Marathoners - What do you do when you're NOT marathon training

It would seem that a lot of people on this forum are training for spring marathons, but what is your plan after your race? How do you train when you're not preparing for a marathon? In fact do you train at all, or just run for fun, with no specific goals other than enjoyment?

For example, my goal is to improve my marathon time, and hopefully over the course of a few years, work towards a GFA marathon time. I'm not sure of the best way to achieve this, either focus on some speed work for the summer months, bringing down my 5k and 10k times, or just put in lots of low intensity miles before my next marathon training block.

What are your goals? and what do you do outside of the marathon prep period to work towards them?

It depends if you are someone that needs motivation or not? I personally need a goal to get me out of the door so I basically took a month off and scheduled a five mile race in for early June just to see where I was at, did a 10k in July and took my OH around his first half in August.

Because I too wanted to get my half and marathon times down I focused a bit more on the speedwork needed for a 10k but still went out for LSRs (albeit more 10 miles than 20) to keep my hand in as it were but if I only felt like doing eight only did eight and just listened to my body.

when i stop training for a marathon it's usually because i'm training for an ultra.

when i stop training for this years marthon im just going to stick with it nearly the same but maybe drop some big LSR miles sometimes!

still got loads of races to keep myself occupied plus i want to get sub 40 10k's easily under my belt.

i think its great just to get out and run, i dont need to think about it i just do it.

never struggled with motivation

Its only my second marathon in the Spring, so not that experienced.

I'll take it easy for a few weeks after the marathon and enjoy not having to follow a schedule, and then I'll get bored and start training for the local 10ks and autumn half-marathon.

I prefer to change the distance as marathon training is time consuming (4am start this morning!?!) and its nice to have a few months of interval training & speed rather than long runs & endurance. 

do some short races

do lots of fell running

put in half an effort for an autumn mara

This is something I always wonder about - I even wrote to RW to ask them to do an article about training between races but didn't get any response! I've since read The Competitive Runners Handbook which does include plenty of advice for training between races.

Eat. Get fatter. Panic. Run again.

Get back into my kung fu for a few months - trains the mind not just the body ie. train more kung fu days a week than running cause at the moment it's the other way around!