005: The Settling Dust

(This one wasn’t planned. It sparked into life somewhere along a quiet solo lap of Gosford Forest, and came together with the help of a coffee and a caramel square. Funny how the right words sometimes find you when you’re not looking for them... )

Your race is run. Your medal's hung on the wall, tucked away in a box, or sitting wherever else you’ve chosen to place it.

Your shoes are washed, rinsed of all your effort, and lie dormant and drying in the hallway.

Your body feels like a patchwork of aches. Your mind is strange and disoriented. An empty cinema where the film's just ended and the lights haven’t come back on.

Welcome to the week after.

It's not something anybody trains for. There are no recovery plans with a list of tasks that read:

• Have an existential wobble.

• Scroll through race photos wondering if you looked as heroic as you felt.

• Eat a week's calories in two sittings.

But this week, the week after the goal, after the finish line, and after the elation that comes with it, is sacred and necessary.

It’s the week when the dust begins to settle.

Day 1: The Sacred Nothing

The first 24 hours are blissfully simple: sit, eat, sleep, repeat.

There’s no plan to speak of, just stillness. A quiet your body insists on, whether your mind agrees or not. You shuffle through the house like a stunned animal, clutching snacks in one hand and your finisher’s shirt in the other, wondering what on earth just happened.

The dust hasn’t landed yet. It’s still hanging in the air, catching the light, refusing to let you fully breathe.

Day 2–3: Ache and Emptiness

Muscle soreness hits you like a slow-motion freight train.

Stairs are your enemy. Chairs are traps.

You wince and mutter profanities at muscles you didn’t even know you had.

The body rebels. Your ego flickers.

At the same time, there’s a strange emptiness. You were a runner with a plan for weeks, months, even. Now what? No sessions. No targets. Just space. Blank pages in your training schedule. Blank stretches in your mind.

You check your result. You read your splits. You scroll through race photos.

Did you smile at the finish line?

Did you cry?

Does it matter?

The dust drifts now, coating you in a quiet, fine film. You’re not sure whether to brush it off or let it sit for a while.

Day 4: The Midweek Drift

Now, the silence grows louder. You wake up at the time you would have trained. You walk the same routes, but slower, aimless. You’re no longer tired, but you’re not quite ready.

You feel like you’re standing in a field after a storm: the wind gone, the grass flattened, the air thick with stillness.

And here, something subtle begins:

Reflection.

Flashes of race moments return, things you’d forgotten. A climb you conquered. A moment when you wanted to quit but didn’t. The cheer of a stranger that carried you, if only for a moment.

The dust begins to settle, gently. And with it, the memories become clearer. Not just what happened, but what it meant.

Day 5–6: The Twinge of Restlessness

Your body forgives you.

You feel (mostly) human again.

You go for a walk. A swim, perhaps.

You stretch, tentatively. You tell yourself you're not training,just moving.

But you can feel it now.

The itch is there. A faint pulse under the surface. You see someone running, and your heart leaps forward before your legs can follow. You find yourself “just looking” at upcoming races. Where’s the harm in looking?

The dust doesn’t choke you anymore. It begins to reveal something. A shape underneath. A pull toward the next.

The Weekend: Stillness Becomes Motion

You run. A short, slow shuffle.

It doesn’t matter how it feels, it matters that you did. You smile afterward, even if it hurt.

You’re not chasing anything yet. You’re just checking that the engine still runs.

(Of course it does.)

You begin to write your thoughts down. Until now, they’ve been swirling in your head, not quite ready to settle.

The Resolute Calm

Eventually, the dust lands. It doesn’t disappear, it becomes part of your story. A light layer of truth over everything you achieved.

It’s not about medals or Strava segments. It’s about what you learned, what you gave, and what you found in the giving.

And what remains is a resolved version of you. Subtly changed. Slightly wiser. Still standing. Ready to go again.

For everyone, the dust will settle at its own pace.

Don’t rush it.

Because in that quiet haze, where the race ends and something new begins, is often where the real transformation, the real victory, quietly waits.