Happy Sunday from marathon weekend.

This week’s deep dive is a little more personal than usual because today is the day I’d been building toward for months: my first full marathon in Palma, Mallorca!

But somewhere along the way, I realized race weekend had quietly become something bigger than “show up and run xx kilometers.” It had become a full wellness trip, complete with food planning, recovery, routines, travel logistics, sleep, gear, and the very specific art of doing less when every instinct tells you to keep preparing.

So today, we’re looking at how endurance events have become their own kind of wellness travel, and why that actually makes a lot of sense.

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A marathon technically requires one thing: run 42.2 kilometers.

Race weekend now seems to require approximately 47 other things.

There is the shakeout run. The expo. The carefully planned meals. The electrolyte situation. The compression socks. The Thera Gun that somehow made it into the suitcase. The “easy” walking that still needs to remain easy. The restaurant reservation selected partly because the menu contains enough carbohydrates. The hotel room that has a soaking tub. The recovery plan waiting on the other side.

At some point, race travel stopped feeling like normal travel with a race attached to it. It became its own category of wellness trip. And honestly, it might be one of the more convincing versions of wellness travel we have right now because every part of the weekend has an actual reason to exist.

The race is obviously the reason you booked the flight, but it rarely ends up being the whole trip. You arrive early enough to settle in, pick up your bib, figure out where the start actually is, eat something familiar, maybe do a shakeout run, maybe meet friends, maybe spend half an hour lying on the hotel bed pretending you’re “resting” while checking the weather for the tenth time.

There’s a rhythm to it that regular travel doesn’t have. The weekend already knows what it’s for. You’re not trying to fit in every sight, every reservation, every neighborhood, every “must-do” thing. Everything bends around the race. That sounds restrictive, but it’s actually kind of nice. It also fits a much bigger shift in how people are traveling: the Global Wellness Institute says the global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024, with wellness travel continuing to be one of its major sectors.

Race weekends sit in a funny middle ground between sport and wellness travel. You are not booking the trip for a spa treatment or a reset. You are booking it because you have somewhere to be at 8 a.m. in running shoes, and the rest of the weekend organizes itself around that.

Food gets very practical very quickly on race weekend. You’re no longer asking, “Where do I want to eat?” You’re asking, “What can I eat here that I know won’t ruin tomorrow?”

Suddenly the bakery looks less like a cute stop and more like infrastructure. Potatoes become strategic. Bananas end up in your bag. Bread is not a side anymore. It has a job. There’s something funny about traveling somewhere new and becoming less adventurous with food than you are at home, but that’s race weekend. Nobody wants a memorable culinary experience badly enough to gamble with kilometer 30.

And there is actual physiology behind the carb obsession. Endurance athletes commonly increase carbohydrate intake in the final day or two before a long event to maximize muscle glycogen stores, which is basically the body’s most useful fuel tank for prolonged exercise. The point is not to eat the biggest pasta dinner of your life the night before. It is to steadily increase carbohydrate availability while keeping the food familiar and easy to digest.

The goal is not interesting. The goal is familiar.

By the night before the race, the hotel room barely looks like a hotel room anymore. Shoes are out. Outfit is laid out. Bib is attached. Watch is charging. Gels are lined up. Electrolytes are sitting next to the bed. There’s usually at least one person stretching on the floor next to an open suitcase.

You travel somewhere beautiful and then spend part of the afternoon with your legs up the wall. It sounds ridiculous until you remember that the whole point of the trip is to show up on Sunday with something left in the tank.

Race weekends are one of the few kinds of travel where you’re actively trying not to maximize the day. And the research is very much on the side of doing less: a 2023 meta-analysis of endurance athletes found that tapering strategies that reduced training volume by roughly 41% to 60% while maintaining intensity could improve performance.

So yes, sitting in the hotel room instead of walking another 18,000 steps around the city can technically count as race prep.

A lot of wellness travel is about adding things: take the yoga class, book the massage, do the sauna, try the cold plunge, go on the hike, have the treatment, wake up early, fit in one more thing because you’re there. Race weekend is the opposite.

The closer you get to the start line, the less you’re supposed to do. Walk less. Train less. Experiment less. Stay off your feet. Eat the boring thing. Go to bed. That part is harder than it sounds.

