Post-Race Blues After Ironman: What the Research Says (and How to Prevent It) Ep 131

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. I'm your host, Chris Newport, founder, head coach, sports nutritionist, and exercise physiologist at The Endurance Edge. Our mission is to empower people to reach and sustain peak performance and health. So get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. We hope to give you detailed information and inspiring stories to help you be your best. Let's do it. Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. I am your host, Coach Chris Newport, and I am here with Dr. Carly Frost Poirier. Am I saying that right? I always feel like I've got your last name.

All the ways work. I'm used to it. You called me Carly and not Charlie, so it was a good start.

Okay, good gracious. So if you've heard Carly on the podcast before, which I hope you have, because she is a brilliant mind that I am so grateful to have on our team. She just finished her dissertation and I was like, Can we please talk about this on the podcast? And she's like, oh my gosh, I would like to throw it all away and like take a break from it. So you guys have to be super patient and I'm going to try to extract as much greatness out of her after she's like, can I just take a nap for the next year? Right?

Yes. Yeah. I think I'm, I think I'm still less than a month out from having defended my dissertation. So yeah, I haven't quite digested and I don't know. Bask in the glory of graduation just yet, maybe, but we'll, we'll chat. I hope I have some useful things or at least interesting tidbits for you guys. And I don't know, we'll see what Chris asked me. We'll, we'll go from there. Yes.

And I find the irony so thick that you're coming off, like your dissertation was about coming off of Ironman. Yeah. And the irony that you're coming off of dissertation. Yeah. Probably feeling the same way.

Absolutely.

So Give us the nerdy title and, and let's go from there.

My, my official dissertation title is Predicting Post-Race Blues: The Role of Passion, Goal Satisfaction, and Life Balance. So I researched long course triathletes, both 70.3 and 140.6 distance, and looked at a couple possible predictors of what could be contributing to the occurrence of post-race blues in those athlete.

So what got you— what got you interested in this topic? What made you think, you know what, I'm gonna dive real deep into this?

Because I experienced the post-race blues. That was my first one.

Like, yeah, because you, you've done several Ironman, which is amazing. So tell us about that experience. Which one?

Yes. Well, honestly, to that point, So I have crossed the finish line of two full distance triathlons and I have DNFed a full distance triathlon. And my experience in both of those scenarios have context into this study actually, and like our goals and, and how we're viewing how we did in those events. Uh, so that's why I, I was pausing on if I get into that part now or if I sort of save it for a little bit later. Uh, you, you caught my brain buffering there, but I did my first full back in 2016, and I was in my, my mid-twenties back then. So I was young and naive. No, but I, I, I wasn't a mom yet. I was, yeah, I don't know. I was just in my twenties, married. I had a job and I randomly decided I wanna do triathlon. If, again, if y'all have know anything about me or heard any of my stories, not to be super redundant, but that's, more or less how I got into triathlon was I decided I wanted to do an Ironman and I didn't even know that like a sprint distance triathlon existed. I saw Kona on the TV and was like, that's cool. I'm, I'm gonna do one of those. And then realized that like I actually needed to be good to be able to do the one I was seeing on TV. But anyways, trained for an Ironman. I experienced the post-race blues afterwards, which sort of to provide a, a brief definition is sort of this period of time where you feel a little bit lost, maybe your mood's a little down, sort of some like light depressive experiences. We're not in a clinical realm where we're in a full-blown depression, but we're just sort of having this lower experience from a situation. And you may have heard about the blues in, in other contexts, such as like the post-baby blues after you have a baby, the post-Olympic blues, naturally, if you've heard of those. A little bit more heavier research than other areas is, but just sort of this period of time where you're in a little bit of a, a lower mood after a big life event, basically. And so my ex— my personal experience, and then after a few years in triathlon, I got into coaching and kind of also had a bigger community than I had when I was training on my own and realized that it was, it was more common than I realized and a lot more athletes were experiencing it. So when it came time in school, they told us to pick a topic we were passionate about and sort of see where the research and that area was and how we could contribute to it. I knew that this was a passion point for me and, and that's how I ended up here. Wow.

