During the intense training period before a race, you consume lots of complex carbohydrates (breads, pastas and high-carb drinks), and add fat to your diet because you need to increase your calorie intake to ensure your best performance, and you need the energy to sustain you through all that running. However, after the race, when you greatly reduce the intensity of your training, "clearly you don't need a tremendous amount of calories anymore; you're not training hard enough to burn off all of those calories," says Elizabeth Kelly, E.d.D., an exercise physiologist and a sports psychologist at Monroe Community College in upstate New York.

In the hours after the race, drink plenty of water and eat something as soon as you can. Carbo-reloading afterward is as important as the carbo-loading before a race, particularly for any run that's more than an hour long. Have a bagel, a cup of soup or an energy bar within 15 minutes after you finish running. It's in this window of time that your muscles will absorb glycogen most readily.(Glycogen is a starch-like carbohydrate that's stored in the liver and muscles. It acts as an energy reserve because it can be quickly metabolized into glucose when needed.) If your run was more than 90 minutes, be sure to graze frequently on high-carb foods for the next 24 hours, since it will take a while to restore your depleted reserves. By the end of that next day you should be back to normal and ready to ramp up for the next big race or training run.

Beginning the next day, getting your diet back to "normal" may be easier said than done. "Emotionally, you get used to eating a lot of calories," Kelly explains. "Constantly grabbing a snack becomes a habit, because you know that you need those extra calories throughout the day, and you know that burning them off won't be a problem." Postrace depression or boredom can also make it tough to get your diet back to normal. "When you're training for a race, you spend an enormous amount of time focusing on it," she explains. "The excitement of the competition, not to mention your training, takes up a fair amount of energy and time." When all of that comes to an end, you have more of an opportunity to eat.

Not being able to moderate the eating habits you adopted during training has consequences beyond mere weight gain. "If you continue to eat an excessive amount of carbohydrates, you'll end up storing those extra calories as fat," Kelly says. "So you will not only lose lean body mass from decreased training but also gain fat." That can really set you back for their next race. "When athletes want to train again, it will take them longer to get back into good shape. If they haven't kept their diet in check, they'll have a huge hurdle to get over, even before they begin to train again."

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