Tales from the peloton: stress and coping in professional women's road cycling

Objective
The purpose of this study was to use narrative inquiry to explore professional women cyclist's stories of stress and coping from their race experiences.

Method
Semi-structured interviews with 6 professional cyclists provided powerful accounts of their racing experiences. Pragmatist narrative inquiry emphasises the key characteristics of these experiences, which coupled with a reflexive creative analytic practice led to individualised first-person stories being constructed which were combined into an ethnodrama to tell the stories of a fictional women's bicycle race.

Results
Tension Lines: The Invisible Weight of the Ride is an ethnodrama portraying riders' situated racing experiences. It shows how appraisal moves beyond a focus on cognition and isolated experiences of stress and coping by providing insights into relationships between the different contexts that interplay within professional women's cycling.

Conclusion
This study provides novel insight into the stress and coping experience through the application of narrative inquiry and pragmatism. It details situated, nuanced interpretations, of stressors experienced by professional women cyclists to show the complex process of coping whilst racing. As non-participant elite women cyclists suggested that they found the ethnodrama to authentically represent their experiences, the findings could serve to emotionally connect and generate awareness with athlete support personnel of the complex relationships between stressors and coping.