Putting Together First- and Third-Person Approaches for Sport Activity Analysis: The Case of Ultra-Trail Runners’ Performance Analysis

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

“…However, these issues linked to the retrospective design were noted by Hauw and Bilard (2012) and Hauw and Mohamed (2015), who used similar interview techniques, but these authors found that the limitation could be reduced by providing traces to help the runners re-enact their past experience and asking them to ignore the outcomes. Therefore, this new situation (i.e., the re-enactment of the past experience induced by the interview techniques) was ultimately quite similar to the lived experience in the race situation, providing us an acceptable level of quality and authenticity of the accounts; this perspective has already been addressed in previous studies in trail running, which used a similar methodology for data collection (i.e., Antonini Philippe et al, 2016; Hauw et al, 2017; Rochat et al, 2017). …”

“…Therefore, access to pre-reflexive consciousness provides a disclosure of the world as meaningfully experienced by the agent. Furthermore, within the sports psychology literature, the course-of-action framework has already been used to gain insight into performance in many sports like trampoline and acrobatics (Hauw and Durand, 2004, 2008), skydiving (Mohamed et al, 2015), table tennis (Sève et al, 2005), orienteering (Mottet et al, 2016), rowing (Sève et al, 2013), soccer (Villemain and Hauw, 2014; Gesbert et al, 2017), and trail running (Antonini Philippe et al, 2016; Hauw et al, 2017; Rochat et al, 2017). All these studies analyzed embedded activity through activity analysis and were able to provide practical recommendations for training, education, and competition (e.g., Hauw, 2017, 2018).…”

“…In the same vein, Antonini Philippe et al (2016) provided a detailed account of withdrawers’ activity by identifying the stages in runners’ courses of experience leading up to withdrawal (i.e., feeling pain, putting meaning to those feelings, adjusting one’s running style, attempting to overcome the problem, other runners’ influences, assessing the situation, and deciding to withdraw). In addition, Hauw et al (2017) articulated experiential data and behavioral data (i.e., runners’ elevation velocities) during an ultra-trail race to characterize typical activity patterns. They identified three activity profiles: economical runners (i.e., who maintain slow running speeds throughout the entire race in order to preserve themselves as much as possible and who display a progressive decrease in elevation velocity), explorer runners (i.e., who alternate between states of ease, during which they accelerate, and states of extreme fatigue, with these changes associated with high running speed at the beginning of the race followed by substantial decreases in elevation velocity), and “Kairos” runners (i.e., who maintain a slow pace during a big part of the race and then accelerate for the last kilometers, thus displaying stable velocity followed by an abrupt increase in elevation velocity).…”

The Relationship between Trail Running Withdrawals and Race Topography

“…A growing amount of recent research in sport psychology has focused on trying to understand withdrawals from such ultra-races [3,4,5,6,7]. Two distinct bodies of research can be identified.…”

“…However, the limitation of these approaches is the lack of insights into the entire activity of runners. Aiming to better understand trail runners’ activity with a holistic perspective, Hauw et al [4] conducted a situated analysis of how runners experience their race situations and were able to finish the race successfully. The results showed various ways of experiencing and managing the different types of efforts required to complete an ultra-trail.…”