Everyone can be a winner: The benefits of competing in organized races for recreational runners

ABSTRACT

Participants in the study were 404 recreational runners. At the end of each week for three months they used an online diary to describe their psychological well-being for the week (a total of 4046 weeks), and they indicated if they had participated in an organized race each week (a total of 1111 races). Multilevel modeling analyses (weeks nested within persons) found that well-being, defined in terms of self-esteem, self-efficacy, life satisfaction, positive affect, and depressed affect, was higher during weeks in which participants had run in an organized race than it was during weeks in which they had not run in an organized race. Moreover, well-being was positively related to self-evaluations of performance in races. For recreational runners, finishing an organized race may represent the achievement of a goal, an achievement that increases well-being and may help maintain or increase the motivation to keep running.

KEYWORDS:

• Goal attainment
• positive and negative well-being
• self-efficacy
• sports

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although the majority of our participants (340 of 404) had participated in one or more races, it is possible that the effects for participating in a race were somehow confounded with whether participants competed in races at all. To address this issue, we repeated the analyses summarized in Table 2 using data from only the 340 participants who had participated in at least one race. The results of these analyses were virtually identical to those reported in Table 2.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Grant NSC 2013/11/B/HS6/01135, National Science Centre, Poland, awarded to Anna Zalewska;Poland, National Science Centre [NSC 2013/11/B/HS6/01135].