That was a long answer. I mean, obviously you dug super deeply into this, but it's, I feel like it is a topic that a lot of us don't talk about. Like, like you, like I saw Ironman Kona and like Coach Marty too, Ironman Kona on TV, like I'm gonna do that. And then You don't necessarily consider like, oh my gosh, how much training is this gonna take? And then, you know, yes, is race day gonna feel hard?

Yeah.

But then are you gonna feel super accomplished afterwards? Yes. And then what the heck happens after that?

Mm-hmm.

So did you find in your research that other than, you know, like you had mentioned postpartum blues and post-Olympics and things like that, that this is a somewhat quiet topic?

Like, it's a less researched topic than I was expecting, I'll say that. So again, having my personal experience and then seeing others, and, you know, I Googled it. What, like, what else do you do when you're trying to learn about something, right? Uh, in a non-academic setting where this is like an official situation, but I Googled it and you'll find articles, not like actual research literature articles, but like, you know, Runner's World article and those types of, I don't know what the word I'm looking for is, but the non-research type of an article that you would read, like a blog.

Or anecdotal story.

Yeah, yeah.

Anecdotal information.

So I found those and was sort of operating my discussions off of that. But then when it came time to writing my lit review, for my research proposal and trying to find actual articles on this topic in the context of long course triathlon, there's a handful that have been published, a handful. Most of what you're able to find on Post-Race Blues is in relation to runners. More specifically at the marathon distance is where the bulk of that research is. So there's some of that that carries over, right? But we also know that running a marathon and racing a full Ironman is a very drastically different physical and mental feats. That, that's not to say anything about marathon runners. Don't come for me, my runner friends. Running a marathon is hard. Running a, an Ironman is hard. Okay. They're, they're both hard.

Yeah. It doesn't make any one person or group of people better or worse than the other. Absolutely.

Yeah.

We're all doing amazing hard things for ourselves. Yes.

Cool.

Mm-hmm.

Uh-huh. From a research perspective, that means We have a lot more context into a marathon and a lot less context into long course triathlon when we're talking about this phenomenon. Similarly, when we look at like post-Olympic blues, there's a body of research. It, it's all relatively new research in the, in the research world. It, it's baby research. It's only been, you know, looking into it for maybe the last decade. And those of y'all that have written any sort of paper know that unless it's recent, it's just ba— it's baby research. We're still fresh and learning about it. All that to say that the, the background in long course, there's not a lot of it. So I, I had to sort of piece together from post-Olympic research and marathon running research and, and apply what we could into triathlon and sort of take it from there. Yeah.

Fascinating. Of course, the Olympics are on right now.

Yeah.

Which I am personally obsessed with, as I will probably say about a million times more. And the extreme highs or lows that we can witness just as non-Olympic athletes.

Yeah.

In my head, I'm an Olympic athlete, but not in actuality. But then I'm thinking like, golly, that is a lot to go through. And to the same end. So is doing an Ironman.

Yeah.

Now granted, there's typically not this like, you know, world platform unless you're Kona. So it, again, something that we don't necessarily think about. And then what happens on the back end? Like, is, is in Olympic athletes, is it super common?

