Are You Really an "Endurance Junkie"? Unlikely.

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“The Death Valley race? Aren’t you getting a bit obsessive about this running thing?” your friends may say, exchanging knowing glances.

Outsiders to the sport you practice are quick to diagnose you as "addicted" when they find your endurance goals scary. But “scary” means different things to different people. To your physically active colleagues, only goals such as The Marathon des Sables (a mere 156 miles of sauntering through the Sahara Desert) may signal obsession. To your mother, running 26.2 miles in your hometown may already mean “taking it too far." When does a passion for an endurance sport really become an obsession?

The two flavors of passion

According to research, passion comes in two flavors: “harmonious” and “obsessive” (Vallerand et al., 2003). Harmonious passion is in balance with other important life roles and is associated with positive feelings and self-evaluations. Obsessive passion brings up feelings of guilt, constant conflict with other obligations, and mood swings connected to (not) practicing the passionate pursuit.

Endurance is not associated with obsession

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Despite what your concerned friends may think, being passionate about an endurance sport in your free time does not make you likely to be obsessive about it. A review of exercise addiction found that its prevalence among amateur competitive athletes was significantly lower than among general exercisers (Trott et al., 2020). Subsequent research agrees: A study of participants in the Munich marathon concluded that amateur marathon running showed a lower risk of exercise addiction than expected. And if you’re thinking “well, the ‘junkies’ must be only among those who trained hard” the same study found no association between exercise addiction and training volume or better performance in the race (Lassner et al., 2022). The “Travesera Integral Picos de Europa” is one of the most demanding ultra-trail races, covering a distance of 47 miles and a positive elevation gain of 23.600 feet. We can only imagine what the mothers, friends, or colleagues of participants in this race think about their obsession levels. Yet, a study of the ”Travesera” ultra-runners found them to have “high levels of mental toughness, resilience, and harmonious passion, and low levels of obsessive passion" (Mendez-Alonso et al., 2021).

How does this all apply to leaders?

In a just-published paper, my co-authors and I unpack the workings of “leisureship," the interaction between a passionate leisure pursuit and a leadership role (Bunea, Kark & Hammond, 2023). Leisureship can bring many benefits, from more effective stress management to enhanced creativity and problem-solving, to a more approachable and authentic image as a leader.

However, these benefits mostly arise if the non-work passion is harmonious, not obsessive. As we have seen, comparatively few amateur endurance athletes are obsessive, but we do not yet know whether this also holds specifically for leaders. What we do know is that a leader who is an obsessive endurance athlete will likely not experience many of the benefits of “leisureship." Our model also proposes that, when a leader is obsessed with their serious leisure, part of the reason may lie in their job.

Are you really obsessed with your endurance sport?

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Do you feel terrible when you have skipped a day of training? Do you find yourself sacrificing family or work time to endurance training while you (not others) really feel you shouldn’t? Does it make you feel guilty or worried more often than it brings up positive thoughts? If yes, then you might be leaning towards an obsessive passion for your endurance pursuit.

Obsessive passion for a nonwork interest can be fueled by unanswered psychological needs in other important life areas (Lalande et al., 2017). All humans share three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). On the face of it, leaders should find it easier to satisfy these needs at work: They arguably have more freedom to decide how they do their work, feel more competent in it, and connect with others easier (leadership is about relationships, after all). Yet leaders’ needs have specific, harder-to-satisfy characteristics. If you are a leader, you have probably felt powerless more often than your team can imagine, caught between conflicting expectations of ever-multiplying stakeholders. Many leaders experience impostor syndrome or at least serious self-doubt at some point in their development. The “lonely at the top” phenomenon is well documented. It turns out that autonomy, competence, and relatedness can all be harder to achieve at the level that leaders expect. If (some of) these needs keep being unsatisfied in the work role, leaders may turn to their endurance passion to compensate, and gradually develop an obsession with it.

In short, if you do turn out to be “an endurance junkie” by research standards, this may be an indicator that you are missing important psychological satisfaction at work. Once you think of it in these terms, you will probably be able to tell which of those three basic needs is coming up short.

Take action as soon as possible to try to address them. Most of us have some leeway to “job craft," meaning slightly re-scope our jobs so as to better answer our needs. Reassert your autonomy, for instance, by redefining expectations together with your boss (or your board, if you are the top honcho). Look for opportunities to feel competent by relying on your strengths more. If you need to maintain some distance from individual employees (the distance-closeness dance all leaders must practice), look for establishing a stronger identity and sense of belonging for the team as a whole.

If these “job crafting” efforts fail, and your basic psychological needs are still unfulfilled at work, you may have to conclude that this job may not be the best match for you in the long run. Trust your instinct: After all, you know a great deal about long runs.