After months of training, doing less can feel suspicious. You start wondering whether you should stretch more, move more, do one last little run, anything that feels like preparation. But there’s nothing left to build. The work is already done. One large study looking at more than 158,000 recreational marathoners found that disciplined tapers, especially those lasting up to three weeks, were associated with better marathon performance than minimal or inconsistent tapering. A strict three-week taper was associated with a median finish-time improvement of just over five minutes compared with a minimal taper. (PubMed)

That makes “do less” feel a little easier to believe.

One of the best parts of race weekend often happens before the race itself. The shakeout run has turned into a whole thing. Run clubs organize meetups. Brands host morning runs. People who only know each other from Strava finally meet in person. Coffee usually appears somewhere in the plan.

That social layer is not anecdotal anymore. Strava’s 2025 Year in Sport report found that new clubs on the platform nearly quadrupled to one million, while running clubs grew 3.5x and club-organized events increased 1.5x year over year.

It’s a nice reminder that running can be both deeply personal and very social at the same time. You still run your own race, but race weekend doesn’t have to feel solitary. There’s something about being around a lot of other people who also think waking up early to run an unreasonable distance sounds like a good idea that makes the whole thing feel less strange.

A lot of wellness is framed around fixing, improving, treating, or optimizing the body. Race travel feels different. You’re not there because something is wrong. You’re there because your body learned how to do something difficult.

That changes the tone of the whole weekend. The sleep, food, hydration, recovery, and routine all matter, but they’re supporting something you already built. There’s also a broader cultural shift behind that. Strava’s data has repeatedly shown younger people using fitness as a source of identity and connection, not just exercise, with Gen Z especially likely to see movement as a way to meet people and build community.

After months of pace targets, long runs, recovery scores, fueling plans, and training schedules, eventually all of that disappears. At some point, you just run.

Then you finish, and suddenly the wellness plan becomes very simple. Eat. Shower. Sit down. Maybe nap. Maybe walk a little because standing up again later might be worse. Have something salty. Have something sweet. Drink water. Lie there for a while.

Nobody is asking whether recovery is productive. Nobody is trying to optimize the nap. You ran a marathon. You’re allowed to be tired. There is something almost refreshing about how obvious the body’s needs become after a race.

That instinct to prioritize recovery has been showing up in broader running behavior too. In Strava’s 2024 trend data, marathon trainees devoted 51% of their non-running days in the 16 weeks before a race to rest or active recovery, part of a bigger shift away from “more is always better” training culture.

No wellness trend required.

Destination races also give you a strange relationship with a place. You remember streets differently when you ran them. You remember where the crowd was loud, the part that felt endless, the turn where your legs started to complain, the section where everything suddenly felt good again, and the view that made you look up for a second instead of checking your watch.

You don’t just visit the city. You move through it in a way you probably never would otherwise. That sticks with you. It also lines up with a broader travel shift: Strava’s 2025 data found that people increasingly keep movement as part of travel itself, with users recording everything from hiking and water sports to winter activities while away from home.

Long after the trip is over, you may forget what you ordered for dinner the night before, but you remember exactly how a certain stretch of road felt at kilometer 35.

Wellness travel has become very good at selling transformation. Come back rested. Come back reset. Come back better. Come back as a newer version of yourself.

And there is a lot of money behind that promise. The Global Wellness Institute says the broader wellness economy has doubled in size since 2013, reaching $6.8 trillion in 2024, with continued growth expected through the end of the decade.

Race weekends don’t really promise any of that. You might come home exhausted, sore, hungry, and walking down stairs like you’ve never seen stairs before. But there’s something more believable about it.

You trained for something hard. You traveled somewhere to do it. You built the weekend around supporting yourself through it. You ate, rested, moved, recovered, and spent time around people who understood why this mattered to you. No detox. No trendy “healing.” Just the experience itself, seeing a new city from a different vantage point through a moving meditation, and perhaps a new perspective on what you can accomplish.

Race weekend has become a wellness trip, but not because someone added a spa package to the marathon hotel. It works because the wellness part is already built into the experience: preparation, movement, nourishment, rest, community, recovery, and eventually letting go of the plan long enough to enjoy what you trained for.

The race gets you there.

Everything around it is what makes the weekend feel like more than 42.2 kilometers.

If you have ever traveled for a race, what was the part you remember most: the course, the city, the people, the meal afterward, or something completely unrelated to the actual race?

And if you are reading this while I am somewhere on the course in Palma: send good thoughts and carbohydrates.

See you Wednesday for the next edit!

Valerie