Uh, I'm not, it's difficult to say because it's not necessarily looked at across all Olympic athletes where we have necessarily a specific X percent percentage of Olympic athletes experience this. It's usually the ones that come forward or seek help, and then we're like, okay, there, there's clearly a subset here. What I, I'll add to that is when you think about all the, the possible things that can contribute to something like this, right? We all come into the sport, and I'll, I'll keep this specific to long course and, and my study, but we come into the sport with, with other and different responsibilities in life, which makes our adaptation into training different. So you might be someone that has a lot on their plate and you are absolutely new to swimming and cycling, so you have a little bit extra to learn and an extra put to put into training, plus you're juggling more in life. And then some of us are retired and we've been in the sport a long time and, you know, picking up volume for Ironman is a little less cumbersome in that regard, right? So as, as I looked through the research, And sort of selecting more or less which avenues and which predictors I wanted to look out for my study. I landed on passion subtypes, life balance. I'm sure that's sending up some flags for people already, and goal satisfaction. And I, I opted to go with goal satisfaction versus goal achievement because as a coach, you know, we often have athletes that will achieve their goal and still not be super happy with it, which is a, a fun nuance to all of you overachieving athletes. Or, or it's, you know, occasionally we get the opposite too. Didn't achieve the goal, but we're still really happy with XYZ, and overall we're able to have this more optimistic outlook towards it, which is great. And I appreciate all of you that are able to do that. But you are sort of more in the lower category of that. Most people land on the, I achieved my goal and I'm still really hungry and I still wanna accomplish all these other things, and I don't necessarily take the time to appreciate it. All that to say, I went with satisfaction versus achievement in this situation. So how do I actually feel about the outcome of what I wanted to get out of Ironman. Am I feeling good about it? Am I not feeling so great about it? Regardless of if I achieved it or not. And to your point, I also looked at it, it is a longitudinal study. So I, I took two data points. One was in within 3 to 7 days post their race because the research shows that that's when our blues period peaks. And then the, the research also shows that we tend to return to baseline within 30 days of our event. So we sort of have this, uh, this ramp up within that 1 week and then a little bit mixed review on how quickly we return back to our baseline, but usually within that 30 days. So I looked at that 3 to 7 day window to hopefully catch any peaks, and then I followed up 30 days after that, sort of did a retest. So I do have some data to look at it over time and we can kind of get into learn all about.

Yeah. So how many, um, how many humans did you—

I ended up with just over 200 participants that took my initial survey. Yeah, it was— I, I had good strong numbers, which was great.

And, and all age— like age range, gender?

Great questions.

Yeah.

Um, I surprisingly, and relatively unintentionally, I ended up with about 54% females, uh, for my participants, which in, from Ironman's reports, generally speaking, we are looking at about somewhere between 20 and 25% female participants for 70.3s, and then that drops to like 18-ish, 15% for long course. So I ended up with a higher percentage of females than is is sort of indicative of a general race balance between genders, which was interesting. It didn't impact my results from like a significance standpoint, but it is something that I think in the future would be worth sparsing out more to continue looking into this topic. My age groups, uh, ex— I, I also looked at experience level. Was this their first long course? Uh, you know, 2 to 4 long course, 5+ long course experience-wise. Uh, and we were real, uh, across the board with all of them. So our age groups were pretty indicative of like what a sample size would look like from a typical long course event. Uh, experience level was, was the same. So other than that gender split being a little bit off, everything was pretty— I think my biggest age group was the 40 to 45, 40, 45 to 49. So again, very, uh, very on point with what a race sample would look like. Yeah.

Fascinating.

All right.

So they took this survey 3 to 7 days after a race.

Yep.

And then you followed up about 30 days later.

Yep. 30 days later. And I also added in my, my follow-up, I also had some qualitative questions and I haven't, um, because I ended up with so many participants, which is wonderful and lovely, I have a lot of data to go through. So in my defense, actually, we sort of quote unquote scrapped the qualitative side of things and I haven't fully dove into frankly reading them, cuz I had over 100 respondents in the follow-up, which was also really great. So in the turnaround time of sort of processing all this data and trying to graduate in time, we're sort of saving that for a secondary study from, from what I gathered. But I did a hierarchical regression for the, for my independent variables. I guess let me define to you, so passion. Was split using the dualistic model of passion. So there is harmonious passion and obsessive passion. And that distinction is, is important. One, because the questionnaire sort of divided everyone into those buckets. What was your harmonious passion level and what was your obsessive passion? And the definition for those is sort of what you would imagine. Harmonious is when we're able to autonomously integrate our sport into our identity and our lifestyle. We feel the sort of quote unquote freedom to train when we want and train when we don't want. It feels very in line with our values and sort of what we're doing and all of that. And then the obsessively passionate part, again, obsessive, right? It feels sort of forced. We feel like we have to do the things, uh, or we're not gonna be able to be in the sport. We're over-identifying. It's feeling very forced. And I'm sure those who—

Is this like perfectionist? In a way, or is that kind of like, not to say that everybody who's this obsessive part is, you know, had some sort of addiction previously.

