‘Ploughing on’: a sociological investigation of ‘endurance work’ in competitive swimming and distance-running

Abstract

Despite a burgeoning corpus of qualitative studies of sport and physical cultures, indepth and embodied investigations of those requiring sustained engagement with 'endurance work' remain relatively under-developed. These physical cultures are sociologically interesting as they often demand of practitioners intense commitment in terms of time, energy, and (for many) finances devoted to endurance-training regimes.They also require substantial sacrifice with regard to social activities and family life, even for those not competing at elite levels. The nature of endurance and enduring still remains under-researched from a sociological and qualitative perspective, however, and we directly address this gap in the research literature by contributing fresh theoretical insights and empirical data on the lived experience of endurance in two different lifeworlds: competitive swimming and distance running. Employing a sociologicalphenomenological framework, we analyse and conceptualise data derived from two separate ethnographic and autoethnographic research projects, and explore interesting commonalities in the shared lived experience of endurance and 'endurance work' in these two distinctive physical cultures.

Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect

“…Katri's comments above resonate strongly with research by McNarry et al (2020aMcNarry et al ( , 2020b that similarly demonstrates the 'embracing' and normalisation of sustained 'hard training' in performance swimming, as part of the 'endurance work' (Allen-Collinson et al, 2018;McNarry et al, 2020a) that characterises many sports requiring a level of endurance and tolerance of heavy training loads. Katri admits that there are some days when she is feeling fatigued, but then she reminds herself that 'in the end, you are doing this for yourself'.…”

“…Phenomenologically-inspired research requires participants to describe in rich detail their experience (McNarry et al, 2020a). Since young people sometimes struggle to express complicated understandings, we used creative non-fiction vignettes as a data collection method to aid reflection (see Barter and Renold, 2000).…”

“…Conducting phenomenologically oriented research requires openness, curiosity and challenging our taken-for-granted familiarity with phenomena (Allen-Collinson, 2009; McNarry et al, 2020a). In our study, the interviewer (NJR) participated in a bracketing interview with TVR to challenge her assumptions about women’s sporting life-worlds.…”

Sensoriality, Social Interaction, and “Doing sensing” in Physical–Cultural Ethnographies

“…Our findings revealed the importance of the sensing body in social interaction, which helped create and shape the lived spaces of training, whether in the indoor-pool environment or outdoors on running routes. Several key sensory modalities were identified in the data, some of which we have discussed previously, including vis-à-vis senses beyond the traditional "Western" sensorium, such as thermoception (Allen-Collinson et al 2018;McNarry et al 2020). In this article, however, it is two "traditional" sensory domains upon which we focus, in investigating the social organization and production of the auditory and the visual.…”

“…On the interactional level, both swimmers and runners were also highly attuned to any mismatch between an utterance made by a co-participant regarding their bodily state, and visual indicators of that state, should the two appear to be in tension. Members of the running and performance-swimming lifeworlds share a common emphasis on learning to endure and to engage in interactional "endurance work" (see Allen-Collinson et al 2018;McNarry et al 2020). Members become socialized into, and familiar with, a particular understanding and language of pain, fatigue, suffering, and endurance.…”