Endurance athletes' coping function use during competitive suffering episodes

Abstract

Endurance athletes who realise that they are falling short of important personal goals during competition are expected to experience competitive suffering. As a negative affective state with implications for performance and personal experiences, it is important to understand how endurance athletes cope with competitive suffering. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate differences in athletes' momentary coping function use over time during a competitive suffering episode. Twenty-six runners (mean age: 35.8 years) completed a 5-km running time trial that evoked an experience of competitive suffering using false failure-oriented feedback. Momentary assessments of goal attainment feelings and coping function use were completed immediately following the running time trial using video-mediated recall. Pooled time series analysis was used to predict coping function use across several points in time (i.e. earlier and later stages of a competitive suffering episode) and at different ratings of goal attainment feelings. Analyses revealed that negative feelings about goal attainment moderately predicted problem-focused coping use, and strongly predicted emotion-focused coping use. Although it was not predicted by goal attainment feelings, avoidance coping use was decreased over time throughout suffering episodes. Overall, this study supports propositions that the coping process is continually adapted to competitive demands and identifies the roles of distinct coping functions within the total coping effort.

Enacting Phenomenological Gestalts in Ultra-Trail Running: An Inductive Analysis of Trail Runners’ Courses of Experience

“…Second, the gestalt of enduring general fatigue and experiencing difficult situations refers to the difficulties (e.g., health problems, injuries, lack of preparation, or challenging environmental settings) that runners must cope with; it is the experience of surmounting these difficulties with emotional, cognitive, or behavioral strategies, as suggested by research on coping in endurance sports (Evans et al, 2014). Interestingly, Atkinson (2008, 2015) highlighted how triathletes and fell runners come together as a “pain community” and share physical and mental suffering in the sport through a collective quest and self-exploration, which suggests that this typical experience of suffering is embedded in the culture of practice in ultra-endurance sports.…”

The Development of a New Sport-Specific Classification of Coping and a Meta-Analysis of the Relationship between Different Coping Strategies and Moderators on Sporting Outcomes

“…A PRISMA flow diagram illustrating the sequence of dataset selection is depicted in Figure 1. The final pool included 18 independent studies (Haney and Long, 1995; Smith and Christensen, 1995; Amiot et al, 2004; Gaudreau and Blondin, 2004b; Hatzigeorgiadis, 2006; Gaudreau and Antl, 2008; Van Yperen, 2009; Gaudreau et al, 2010; Levy et al, 2011; Nicolas et al, 2011; Nicholls et al, 2012a,b; Schellenberg et al, 2013; Doron and Gaudreau, 2014; Evans et al, 2014; Laborde et al, 2014a,b). A variety of questionnaires, which classified coping in many different ways, were reported in the primary investigations.…”

“…Measures used to assess goal attainment include the 12-item Attainment of Sport Achievement Goal Scale (Gaudreau and Amiot, manuscript submitted), a 3-item scale (Gaudreau et al, 2010), a 2-item scale (Gaudreau and Blondin), or a sliding scale anchored at −5 (negative feeling about ability to achieve goal) and +5 (positive feelings about ability to achieve goal; Evans et al, 2014). The majority of these studies (e.g., Amiot et al, 2004; Gaudreau and Antl, 2008; Nicolas et al, 2011; Schellenberg et al, 2013) found a positive association between goal attainment and task oriented coping, but a negative relationship between goal attainment and disengagement-oriented coping.…”

“…Distraction-oriented coping was not associated with goal attainment in these studies. Evans et al (2014) explored how athletes coped when they were in danger of not achieving their goals and therefore experienced concerns about performance. The endurance athletes in this study used problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies when they had negative feelings about their goals.…”

Validation of the Arabic Version of the Inventory of Coping Strategies of Competitive Sport (ISCCS)

“…In the Daily coping inventory, people are asked the same day the stressful situation. Recent studies develop and implement methods that would minimize the retrospective bias (Calmeiro & Tenenbaum, 2007;Calmeiro, Tenenbaum, & Eccles, 2010Doron & Gaudreau, 2014;Evans, Hoar, Gebotys, & Marchesin, 2014;Gaudreau et al, 2010).…”