‘Endurance Work’: Embodiment and the Mind–Body Nexus in the Physical Culture of High-Altitude Mountaineering

Aggerholm

et al. 2020

Self Cite

New forms of neoliberal femininity create demanding horizons of expectation for young women. For talented athletes, these pressures are intensified by the establishment of dual-career discourses that construct the combination of high-performance sport and education as a normative, ‘ideal’ pathway. The pressed time perspective inherent in dual-careers requires athletes to employ a variety of time-related skills, especially for young women who aim to live up to ‘superwoman’ ideals that valorise ‘success’ in all walks of life. Drawing on existential phenomenology, and in-depth interviews with 10 talented Finnish sportswomen (aged 19–22), we explored their experiences of lived time when pursuing dual-careers in upper secondary sport schools. Exploring participants’ bodily experiences of inhabiting the achievement life-world, we analyse how these sportswomen either learned ways of living up to this ambitious script or came to understand the detrimental effects of the script, necessitating other ways of being. For those who experience a disjuncture between the ‘perfect’ and their embodied experience, self-care practices are needed to restore life-world harmony, and orient to alternative futures.

Section: Living Up To the Perfect Idealmentioning

confidence: 83%

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

Ronkainen

Aggerholm

et al. 2020

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“…For all the authors, as recreational athletes, there is something sensorially invigorating about immersion in the immediacy and unpredictability of the weather-world, providing a stark contrast to the often stuffy and airless offices where the majority of our academic working-life takes place. Our sporting life-worlds require that we become ‘weather-wise’ and also learn to develop ‘weather endurance’ (Allen-Collinson, 2018; Allen-Collinson et al, 2018), as part of our weather work, requiring an active and practical disposition to contend with and adapt to weather. As Moore portrays, in relation to cyclists’ weather encounters, these can re/connect us with the environment, and also with the past: The cold reconnects us with the world our forebears knew, and restores some of the resilience and self-reliance that our warm houses, heated cars and insulated clothing take away.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To date, lived weather has remained largely unexplored and untheorised within sociology, despite the significance of weather in our everyday lives (Ingold, 2007, 2010; Ingold and Kurttila, 2000; Rantala et al, 2011; Vannini et al, 2012), and in sporting and physical activity (Allen-Collinson et al, 2018). Whilst there are many studies that include weather-related aspects, relatively few consider weather as the central analytic topic.…”

Section: Lived Weather Weather Work and Phenomenological Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Weather-wise? Sporting embodiment, weather work and weather learning in running and triathlon

Jennings

Vaittinen

et al. 2018

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Weather experiences are currently surprisingly under-explored and under-theorised in sociology and sport sociology, despite the importance of weather in both routine, everyday life and in recreational sporting and physical–cultural contexts. To address this lacuna, we examine here the lived experience of weather, including ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, in our specific physical–cultural worlds of distance-running, triathlon and jogging in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and the findings from five separate auto/ethnographic projects, we explore the ‘weather-worlds’ and weather work involved in our physical–cultural engagement. In so doing, we address ongoing sport sociological concerns about embodiment and somatic, sensory learning and ways of knowing. We highlight how weather work provides a key example of the phenomenological conceptualisation of the mind–body–world nexus in action, with key findings delineating weather learning across the meteorological seasons that contour our British weather-related training.

“…There is, thus, a specific mode of being, doing and understanding that swimmers have to incorporate and embody in order to engage effectively and cope with the physical and psychological demands of the sport, as well as to belong to the wider community of competitive swimmers. These ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss, 1979) or ‘habits’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002) are acquired through a process of apprenticeship in culturally specific contexts (Shilling, 2010) as a form of body pedagogics (Allen-Collinson et al, 2018; Shilling, 2017), and are essential to the production of the competitive swimming body and lifeworld. Such acquisition requires the ability not only to swim, but to swim effectively, efficiently and, ultimately, quickly.…”

Section: The Mindful ‘Doing’ Of Competitive Swimmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It should be emphasized, however, that despite attaining a high level of technical proficiency at certain times, such skills and level of performance are only temporary; there is no fixed end point at which corporeal skills are developed and consolidated once and for all (Allen-Collinson et al, 2018). The fluid and evolving nature of ‘doing’ renders it difficult to ascertain a point at which technical efficiency is achieved.…”

Section: The Mindful ‘Doing’ Of Competitive Swimmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Doing’ competitive swimming: Exploring the skilled practices of the competitive swimming lifeworld

McNarry

Evans

2020

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Despite a developing literature on various facets of sporting embodiment, there is currently a research lacuna with regard to in-depth analyses of actually ‘doing’ sporting activities within specific physical cultures. In this article, we address that gap by drawing on a developing theoretical literature in sociological phenomenology to investigate a particular physical–cultural domain. Here, we present and analyse data from an ethnographic study of competitive swimmers undertaken in the UK. Responding to calls to explore the domain of ‘body pedagogics’, we investigate the embodied work involved in the skilled practice of ‘doing’ and learning how to ‘do’ competitive swimming. This embodied work plays a key part in the swimmers’ ability to inhabit the competitive swimming lifeworld. In the analysis, we highlight how the acquisition and ‘habituation’ of these body techniques and skilled behaviours are not achieved simply through the repetitive rehearsal of coherent movements over time. These processes are complex, demanding practical experimentation, discovery and the ability to adapt constantly to changes in the environment and the swimmer’s own corporeality.