Eleven hours, 21 minutes and 15 seconds – that's how long it took Flora Colledge from jumping into the Hardangerfjord in Norway to celebrating on the 1,883 meter high Gaustatoppen.
“It was a dream come true,” said the 37-year-old Briton about her Norseman triathlon victory this year. “It was my fifth attempt to win this event.”
After two second-place finishes in 2019 and 2021, Colledge was finally on top of the podium and can now call herself XTri World Champion. XTri stands for extreme triathlon and, in addition to the distance of an Ironman race – 3.8 km swimming, 180 km cycling and 42.4 km running – represents the special challenge of the route. In the Norseman, around 3,000 meters of altitude have to be overcome on the bike , in the marathon there are over 1800 meters in altitude.
Sports scientist Flora Colledge after winning the Norseman 2023 in NorwayImage: Pauline Monasterska
However, Flora Colledge is not only an extreme athlete, but also a sports scientist who is currently researching the phenomenon of exercise addiction, particularly with the ideas of compulsivity, excessive exercise and behavioral addiction.
Danger of addiction from seven hours per week
“I didn't bother with it because I felt like I was in danger myself. The topic chose me,” Colledge tells DW and laughs. “As a high-level athlete, I find it exciting to explore the differences between exercise addiction as a disorder and high-stress training in a healthy way.”
Colledge himself trains about 25 hours a week. In her research, she identified a value of around seven hours per week as the threshold for possible sports addiction.
“For someone who has a full-time job, a family and other responsibilities, an hour a day is no small amount. If he still does sports and neglects other obligations, one can speak of a sports addiction from around seven hours per week,” explains the scientist, who works at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland.
The phenomenon of sports addiction was discovered incidentally in 1970. The New York doctor Frederick Baekeland wanted to investigate whether a lot of exercise promotes deep sleep. To this end, he offered money to passionate runners who trained daily. In return, they should give up their sport for a month. Most of them refused even when the scientist offered them large sums of money. Baekeland coined the term “sports addiction”. There are now more than 1,000 scientific articles on the phenomenon, and research has really taken off in the last five years.
In contrast to gambling and betting addiction, sports addiction has not yet been recognized as an independent psychiatric disorder. Colledge acknowledges that some studies should be viewed with caution, saying that some measures used to identify exercise addiction are “far too simplistic.”
In a frequently used questionnaire, athletes are asked whether they have increased their training load and whether they use sport to improve their mood. These are two of six questions. “An athlete will clearly answer yes to both questions,” explains Colledge. “Of course you increase the amount of training. And the fact that physical activity leads to a good mood is no problem at all. That’s why we recommend exercise.”
Never enough – defeat sports addiction
This browser does not support the video element.
Symptoms of anxiety and depression
But when does passion become an addiction?
“Sport can play a central role in life, but it shouldn’t be the only priority,” says Colledge. People who are involved in sports have clear goals, but, unlike addicts, they also cope well with breaks from training.
“Taking a day off is fine and will not cause withdrawal symptoms. “Exercise addicts, on the other hand, report severe anxiety and severe depressive symptoms and even suicidal thoughts when they are unable to exercise regularly,” says Colledge. This inner compulsion to exercise at all costs and never reduce intensity is one of the main warning signs.
Therefore, amateur athletes may be even more at risk.
“Professional athletes generally understand that training not only makes you fitter, but that you also need recovery periods to balance out the intense training phases,” says Colledge, who holds a professional triathlon license herself. “Exercise addicts don’t understand this. It's not about getting better, faster or fitter, it's just about completing a daily training program. And that should be no less tomorrow than today, maybe even a little more.”
Training despite a fracture or fever
Scientists disagree about how many active people are addicted to exercise. Endurance sports are considered particularly at risk. In 2022, for example, researchers determined a high risk of sports addiction among cyclists at six percent. For marathon runners, the risk was just under seven percent.
However, high risk does not necessarily mean a pathological disorder. An estimate by Simone Breuer and Jens Kleinert from the German Sport University in Cologne is often quoted in this context. According to this estimate, approximately one in 100 athletes exhibits isolated abnormalities, one in a thousand noticeable signs of a disorder. And probably one in ten thousand people needs treatment. This also applies, for example, if symptoms of an eating disorder coincide with those of an exercise addiction.
“It becomes pathological when exercise has become a psychological burden,” says Flora Colledge, giving the following example to illustrate the point at which people should seek treatment. “I don't actually have time for two hours of training today because I have to work or take care of my family. But I do it anyway, between two and four in the morning if necessary, because there is no other way.”
People who simply ignore illnesses or injuries and continue training also need treatment, says the sports scientist. “There are exercise addicts who continue despite a stress fracture or high fever. They can’t listen to their bodies anymore.”
When does too much exercise become a problem? Image: William West/AFP/Getty Images
Looking for the right therapy
How do you treat a behavioral addiction that is not yet officially recognized as a psychiatric disorder?
“We are still in such an early stage of research that we haven’t even been able to test forms of therapy yet,” answers Colledge. “There is no clinical trial on exercise addiction therapy.”
However, there is evidence that something called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be helpful. “You learn to deal with your feelings about sport differently. You try to reduce the stress slowly in order to process the feelings associated with it.” Completely abstaining from exercise, as is the case with alcohol addiction, makes no sense: “People need exercise, so completely abstaining from exercise is not an option.”
Colledge says she will continue to compete in extreme triathlons.
“I’m more suited to endurance sports. The longer the better,” says Colledge, adding that she simply enjoys competing in stunning natural surroundings and in a small space. “It’s less of a fight against other opponents. I'm really trying to do the best I can under these challenging conditions. I think it’s great.” And of course without addiction.
This article was originally written in German.
Comments are closed.