This is how poker tournaments are structured in many popular poker rooms. If a tournament has a large prize pool, the blind structure will be deeper. If you’ve been playing poker for a while, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a single tournament can last 8-10 hours if it goes deep.
As for freerolls, to be honest, it’s better not to waste your time on them. Freerolls can only be interesting if they’re a step tournament (satellite) where you can win a ticket to a bigger tournament.
I enjoy the free rolls and sometimes I play free Poker on coin poker application to improve my skills but it's true one shouldn't expect much from the free rolls however they're good to improve your skills and that's how a real tournament can work. I know players at free rolls take huge risks but that's the fun if you get good cards then take risk.
Let's say if you get pair of Aces or pair of Kings then it's okay to take some risk as you won't lose anything because you spend nothing to be part of the free roll. It's just a fun experience to be honest. I agree with iv4n the hardest thing is to stay disciplined for long time during long hour tournaments.
I won $2.5 entry tournament at another Poker site got around $108 as top 1 in that tournament, but it took more than 3-4 hours to win that amount. Hope in future I may become part of high value tournaments, meanwhile I'm working on my skills to make those better overtime.
Well, if the tournament you won lasted only 3-4 hours, then it was probably a turbo tournament or something like that, where the blinds increased pretty quickly.
By the way, in major tournaments, blind levels can last up to 2 hours. For example, in last year’s WSOP Main Event, the blind levels were exactly two hours each. The tournament itself lasted 11 days (from day 1 to the final table), with players playing five levels, or 10 hours, on most days. In my opinion, it’s really hard to maintain discipline over such a long period in tournaments like these, since this format is extremely exhausting. On the other hand, the prize money in such a tournament is impressive.