Brooks Rand Instruments (United States)

PURPOSE: To qualitatively characterize the emotional landscape of amateur runners and discover relationships between mental wellbeing and running behavior. METHODS: Self-reported pain level (4-point scale) and mental wellbeing (5-point scale, Terrible to Great) ratings as well as wearable device data were collected from runners over a period of 12 weeks. Participating runners also provided open-ended text comments explaining their mental wellbeing rating choice each week. Using the BERTopic framework, we conducted guided neural topic modeling with emotion-related seed words on the mental wellbeing explanations to identify common themes and affective states experienced by the runners. We divided participants into three groups based on their most frequent mental wellbeing ratings: Positive Mind, Neutral Mind, and Negative Mind, and engineered prompts for a hybrid SSM-transformer language model (Jamba-Instruct) to analyze the open-ended comments from these groups. To identify concrete relationships between mental wellbeing and overt running behaviors, we utilized the one-tailed Mann-Whitney U test to compare the distribution of total weekly mileage for each mental wellbeing rating with that of the next highest rating. RESULTS: 16,188 self-reported comments explaining the weekly mental wellbeing ratings of 1,847 runners (826 Male / 978 Female / 43 Other, Median Age = 42 years [IQR = 13.125 years]) were included in the natural language processing analysis. Topic modeling revealed distinct clusters of commonly co-occurring affective states. From the language model analysis, we extracted psychological traits and behavioral strategies that distinguished Positive Mind from Negative Mind runners, suggesting targets for behavioral interventions. Specifically, Positive Mind runners expressed connection to a concrete training goal and exhibited mindfulness and adaptability. For each mental wellbeing rating except 4/Good (U = 2,384,183, p = 0.054), runners’ total weekly mileage was significantly less than in weeks with the next highest rating (maximum p = 0.009) at a level of 0.05. CONCLUSIONS: Amateur runners experience a diverse array of mental states that can impact their training. Thematic analysis of these experiences suggests strategies for runners to increase their resilience.

The free moment is considered an important variable during running in lower extremity transverse plane loading of the support leg. The effect of current footwear technology on free moment application has not been widely studied despite evidence that greater free moment amplitudes may be related to common lower extremity overuse injuries. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of current running shoe types on the free moment application in running and to identify which design features specifically influence free moment waveforms. The free moments and lower extremity kinematics of 103 recreational runners were collected when running at 3.5 m/s using force plates embedded in the ground. Six conditions were analysed, ranging from minimalistic to motion-control footwear. Runners were classified into three groups of different free moment pattern using functional principal component and cluster analysis techniques. The results revealed that the free moment application can be affected by footwear technologies used in modern running shoes. Nonetheless, the free moment application was influenced to a greater extent by the overall running technique highlighted by the greater effect sizes for pattern membership compared to footwear effects. Footwear may affect the free moment application as a function of its torsional flexibility and to a lesser extent by means of motion-control features. Future studies should address the effect of footwear design features (such as shoe-mass and traction) on free moment application in greater detail to improve the running style with respect to injury prevention and performance enhancement.