Psychological traits associated with mental and performance resilience in long-distance and ultra-endurance runners: a systematic review.

Distance runners face two intertwined challenges: staying mentally steady during grueling races and actually finishing them. Researchers have studied traits like mental toughness, motivation, perfectionism, and pain coping separately, so this systematic review pulled together 53 studies to see what psychological traits relate to both mental resilience and performance continuity in long-distance and ultra-endurance running. Across this body of mostly observational research, one pattern stood out consistently: runners who coped poorly with pain tended to adapt worse to it and were less likely to complete races. Emotional intelligence and emotion regulation linked mainly to mood and stress, while traits like motivation, personality, perfectionism, and self-efficacy showed mixed, inconsistent associations.

The major limitation is methodological: the vast majority of included studies had moderate or serious concerns about bias, so these are associations only, not proof that training these traits would improve performance.

If you're a distance or ultra-endurance runner, you've probably wondered whether your mindset really affects how you handle pain or whether you finish a race. This review gathered 53 studies looking at psychological traits, things like mental toughness, motivation, personality, and how people cope with pain, and how they relate to staying mentally resilient and completing races. The clearest pattern was around pain coping: runners who used less helpful ways of dealing with pain seemed to struggle more with adapting to it and were less likely to finish.

Other traits, like emotional intelligence, linked more to mood and stress than to finishing races, while things like motivation and perfectionism showed mixed results across studies. It's important to understand what this evidence can and can't tell you. Most of the included studies had notable weaknesses in how they were designed, so these findings show associations, not proof that changing your mindset would change your performance.

The review doesn't establish that training mental toughness or similar traits actually improves race outcomes.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

For physiotherapists working with endurance athletes, a recurring clinical question is whether psychological traits meaningfully relate to how runners tolerate pain and whether they complete races, or whether these constructs are too fragmented to inform practice. This systematic review addressed that by synthesizing 53 studies, mostly observational cohort or cross-sectional designs with some qualitative and mixed-methods work, examining psychological traits against both mental adaptation and performance continuity outcomes in long-distance and ultra-endurance runners. The most consistent finding was that maladaptive pain coping related to poorer pain adaptation and a lower likelihood of race completion, a pattern relevant to how clinicians might think about pain-related communication during endurance events.

Emotional intelligence and emotion regulation associated mainly with mood and stress rather than completion outcomes, while motivation, personality, perfectionism, mental toughness, resilience, and self-efficacy showed heterogeneous, inconsistent associations across studies. Critically, risk of bias assessment using Joanna Briggs Institute checklists found only three studies with minor concerns, 36 with moderate concerns, and 14 with serious concerns. Given this predominance of methodological limitations and the observational nature of the evidence, the findings should be read as associations rather than causal relationships, and the review explicitly does not establish that training mental toughness or other traits would improve endurance performance.