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 participate 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 24 h hour running competition, aged M = 37.6 ± 13.8 years. In this study, n = 23 very extreme athletes competed as single starters or in a relay team of 2, and n = 84 less extreme athletes competed in relay teams of 4 or 6. 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 also matters for highly active athletes. The fact that the experience of boredom—and not more prototypical competition-induced challenges, such as pain or effort—were 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.

Boredom in Sports and Exercise

“…In one study, extreme sport athletes (snowboarders, climbers) displayed lower boredom proneness than e-sport athletes 85 . In the second study, ultra-endurance runners scored lower on a measure of sport-specific trait boredom than less extreme runners 83 . These studies indicate that athletes' boredom proneness differs across sports and across athletic levels.…”

“…Beyond training, one study investigated the prevalence and relevance of experiencing boredom during ultra-endurance competitions. Interestingly, boredom was reported less frequently than more prototypical exercise-induced sensations such as fatigue or pain; but only boredom emerged as a statistically significant correlate of having had a crisis during competition 83 . This highlights that a sensation does not need to be experienced very intensely or frequently to alter performance.…”

Bored of sports? Investigating the interactive role of engagement and value as predictors of boredom in athletic training.

“…While boredom is prototypically understood as something that occurs in situations that are underchallenging and of low arousal (van Tilburg & Igou, 2017; Vogel-Walcutt et al, 2012; see also Bieleke et al, 2021; Westgate & Wilson, 2018), a recent study showed that boredom can even occur during very hard efforts that are performed until exhaustion (Hirsch et al, 2021). In another vein, a study that was conducted with ultraendurance runners competing in a 24-hr running competition showed that trait measures of boredom predicted how much the athletes struggled with boredom during their competition and that the experience of boredom during the competition was a predictor of whether an athlete had experienced a crisis during their run (Weich et al, 2022). Taken together, these types of studies show that boredom seems to accompany training in various sporting contexts (i.e., training and competitions), and the presence of boredom might impair sporting performance.…”

Bored of sports? Investigating the interactive role of engagement and value as predictors of boredom in athletic training

“…While boredom is prototypically understood as something that occurs in situations that are under-challenging and of low arousal (Van Tilburg & Igou, 2017;Vogel-Walcutt et al, 2012; see also Westgate & Wilson, 2018), a recent study showed that boredom can even occur during very hard efforts that are performed until exhaustion (Hirsch et al, 2021). In another vein, a study that was conducted with ultra-endurance runners competing in a 24-hour running competition showed that trait measures of boredom predicted how much the athletes struggled with boredom during their competition, and that the experience of boredom during the competition was a predictor of whether an athlete had experienced a crisis during their run (Weich et al, 2022). Taken together, these types of studies show that boredom seems to accompany training in various sporting contexts (i.e., training and competitions), and the presence of boredom might impair sporting performance.…”

“…Interestingly, while recent work has shown that boredom matters during competitions (Weich et al, 2022), relatively little is known about the effects of boredom during training.…”