Oh, absolutely not. No.

Yeah.

But I, I think it's a valid point. And as a side note, I've been looking into that research just out of personal nerdiness. That's true. So maybe we'll talk about that another time.

Yeah, totally.

Totally. But, but yes, where we have this, like we lose that autonomy part and we feel like we, we have this Necessary urge, and whether that is something that is happening from within us, or maybe we have outside influences that are sort of drawing us in. This can also fall into the category of like, all my friends are doing it, so now I'm doing it. And we don't really have that doing it for ourselves part. We have that, that sort of forcedness into it, if that makes sense. So we have those two types of passion that we're getting out of, of this group of surveys that people took. And then we have a total life balance score. So as you can imagine, that is a range of I feel super balanced to everything is a hot mess. And then our goal satisfaction also—

Is that your exact question that you asked people? Is everything a hot mess?

Pretty much, yeah. But it does, it did, uh, the questionnaire ranged right from different areas of our life, but Overall, again, thinking of the different roles that we have, whether it's work or at home, or, or maybe you're involved in organized religion, like the different avenues that we have, uh, and how are we balancing them? Are we contributing as much as we would like to? And those sorts of things. And we looked at the life balance, it was 30 days prior. So in that peak time of training, what did our life balance look like and how were we feeling about it? And then goal satisfaction, of course, being related to that specific race that they were using as their marker for the survey.

Yeah. So you've got the passion part, you've got the life balance part, and then you also talked about goal satisfaction. Yeah. So those were like the 3 big realms of what you researched.

Yeah.

How, how long did these, did they roughly take? Like how long were those surveys?

Uh, I think the surveys averaged like 8 minutes, but it was 10 to 12 for the life survey in particular. That one I, You learn a lot when you do your first research study. Um, and in survey selection, certainly a big one that I'll be interested if I delve into this more in the research world, if I stick with that measure. It, it was, it gave me the most breadth of information, but it was a little trickier and I think a little bit more redundant on the participant side of like do I want to do this activity and have I done this activity? And there was a lot of activities, um, again, trying to sort of capture all the different things. Maybe you're artistic, maybe you're into music, maybe again, you're in, you have, um, community activities that you're involved in. It tried to hit all the different roles that a human might incorporate into their life. So it was a bit, it was a hefty one, but all that to say the, the first step of my regression was all the demographic variables and age, gender, and triathlon experience did not significantly predict the post-race blues, at least in my sample of participants. We did find, so I, I measured post-race blues with the BRUNS, the Brunel Mood Score, and that comes up with a total mood disturbance score as its total score. We did have a subset of athletes that would've scored and sort of qualified as more of an actual blues experience. But overall, majority of the participants just had a mild mood disturbance, and we probably wouldn't have fully categorized them as having actual blues experience, just, just a little note of it. But for, in terms of the numbers that we had, the age, the gender, and the experience did not significantly predict in this sample size. In the second step, I, I entered passion and life balance, and surprisingly, harmonious passion was not significant, but obsessive passion and life balance were significant and accounted for about 30%. I think it was 27% more specifically of predicting post-race blues, which is a lot.

So if I'm hearing you right, more obsessive, well, you didn't actually say that. So what I'm synthesizing in my head is it sounds like the more obsessive you are and the worse your life balance is, the higher the predicted post-race blues.

Yes. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Interesting.

So the lower your life balance, the higher likelihood of your blues experience. So the, the worse your blues would be. And that in this step 2, the, the life balance of that 27%, the life balance was significantly more of a predictor than the obsessive passion. So it was really interesting that of them, that life balance factor was the biggest factor that I found to be a predictor of Bushwick Blues. And then in the third step, I added goal satisfaction, which was also a significant predictor, but it was small percentage-wise. It was only 2%. So while a significant predictor, it was definitely secondary to life balance, which was a big one.

