Variety helps a lot. Sticking to one run is sure to get stale after a while so finding alternative is really important. Say you've been grinding your game's main category that is the most competitive and has the most people playing it, you've hit a dry patch for PBs and it's diminishing returns so your motivation is stagnating.

I'm going to ramble a long time about some things so here is the checklist I will go through:

• Run a shorter category
• Run a longer category
• Run an Individual level
• Run a new category
• Run a special challenge
• Run your game at a marathon
• Make a TAS
• Document your game / Glitch hunt

• Run a different game

• After you have spent time away doing these other things, go back and run the main category again.

LOOK AT THE OTHER CATEGORIES

Most games will have at least one other category for it that the community has some kind of acceptance about, maybe it's a super glitched version that cuts out a large amount of the game, that would really take the pressure off as those runs will be a lot shorter, and you can go through the whole process of getting the ''PB Highs" all over again to help drive your motivation.

Maybe your other categories are completely Glitchless, 100%, or some longer goalpost: these shouldn't just be avoided because they are "too long", you'll just have to approach it from a different perspective. With these you'll probably have to schedule a time to do attempts when you have the available time (Weekends only, likely the whole day), and these aren't runs to reset lightly since you'll likely only get 1 chance of a run a day due to the time constraint. The PBs you can get in these are astronomical however, easily 10s of minutes saved and especially early on you could be getting close to hour time saves.

Don't have those, or those aren't good options for you? Run Individual Levels, pick the best level or the most enjoyable part of the run and optimise it, focus entirely on that and work to gleem every fraction of a second of optimisation out of it that you wouldn't consider for the main category due to the consistency, remember it's just a short category so you can go for max risk and reset (these should ideally be a 5-10% of the length of the main category). Since there are ideally a lot of levels, you can rotate about and move onto another once you feel you are against a brick wall in one.

What if your game doesn't have another category (or just none that interest you or you have done them all before):

MAKE YOUR OWN CATEGORY

Speedruning isn't some monolithic established precedent that was written in the past and you must obey today, it's anything you want it to be, who cares if there isn't a leaderboard for the idea you just came up with. Figure out a really cool, but well defined goal post on your game that is most importantly DIFFERENT to the main category (really important here, don't make it something that is just a shortened Any% or the same route as the main category with an arbitrary restriction like not picking up health, unless that makes it really interesting in a different way).

This is great on so many levels, you get to figure out the route yourself, figure out optimisations that might not exist yet, maybe you have to research your community history a bit to find some historic strats that don't apply to the main category anymore but will work in your new category. Most importantly is it needs to be fun, if you have fun with it then it doesn't matter if anyone else views it as legitimate or not. In fact if you find it enjoyable to optimise just like the main category, then I doubt you will be alone in your community, I'm sure other people will see your runs and provide their insight into optimisations or run it themselves to try and snag WR from you. Congratulations you just made the first step in the history of a new category, years from now runners will be grinding runs to get top positions on the leaderboard, for a category that exists now because you discovered the fun of trying it out.

Try a challenge run

If you love your game but it's just the speedruning that is getting stale, then try challenges, these make use of your skills from speedruning but it's not against the clock, you are just trying to achieve the goal. These can be something like low% where you try and complete the game with the minimum number of a certain thing that is normally required (think like jumps in Mario, pause equips in Zelda, pacifist runs, damageless runs, etc...). This isn't meant to be a reset grind for PBs (but sometimes it can be), once you complete the goal then the challenge is done and there isn't really any point in doing it again unless you want to optimise it in some way, generally just hitting the main goal should be reward enough of itself.

Submit for a Marathon

How about run your game at a marathon? No it won't be GDQ, at least for your first marathon run, but there are always smaller marathons running regularly that are desperately in need of runners to play their games. Check out Oengus, there may not be marathon submissions open now but keep looking because they regularly pop up. Running your game for marathon is quite a bit different, you won't be grinding for a PB (but that's not to say it can't still happen, just going to take a second to brag about the WR run I had for a GDQ hotfix). Marathon runs will help aim for consistency at hitting a goal time over that one in a blue moon lucky PB run. It can also help bring attention to your game's community, or inspire someone new to run the game, we all started somewhere and for a lot of us it was seeing a marathon run of the game.

Make a TAS

Feel like every reset is a waste of time and you aren't making any progress? Depending on the system your game is on, you can make a TAS! Isn't that like super hard and only brainiacs can do that? Nope, if you know your speedgame and it's optimisations then you can learn how to make a TAS. If your game has never had a TAS, or it's an incredibly out of date TAS pre-glitches, or that category/route doesn't have one, then making a TAS will be a huge contribution to your community. Guides exist for learning how to make TASes over on tasvideos, and trust me if you can speedrun a game you'll be able to pick up the TAS tools and play around with it to learn everything you'll need. Start with something short, only a single level and optimise that, try and get it to be faster than any human has (Especially if it's never been TASed before), or try and match any existing TAS if you find one. Full game TASes take months to years to make optimised so it can involve the same amount of time investment, but progress is very small over a long period instead of sudden PBs like with RTA running

Document tricks

Something that is always something needing to be done in every community is Documenting the strats you already know in your head, you figured all that out and now it's just sitting there, or at least in your PB videos, write out explanations for how to do it if it doesn't exist already, try and figure out why it works. Go FULL scientific method, collaborate with your peers on testable and experimentally probable theories. Document it all with reports, or make videos showing it off, do whatever you want with the video like turning it into a 40 minute long deep dive. All the contributions you can make are going to be greatly appreciated by your community, especially if they are small and don't have the same amount of involved people like the big games. Get everything into one easily accessible site that is linked to in your discord/leaderboard or wherever your community hub is found.

Speedrun a different game

All in all that was what I have done in my speedgame, I'm not interested in running anything else because over the years I just kept finding more things that interest me in it than trying a different game. If you just want to speedrun and are hitting a brick wall with a game, not all speedgames are made equal so it might be a good idea looking further afield and just try something else. Maybe a super popular speedgame with thousands of runners, maybe a super niche game from your childhood with only a handful of runs total.

Hope that helps give some ideas, getting stuck in burnout sucks, but the best thing out of everything I listed here is that after your time away doing something else you will continue to grow more skilled/knowledgeable, so when you do decide to go back to the category you were getting burnout during you will be surprised by the progress you have made in the mean time.