Mind you, completing the ultramarathon did make me extremely happy and gave me a certain amount of confidence. Even now I’m glad I ran the race. Still, I had to deal with these aftereffects somehow. For a long time after this I was in this slump—not to imply that I had such a tremendous record to begin with, but still. Each time I ran a full marathon, my time went steadily down. Practice and racing became nothing more than formalities I went through, and they didn’t move me the way they used to.