Wow. So, okay, so we went over the methodology and the results, and now we're into the discussion part.

Okay.

So, yeah, so I know that you've almost like sort of dove into like, man, there's so much more that we could do in terms of research. But what does this feel like in terms of not only what your research means to the greater long course community, but certainly in your own life? Like, what is it like? Those were big questions.

Yeah, those are big questions. Sorry, not sorry. Well, and let me, let me actually back up before we get into those questions. Those were the results from my initial study in that 3 to 7 day period. Hmm.

Okay.

When I retested for the follow-up study, I looked at life balance again and we looked at total mood score again. So, cuz passion would remain stable, goal satisfaction. Was what it was. Life balance significantly improved over the course of time. So by that 30 days, we saw a significant improvement in life balance, meaning people were getting back to filling all of those roles again. We did not get a significant change in mood disturbance. So again, at the moment, I'm theorizing that because we had such a small subset that actually qualified for a more impactful blues experience that everyone else's was so mild that we didn't have enough to actually see a significant change within them. Like, it might have improved, but not significantly enough. But I think that's because they weren't experiencing it bad enough in the sample. Bad enough, that sounds terrible. Good enough, really.

Well, I mean, when we're talking about statistics, right?

Yes. Yes. And bless, bear with me, my statistics friends. Uh, but anyways, no, which is also an interesting finding. So one of the subscales in the BRUMS is tension, which you can imagine as sort of this like friction point feeling like, uh, we're sort of butting heads in some way with, with areas of our life. Tension increased over time, which sparked a really interesting conversation of what happens when we return to more balanced lifestyles.

Huh.

And I'm letting that— I'm, I'm purposely letting that sink in for a second because I know for like what came to my mind first was different than what came to mind for one of my committee members, but both were equally valid reasons of why our tension might increase when we are maybe home a little bit more than we have been, or maybe we're spending time with certain family members more than we were before, uh, you know, when—

Riding your bike was a nice— escape an American.

Exactly. Uh-huh. Um, so I, all I can say is that tension increased over time. Hmm.

Okay. Interesting.

But I think that's also a testament to, to, to why people are drawn to the sport, right? If it, if we're in peak Ironman training and experiencing less tension during a time where we're probably experiencing low life balance. That's interesting. Yeah. And you could see why it would sound alluring to go ride your bike for 6 hours on a Saturday. If somehow that is less tension-causing than a quote unquote normal Saturday outside of training. Anyways, that's where I'm at with my, with the follow-up findings at this point in time. From a sort of practical implications standpoint. For athletes, for coaches, for sports psych folks, we really wanna pay attention to how these athletes are diving into their sport. Are we seeing signs of over-identification? Are we seeing signs that might be pointing towards just this really big swing in life balance? Are they saying they're putting down a bunch of other things to be able to get into Ironman training? And what can we do to, to help with that, which is sort of I think part of the bigger question when we talk about long course triathlon or other ultra endurance sport, that we have to put in a certain amount of hours to be able to get our bodies up to this point of being able to race. And so from a, from an hours perspective, how do we, as a sport, how do we figure that out? How can we participate in a sport that takes up this much time? And find ways to keep that balance. And I think that will continue to be the age-old question as we sort of not only look into this topic, but just longevity in this sport. How do we, how do we find ways to balance it? I know for me, I try to get creative with my athletes. I sort of space training out a little extra longer maybe, but so we can have extra weekends off where maybe we take a break from, you know, these really big brick days and they just have like an hour session and it's, it's blocked for family or something like that. So, you know, our, our, our bulk of training might be, you know, more into the 20 to 25 weeks versus 16, but I'm trying to help, you know, keep the spouse happy too, right? We're trying, we're trying to find ways to not peak too soon, but also just give a little bit more breathing room in the bulk of that training, which will work for some and won't for others. But that's sort of, again, back to the, the bigger question of how do we look at the roles that someone's trying to play and help accommodate this big volume training so they can do both. Yeah.

