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.