A HEAD FOR HEIGHTS

How can we combat the psychological comedown from achieving our big season goals?

- Anna Gardiner

You'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.