And from like the passion and it's things I'm obsessed, I'm not, I'm fascinated by this obsession versus what was, what was the word?

Harmonious.

Harmonious. That's lovely. I feel like that should be our tagline. Endurance Edge, harmonious, harmonious training, harmonious life. Like that's really what it should be.

Yeah.

If, if I were training everyone, you know, which it, uh, in my mind it should be a, a lifestyle in which you are able to do all these different fun, hard things, but also have a life.

Yeah.

Have a body.

Well, and in my sample we did find that pretty much across the board we had high harmonious passion. So you can be both. Yeah. Is part of this thing, right? So most of the athletes scored high in harmonious passion, and then we had a subset of them that also scored high in obsessive passion. So it was kind of like where you fall on one impacts this more than the other. We also generally had high goal satisfaction, which was, I was like, yay, everyone's happy, which is always nice. Um, so that was good too.

So maybe it's almost like backing up a little bit and saying, why do I want to do this? And sometimes that's, I feel like that's a heavy question. And then we just sort of like, well, I'm just gonna keep going 'cause I paid my race registration. Or, you know, like, you know, you almost get like too heavily invested and then it's like, but can you turn around?

Yeah. Which also, finances and budgeting and all of that is part of the life balance as well of like, am I keeping this in line with what I want it to be? That's actually sort of part of what I was parsing out during my lit review because we do hear people be like, well, I've committed all this money, I've bought a new bike, I'm paying all of this money, I better not quit at this point, I better not get overwhelmed with how much time it's taking, yada yada. As I, again, as I went into this lit review of trying to find like, okay, how do we, how do we quantify that? Not just like from a literal dollars and cents perspective, but from a psychological factor. Like what does that look like? What is investment? What is sacrifice? And how does that all come together as we engage in sports? And ultimately I really liked this life balance as a sort of a catch-all, for lack of a better word, but to encompass both of those as like what we, we're sacrificing a lot. Some of us are spending percentage-wise more than others, right? And some of us are, again, based on the roles that we have, some of us are sacrificing more than others to participate in the sport. So how does that all come together? And this life balance was sort of the encompassing construct for that.

Interesting. So having done all this research, what do you feel like it means for you? And then what do you feel like it means for, uh, you as a coach, you as an athlete, and you as a coach?

I think to your earlier point, and we'll kind of circle back to what I—

circle back, we get it.

To, to the very first thing that we were talking about, we As athletes, and I, I have been consulting with other sports psych professionals who are particularly, cuz I had these results back in, uh, you know, early winter and fall when racing season was ending. And that's just how long it takes to sort of wrap all these things up that we're here in February now. But like my, my athletes are done with their racing season and they're, they're having blues. Not necessarily that they did this race and they're done, but their season's done. They're heading into off-season, they're on the treadmill, and a lot of the conversation has been around just this change in structure, right? So as we go back to these other roles, how do we keep a structure for exercise? Because that is meaningful for us. We have likely ingrained that in our identity. It's likely part of our core values. And as we transition into filling more of the other cups for our other roles, how do we keep these ones filled enough that we have that balance? And that starts by planning ahead, looking ahead after the race, cuz we very much get into this, we only look to the race point, right? And even as coaches, we, we toe this line of like, well, I don't wanna start talking to them about the race we have after the race, but we kind of need to. We can't just like have this big race and then again, within this, this particularly that week afterwards, not have a plan or not have a check-in or not have anything that we're looking forward to in some way, shape, or form. So I think just considering that, that month after a race and having a plan for it and making sure that, and, and we, we also have athletes that their, their coaching ends when they race. And I would recommend keeping your coach for another month. Have those check-ins, have that sounding board, have someone who understands what you just went through that you can just check in with and maybe try to keep something in TrainingPeaks for a little bit afterwards, even if it doesn't, it doesn't have to be as crazy and all of that, but something to help keep that structure and those check-ins going so it doesn't feel like we're stepping into a completely different world.

Mm. So interesting. You so beautifully skirted the question of you as an athlete.

