Contemporary meanings of endurance: An interdisciplinary approach

Contemporary Meanings of Endurance, 2022

2018

Conference presentation at 13th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Granada, Spain, July 25-27. Youtube version at: https://youtu.be/hAhf8bjA3WQ

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2016

Review of Koski (2015) The Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Running: The multiple dimensions of long-distance running. New York, Dortrecht, and London: Springer. ISBN: 3319155962 Cost: 129.00 USD Length: 172 pages English translation of Juoksemisen filosophia (2005: Tampere University Press).

South African Journal for Research in Sport Physical Education and Recreation, 2007

The aim of this study was to determine the coping strategies that non-elite athletes use to overcome environmental factors during endurance events. A sample of 53 nonelite endurance athletes completed a questionnaire and interviews were conducted. The research focused on exploring individual experiences as well as identifying themes and patterns of behaviour during endurance events. The results indicated that endurance athletes used basically three coping strategies (responses) that were identified in the literature. The most frequently used strategy was to remove the source of the stress followed by strategies that change the athlete's perception of the stressor and lastly strategies that deal with the symptoms of the stressor. Most of the endurance athletes perceive problems and challenges to be a positive experience. The majority of endurance athletes have a positive perception of their own abilities and regularly place themselves in situations of danger or extreme stress to test this ability. This ability must, however, constantly be tested by participation in endurance sport or other stressful situations. Previous successful participation in endurance events or other stressful situations leads to an increase in positive self-perception of own abilities, as well as an increase in performance in endurance events.

Transfers, 2016

What are the ways in which running-the popular exercise, the locomotion, the etymology of the word and its rich idiomatic expressions-can be activated as a metaphor and method to think and talk about the so-called migrant crisis and, more generally, how people cross borders today? With phrases like "life on the run," "letting your imagination run riot," "running away," and "running for your life," how can the poetic processes of running act as a toolkit of resistance as we move about, to "run against" the status quo, in refusing to "take things lying down," and letting things "come to a standstill"? What are the new frontiers for the twenty-fi rst-century mobile citizen? What does it mean to be a political, digital, existential, and intellectual exile, either forced or voluntary? How can artists make and disseminate work on the move, and refl ect on and complicate this life on the move? Th e above are a few of the overlapping-and contradictory-questions behind this exhibition of eight works put together for Transfers. I created the images over the past six years as a (mediocre) runner, mongrel, and one of 230 million people around the world who live outside the country in which they were born. Artist Ai Wei Wei has created artworks responding to the current refugee situation in Europe; yet more voices from the cultural sectors could help enrich the discussion dominated by politicians, journalists, scholars, and "Nimbies"-people who oppose something they perceive as detrimental to their immediate reality; "not in my backyard"). One of the works here, Certainly the Toughest UltraMarathon of Your Life, was created as thousands of refugees made a 135 km trek from Hungary to Austria last summer. Based on a map of Africa-Europe, this artist's map shows the European "warriors" making "heroic" maneuvers-except that instead of Tough Mudder races and other man-made adventures, they are making perilous crossings over the sea (depicted in Figure 1 in a deep red tone) and jumping over (or crawling under) physical (and metaphorical) barbed-wired hurdles across diff erent "challenges" marked out in gaudy colors for easy identifi cation for the (often middle-class) participants who would have paid (quite) a bit of money to take part in such "fi rst world" rituals of voluntary mass suff ering. Th e intention of such a mash-up is to provoke viewers to interrogate

For more than two centuries, women and girls performed extraordinary feats of endurance--with limited notice. In the 19th century, women's individual achievements included walking for a month with less than 10 or 15 minutes continuous rest, walking and running more than 400 miles in six consecutive days, and defeating all men contestants in endurance competitions. Ideally, these achievements should have shattered myths of female frailty and allowed more women to participate in and manage endurance events. However, women's sporting efforts were often reduced, marginalized or exploited. Analyzing more than 1000 primary sources, the author focuses on long-forgotten 19th century women's professional endurance sports, but it adds that marginalization and exploitation of women's efforts continues into the 21st century.

The precise ways in which we go about doing the mundane, often repetitive, actions of everyday life are central concerns of ethnographers and theorists working within the traditions of the sociology of the mundane, sociological phenomenology and ethnomethodology. In this article, we utilize insights derived from Schützian phenomenology and its operationalization via ethnomethodology to provide a novel perspective on a particular, mundane and embodied social practice: training for distance running - in specific places: our favoured running routes. Despite a growing corpus of ethnographic studies of sports and physical cultures, relatively scant analytic attention has been devoted to investigating the actual, mundane, everyday practices of “doing” or “producing” physical cultural activity, particularly from a sensory auto/ethnographic perspective (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2009; Sparkes, 2009). Here we seek to “mark” (Brekhus, 1998) the everyday activity of training for distance running, in particular analysing how terrain is habitually seen, evaluated and experienced on the run.

The Sport Psychologist, 2014

Ultramarathon (UM) running is a rapidly growing sport throughout the world, yet to date it has received little attention in sport psychology literature. To obtain further insight into this sport, the current study examined the training and competition experiences of UM runners. Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 26 participants ranging in age from 32 to 67 years (M = 44.1 yrs, SD = 8.1). Qualitative analysis of the interview data identified meaning units, which were grouped into major themes. A final thematic structure revealed five major themes that characterized the participant’s experience of UM running: preparation and strategy, management, discovery, personal achievement, and community. Taken together, the present results extend previous research on UM running and provide a number of suggestions for sport psychology consultants working with UM runners.

DEVELOPMENT AND ITS APPLICATIONS IN SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

This research aims to investigate in the literature the contributions of sports social projects (PSE) and their connection with the development of the student's body image and the promotion of resilience through sport. This article is a narrative review of the literature, where a path was sought to present studies of PSE strands, collecting, especially, the texts that addressed resilience. For being a current theme, the PSE still has scarce literature. Resilience is also a new topic that needs further study. The issue of resilience in PSE is even lower, with a large gap to be filled. The findings show to a large extent that PSEs provide benefits thanks to the regular practice of sports and collaboration in the moral formation of their students. However, there is also a “shadow side of the sport”, showing that many of the PSEs are palliative, as they have shallow goals and no clear goals. For a better analysis of the contribution of PSE and the development of resilience, more stu...

Sociology, 2018

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social ‘production’ of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of ‘endurance work’. Data emanate from in-depth interviews with 18 high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The article responds to Shilling’s (2016) call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing.