The Motivational Influence of Milestone Times on 10-km Running Performance

M. Daniel Cushman, Ashwin Babu, Benjamin Marshall and Monica Rho

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2016, vol. 16, issue 2, 602-611

Abstract: To date, little research has been conducted to evaluate the potentially motivating effect of completing a race at a specific “milestone” finishing time. As this is difficult to perform in a laboratory setting, we examined 10-km runners from a large cohort to see if they were more likely to complete a race before rather than after a set milestone time (40:00, 45:00, and 50:00). Frequency distributions for finishers of each sex were created in 30-second time groups, with ideal normal distributions modeled based on this data. The actual time group frequencies were compared to the “expected” values from the modeled normal distributions. We included time groups that contained at least 1,000 finishers, thus were constrained to 36:00 – 52:00 for men and 43:30 to 52:00 for women. A total of 180,731 men and 53,047 women were included in the analysis. Men showed significant positive deviations (more finishers than expected) in the 39:30-40:00, 44:30-45:00, and 48:30-50:00 time groups (3 groups); they showed significant negative deviations only at 40:00-40:30 and 50:00-50:30. Women only showed significant positive time group deviations from 48:30-50:00 (1 group) with no significant negative deviations. In conclusion, despite the relatively arbitrary nature of milestones, they appear to exert a motivational influence on 10-km runners.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24748668.2016.11868912 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpanxx:v:16:y:2016:i:2:p:602-611

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPAN20

DOI: 10.1080/24748668.2016.11868912

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport is currently edited by Peter O'Donoghue

More articles in International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().