Um, I, I think I would take that exact advice. Honestly, I think particularly after my first Ironman, I was just so laser focused on that day that life afterwards wasn't a consideration.

And it's really hard to think about when you like, like you're saying, when you're so like, oh my gosh, I want this thing.

Mm-hmm.

Especially if you've never experienced it, then it's like, I don't even, I don't even have the time to insert into my brain what's gonna happen afterwards.

Yep.

Because that seems like a distraction.

Right. And it's almost like you're skipping over this major life event, but really reframing that into taking care of yourself. It really is, um, it becomes a form of self-care, right? That I'm, especially if you're someone that has experienced this and is anticipating that would, it would happen again. Cuz we do have those athletes too that are like, after every 70.3 this happens to me. And it's like, okay, what can we do to prepare for that? And hopefully make a better scenario for you after this one. Think of it as self-care if that helps you reframe it to to be something that you'll actually do. But ultimately the craziness of this whole situation is I'm leaving this research study with more questions than answers, which is wonderful and beautiful. And, but also like, I, I hope the research continues and we get more answers and specifically for long course triathletes and what y'all experience in the sport. Yeah.

Fascinating. That also reminds me of some of the genes we see in genetic testing of typically in the mood and behavior category of certain— there are certain genes that make us more susceptible to feeling kind of blue.

Yep. And there's, there's naturally in the post-Olympic blues research who may or may or may not, I'm not making accusations, get some funding, but they have a lot more, again, they're, they're further into this side of the research, but there was a lot of interesting, more bio, uh, physiological side of the sciences to incorporate in what they were finding. So lots of like cortisol, they're looking at sleep a lot and other additional factors. As we said, the whole, all the things that go into this. So it was really interested. And if you guys are more interested in reading more about this, I would sort of skip over into the post-Olympic blues research just cuz there's, I think, more well-rounded data at, at this point in time where that research is. But it's really interesting to look at like all the factors together. And, and how they're impacting those athletes.

Wow. So what's next? Not only for you, but also like for this topic. I mean, I know that you left with more questions than answers, but like what next?

I don't, I don't. Great question.

You just did your own long course.

I did. I very, I very much did. Um, I don't know. I think at some point I will get a co-author to hack up and rewrite some of my final dissertation. Um, I think I have some really interesting findings here that other people would also find interesting if I can take a step back from it and acknowledge that. So I think at some point I'll reach out and hopefully get a co-author that can help me get this published. That would be really cool. But I also trying to be self-aware and, and know that I needed a break and to take a, take a minute and recover from the whole school process. Um, yeah.

Speaking of life balance, right?

Yeah, exactly. So, but yeah, time to, time for me to get back to some structured training and some of the more fun side of things.

Considering all of this, like, between your experience with post-race blues and your experience coaching and in sports psychology, do you, would you be more cautious going into long course? Do you think you wanna do a long course again? Or now that you know that short course exists, I'm always trying to get people in short course. I'm like, come on you guys, let's go fast and then go home for breakfast.

Um, I, yeah, I'll absolutely be getting back to long course at some point. I think. Very similarly, I feel like I'm coming out of Ironman training. I, the volume of time that school took up for my family, I, I'm very much in a phase right now of rebalancing and, and filling up other roles and cups and trying to be a better friend and daughter than I've had the time to be. So I, I, that's the phase that I'm in right now. I know I'll come back to long course at some point. But, but you'll probably have me in the, in the sprint, uh, category for a bit as I work my way back to that.

Short course rules.

It is, it is nice to be home by lunch for sure.

Yeah, definitely. And life balance in general.

Yeah. And you know, after resentful feelings, you know, like who needs that? Nobody.

At all. So cool, Dr. Carly.

It's so weird to say that now. It's still weird. None of it has sunk in, y'all. I'm, I'm, I don't know, imposter syndrome is real. I still feel like just a little baby navigating this whole realm, but also confident in myself at the same time. It's really weird.

