Jogging not running: A narrative approach to exploring ‘exercise as leisure’ after a life in elite football

Abstract

As research has shown, former elite athletes often struggle to adapt to aspects of their postsport lives. This can include the management of their identities, dealing with the uncertainty of their new roles, and negotiating the changes that occur to their bodies. In this paper we discuss an under-reported challenge facing retired athletes: how to manage their ongoing relationship with exercise. To address this issue we adopted a narrative approach, based on the first author's experiences as a former football player, to provide a socio-cultural reading of the various challenges involved in the transition from exercise as a vocation to a leisure activity. We suggest that these stories demonstrate that in retirement, former athletes' docility, while seemingly advantageous, can also be a significant obstacle to developing alternative meanings for exercise, including as a potential re-creative or leisure activity that can become meaningful and important in its own right.

“After the Dust Settles”: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes' “Re-orientation” to Exercise

“…This review reiterates Barth et al (2020) recent observation that the significant majority of published papers examining retirement from elite sport have predominantly focused upon the initial transition into retirement (Hickey and Kelly, 2008;Jones and Denison, 2017;Stamp et al, 2021). Moreover, while a handful of examples of sports retirement research that entertain the longer-term psychosocial impact of a sports career upon retirement experience do exist (McMahon et al, 2012;Agnew and Drummond, 2015;Torregrosa et al, 2015), including the longer-term connection between an athlete's career demands and their experiences of exercise in retirement (Tracey and Elcombe, 2004;Jones and Denison, 2019), there remains a paucity of research from any tradition that considers the implications of having been an obedient and compliant (read "docile") body, beyond the frequently analyzed initial "retirement transition" (Fuller, 2014;Barth et al, 2020).…”

“…I have come to understand that the residue of the disciplinary practices I experienced has remained and, like an undetected toxin, infiltrated numerous aspects of my existence. In one example, I now see quite clearly the connection between the effects of the disciplinary logic (Denison et al, 2017) that determined my football experiences and how I (oftentimes awkwardly) posture my meaning for exercise as a retired footballer (Jones and Denison, 2019). Now, after the dust has settled, I continue to harness Foucault's notion of power as productive, as I try to exercise with greater nuance-rejecting exercise's former explicit purpose, that of controlling or improving my body for the purpose of performance.…”

“…While the challenges associated with retirement from high-performance sport have been extensively researched, albeit dominantly through a psychological or psycho-social lens (e.g., Lally, 2007;Warriner and Lavallee, 2008;Martin et al, 2014), one aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives (Tracey and Elcombe, 2004;Jones and Denison, 2019). In the current paper, we attend to this lacuna by drawing on a Foucauldian lens to present and analyze a series of vignettes from the three authors concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance running (author three).…”

‘Falling Upward’ into Sports Retirement: A Rohrsian Exploration of the Sports Retirement Experience

“…Sport sociologists have also traditionally shared similar concerns, yet their 'flexible' epistemological and ontological foundations have helped to position and investigate the social phenomenon of sports retirement in slightly different ways (Jones and Denison 2019). As Denison and Winslade (2006) suggest, moving towards a sports sociology lens helps us think more readily about common problems in sport in a way that takes the focus away from the individual athlete, thereby disrupting the entrenched idea that the 'athlete' should be the location where change needs to occur.…”

“…Retirement from sport is widely reported as a challenging time of transition in the lives of elite athletes and one that has been explored from a range of different perspectives both by sport psychologists (Park et al 2013;Stambulova et al 2020) and socio-cultural scholars of sport (Andrijiw 2020;Hickey and Roderick 2017;Stamp et al 2021;Jones and Denison 2019). The majority of academic work in this area has focused on the initial aftermath of transitions away from sport (see Barth et al 2020) and the ongoing social and psychological adjustments to life thereafter (Cavallerio et al 2017).…”