24 hours on the run – Does Boredom matter for ultra-endurance athletes’ crises?

Abstract

Sport and exercise can be boring. In the general population, thinking of sports as boring has been linked to exercising less. However, less is known about the role of boredom in people who partake in ultra-endurance competitions: Do these athletes also associate their sports with boredom, and does boredom pose a self-regulatory challenge that predicts if they encounter a crisis during an ultra-endurance competition? Here, we investigate these questions with a sample of N = 113 (n = 34 female) competitors of a 24h hour running competition aged M = 37.6 ± 13.8 years. n = 23 very extreme athletes competed as single starters or in a relay team of two, and n = 84 less extreme athletes competed in relay teams of four or six. Before the run, athletes completed self-report measures on sport-specific trait boredom, as well as the degree to which they expected boredom, pain, effort, and willpower to constitute self-regulatory challenges they would have to cope with. After the run, athletes reported the degree to which they actually had to deal with these self-regulatory challenges and if they had faced an action crisis during the competition. Analyses revealed that very extreme athletes displayed a significantly lower sport-specific trait boredom than less extreme athletes (p = 0.024, d=-0.48 ). With respect to self-regulatory challenges, willpower, pain and effort were expected and reported at a much higher rate than boredom. However, only boredom was as a significant predictor of experiencing a crisis during the competition (Odds Ratio = 12.5, p = 0.02).Our results show that boredom matters for highly active athletes too. That the experience of boredom - and not more prototypical competition-induced challenges, such as pain or effort - was linked to having an action crisis highlights the relevance of incorporating boredom into the preparation for a race and to the performance management during competition.