Yeah, I think that is the typical life journey. Yeah, you know, as you get so deeply nerdy into something and then you're like, but doesn't everybody already know this? And why does this make me special? And yeah, owning some greatness. Yeah, I feel like that needs to be the 2026 theme. Own your greatness, people, myself included. And for you, definitely for you, Dr. Carly.

I might take a little— I need a nap first, I think.

Yeah, we're gonna call that self-care. Good night, friends.

Yes, I've had a reasonable bedtime for the last couple weeks. It's been beautiful.

It's miraculous, isn't it?

I know.

Oh my gosh. Let's, let's shout that from the rooftops. Sleep is amazing.

The, the worst part I think was that my assignments were always due at 3:00 AM for me, midnight Pacific. So again, getting things done when I could get them done. I wish it had been midnight Eastern, but the amount of times that I was up till 2-something in the morning was too much. Yeah, but it's done now.

Yeah, congratulations. I know that that was a hard process to go through, and being the wonderful perfectionist that you are, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's, and, and then uncovering some really amazing research. Like, this is great.

Yeah, and releasing a lot of my perfectionism in the journey. 'Cause I had, I had to, I didn't have a choice. I had to. Yeah.

Good for you.

I learned a lot.

What a journey.

About myself.

That's so cool. Um, Carly, I'm so glad that you were able to share this journey with us of your own personal long course dissertation.

Chris Newport was asking if I wanted to share my, my slide deck from my defense, but it's just a lot of numbers. And, and again, in the learning process of like, how do I now back this out to make it deliverable and a more fun way for people to learn about it, then—

It's a hard process of, and this goes for anyone, right? Being in an educational setting and like when I first graduated and then I was writing blogs, like I was writing papers.

Yeah.

And I was like, I'm not trained in this. I'm not trained to not, you know, like you're trained in a way that is like, this is for the academic community and 'You have to have this cited in this way.' And then I was like, 'You mean I just like put it out on a blog, like what my thoughts are?' And, you know.

Yes.

It's like, how did—

how—

the translation process is something I think that needs to be trained in a way. Yeah. And then also, you have this interesting gap of how do you take it in the quote-unquote 'right way' that will actually serve the community and serve the public in a way that's not— because man, that translation part can be real ugly.

Yeah. And that's— in preparing for this conversation, I was going back and forth in my head between like, I want to make sure I'm sharing this information in a digestible way, but also coming out of the context of making sure that my nuances were very clear and that I wasn't providing results, that my numbers weren't showing. And I, I don't want y'all to take things out of context, but I also don't want to be so nerdy that no one wants to listen. Yeah, to an extent, right? Like, obviously you guys are here to be a little bit nerdy with us, but no one actually wants to hear the ridiculousness that came out of my, my defense over here, right?

I mean, obviously some people do, but sure. Um, You know, like the Hubermans of like, which is like every podcast is like going to a college course.

Yeah.

You know, so some people do, but then the rest of us kind of want the, you know, like, give me the Reader's Digest version, right? That because there's so many things to learn in this world that how can I take this little tidbit and put it into, insert it into the rest of the context of my life, which again can be a like, I think you did a really good job about being very clear with—

Okay, good. Life balance, people. There's your summary.

People process.

So aim for life balance regardless.

Yeah. So good. And I mean, you know, that's the challenge with research in general. And you're obviously very close to this. You wrote it.

Too close.

Yeah. When you are just reading a— when you're just skimming an abstract, which is what I do frequently, then it's like, okay, well, let's jump to this conclusion. It's like, but did you get deeper into some of the methodology and, you know, their statistics and whoo. And then we've spent a lot of time doing certain things. So, you know, we want the shortcut. It's okay. We're human.

Sure.

We have other things to do. All right. Well, Carly, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing all your research and all your love, fabulousness, and sharing your greatness. Thanks for listening to the Find Your Edge podcast. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. And if you're interested in learning more about our endurance coaching, sports and wellness nutrition, metabolic and sweat testing, triathlon training team, or our triathlon training library, be sure to check us out at theenduranceedge.com. And don't forget to follow us on social media at The Endurance Edge. Thanks again, and we'll catch you next time.