The Embodied Rupture: Navigating Socio-Technical Friction and Sensemaking Among Amateur Endurance Athletes

Sammanfattning

Wearable devices increasingly issue algorithmic verdicts on the body's recovery and readi-ness claims that may contradict what an athlete directly feels. This study examines how ama-teur endurance athletes make sense of the embodied rupture: the moment at which a weara-ble's recovery assessment conflicts with their own somatic knowledge. While Information Systems research has theorised how people construct knowledge from data, it has not ad-dressed the case where the data concerns the interpreter's own body. Through twelve semi-structured interviews analysed abductively against a four-mode sensemaking framework, the study finds that athletes resolve the rupture asymmetrically: the body's verdict prevails, and articulated doubt is directed more often at the device than at the self. The affective response, however, depends on whether the mismatch can be contextualised rather than on this hierar-chy alone. Athletes sustain a workable relationship through metric-level trust, curation of distrusted metrics, and contextualisation held in memory rather than logged in the applica-tion. The study extends Ruckenstein's data double, qualifies the sensemaking framework with structural and developmental conditions, and identifies a practical design gap in captur-ing contextual knowledge. Findings describe sensemaking within an engaged population of amateur endurance athletes and do not generalise to wearable users broadly.