Anxiety and the Ironman: Investigating the Antecedents and Consequences of Endurance Athletes’ State Anxiety

Abstract

This investigation had three primary purposes: (a) investigating whether anxiety has a major debilitating effect on the performance of endurance athletes, (b) assessing whether age or sport-type differences were evident in the precompetitive state anxiety patterns of triathletes and two of their singlesport counterparts, and (c) testing the anxiety–performance hypothesis for endurance athletes using an intraindividual measure of performance. Subjects were 293 endurance athletes recruited from races in the Pacific Northwest. Results revealed that precompetitive anxiety did not impair the performance of endurance athletes. Triathletes were significantly more cognitively and somatically anxious than either runners or cyclists, and older endurance athletes were found to experience significantly less cognitive anxiety than did their younger counterparts. Results did not support the anxiety–performance hypothesis, although a significant negative correlation was found between negative thoughts during the race and performance.

Path Analysis Examining Relationships among Antecedents of Anxiety, Multidimensional State Anxiety, and Triathlon Performance

“…The failure of any anxiety subcomponent to predict triathlon performance is consistent with Hammermeister and Burton (1995). In endurance sports like triathlon, measures of state anxiety may not be consistent predictors of performance due to the length and nature of the event.…”

Too Exhausted forOperation? Anxiety, Depleted Self-control Strength, and Perceptual–motor Performance

“…Eysenck and colleagues (2007) offer an alternative explanation for the negative influence of anxiety on performance by introducing the attentional control theory (ACT), which is an enhancement of processing efficiency theory (PET; Eysenck, & Calvo, 1992). According to ACT and PET, anxious individuals do not necessarily perform worse (i.e., less effectively), but they do need to invest more effort to accomplish the same level of performance as their non-anxious counterparts (i.e., less efficiently), which may explain why some studies do not yield an adverse effect of anxiety on perceptual-motor performance (Gould, Petlichkoff, Simons, & Vevera, 1987;Hammermeister & Burton, 1995;Woodman & Hardy, 2003). Combining ACT with the strength model of self-control (Baumeister, 2002;Baumeister et al, 2007;Muraven & Baumeister, 2000) could explain this inconsistent pattern of results: Investing additional effort-which in terms of ACT means overcoming the tendency to pay attention to threatening stimuli (i.e., inhibition), and instead focusing on the relevant stimuli at hand (i.e., shifting)-can be interpreted as attentional control, which in turn is a self-control act (Schmeichel & Baumeister, 2010).…”

The Effect of Role Ambiguity on Competitive State Anxiety

“…From an individual difference perspective, A-state has been found to be associated with goal orientations (Ntoumanis & Biddle, 1998), trait anxiety (Crocker, Alderman, & Smith, 1988), performance expectations (Krane, Williams, & Feltz, 1992), evaluation concerns (Bray, Martin, & Widmeyer, 2000), competitive level (Hammermeister & Burton, 1995), and gender (Jones & Cale, 1989). From a situational perspective, A-state has also been found to be related to factors such as task complexity (Krane & Williams, 1994), an opponent's ability (Thuot, Kavouras, & Kenefick, 1998), game location (Terry, Walrond, & Carron, 1998), and sport type .…”