Snot, Sweat, Pain, Mud, and Snow - Performance and Experience in the Use of Sports Watches

We have conducted interviews with ten elite and recreational athletes to understand their experiences and engagement with endurance sport and personal and wearable sports technology. The athletes emphasized the experiential aspects of doing sports and the notion of feeling was repeatedly used to talk about their activities. Technology played both an instrumental role in measuring performance and feeding bio-data back to them, and an experiential role in supporting and enhancing the sport experience. To guide further interaction design research in the sports domain, we suggest two interrelated ways of looking at sports performances and experiences, firstly through the notion of a measured sense of performance, and secondly as a lived-sense of performance.