A new temporal framework for the passionate engagement journey of ultra-endurance athletes: A qualitative investigation

Abstract

The explosion of popularity of ultra-endurance (UE) sports in the last 20 years has attracted a lot of interest amongst sport psychologists who studied many aspects of their participants. However, a temporal perspective on the development of the UE engagement was missing. With this research we aimed to explore the long-term individual journeys of UE athletes and how their passion developed over time from the moment of inception to full adoption of UE as an identity and a lifestyle. For this purpose, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 UE athletes (12 male and 4 female, mean age 43.4, SD 10) in cycling, trail running and triathlon. Five key themes (with 13 sub-themes) of their UE engagement journey emerged as the result of the interpretative phenomenological analysis of the interviews: 1) The making of the UE athlete, 2) Finding the tribe, 3) Peak experiences, 4) UE lifestyle and 5) UE passion and outcomes. Rich descriptions were generated demonstrating that the development journey of UE athletes is a multi-year, sometimes life-long endeavour, which is full of unique experiences, emotional rollercoasters, passion, overcoming and surrender stories and also of spiritual growth. And while each journey we heard was unique, we could observe similarities in its key milestones. We summarized them in a wholistic UE journey framework which we developed based on this research. The new “Temporal framework for progressive UE engagement and passion development” is presented here for discussion and further validation.

Does Ultra-Endurance Passion Make Athletes Happy?

“…Researchers studied both the unique physiological markers of UE athletes and their psychological characteristics, traits, and behaviors. Trying to explain the UE phenomenon on a broader social-personal level of lived experiences, in our previous qualitative research of the journey of UE athletes [ 5 ] we created a holistic framework of long-term UE engagement and passion development ( Figure 1 ). We aim to enrich this framework in current and future studies with UE athletes.…”

“…Based on the above literature research and our previous qualitative study with non-professional UE athletes [ 5 ], the following hypotheses were formulated to be tested quantitatively: (1) HP will be associated with greater intrinsic sports motivation, greater social identity type of athletic identity, and years in sports; (2) OP will be associated with greater extrinsic motivation and greater exclusivity and negative affectivity types of athletic identity; (3) Happiness will be associated with greater HP, intrinsic motivation, lower OP, and extrinsic motivation.…”