How can we combat the psychological comedown from achieving our big season goals? Anna Gardiner investigates
Words Anna Gardiner Illustration Peter Strain
Y ou’ve trained for months, put body and mind through the wringer, bunked off work commitments, shirked family duties and gone on to make the finish line of the big bike race that you’d been targeting for the previous 12 months. Then, a brief rush of euphoria, which might last a couple of days if you’re one of the lucky ones, followed by a far longer period of feeling flat and despondent.
Your close family and friends can’t understand why you’re not on cloud nine after achieving this all-encompassing goal that has consumed your life for so long, but among cyclists it’s a common, if seldom talked about, phenomenon.
“Whatever the distance of the race, if you have trained hard for it and felt it was important to you, then once it physically ends you might have a psychological hangover in the shape of post-race blues,” says sports psychologist Dr Josephine Perry (performanceinmind.co.uk). But what, exactly, are these blues and what can we do to mitigate against feeling this dejection?
Bicycle blues
Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard lecturer in positive psychology, came up with the idea of ‘arrival fallacy’. This, he says, is the idea that “once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness”. For the few lucky ones, such as multiple Haute Route finisher Christopher Brekon, the achievement of finishing does indeed provide a lasting afterglow. “I do find that I can live off the memories and the thrill of the event for several weeks,” he says.
For others, it’s an illusion. James Trim’s life on the bike began by training for one of the big ones: Land’s End to John o’Groats (LEJOG), the British end-to-end. But by the time he reached the most northerly tip of mainland Britain, there was no revelatory moment or lasting sense of achievement. “It was the biggest sporting event I had ever undertaken,” he says. “I went from 14 to 11 stone in under a year and trained six times a week, so it’s fair to say the training took over my life. Arriving in John o’Groats was a massive anti-climax and going over the finish line I just thought, well that’s it, after nine months of training.”
With the passage of time he looks back on it more positively, but for the first few months afterwards he felt low. More big rides have followed, such as Wales’ Dragon Ride and a coast-to-coast, and he is now aware that the culmination of a big goal isn’t always the joyous occasion it mi
