‘It has to hurt’: A phenomenological analysis of elite runners´ experiences in handling non-injuring running-related pain

Abstract

Running can be a painful endeavour. In this article, we focus on four elite middle-distance runners' experience of non-injuring running-related pain, with the aim of better understanding how their handling of pain is a part of their expertise as elite athletes competing on an international level. The article employs phenomenological clarifications of bodily self-consciousness and pain in the analysis of an ethnographic fieldwork carried out during four months in a Danish elite middle-distance training group. The first author's background in competitive running enabled him to draw on his own 'insider' experiences as a runner to perform participant-observations and facilitate rich descriptions in both formal and informal interviews. The analysis indicates that a large part of the runners' training and racing relied on three overarching ways of handling pain. The runners possess a familiarity in dealing with the 'acidic' pain experienced during short intervals and races, they 'shuffle' with pain in order to enhance their performance, and they persistently ascribe context-dependant meaning to the experienced pain of running. Importantly, the runners continuously draw on this nuanced familiarity of their pained runner´s bodies while practicing and competing. We suggest that these ways of handling running-related pain can be understood as integral to their expertise as elite runners.

Sources of information used by elite distance running coaches for selection decisions

“…Specifically, coaches expressed their awareness of potential indicators for injury, recovery strategies for overcoming injury, and ability to tolerate injury, indicating a particular value placed on this specific component in their selection criteria. This is in strong alignment with the research surrounding the sub-culture of distance running that embraces pain and discomfort [32,73]. Not only does this finding shed light on the coaches' selection preferences, it also sheds light on the coaches' subjective beliefs of running talent, which may in turn, cyclically inform their selection decisions.…”

Earth(l)y pleasures and air-borne bodies: Elemental haptics in women's cross-country running

“…Distance running, marathon running, trail running, track running, and more “experimental” forms of running have also been investigated via this phenomenological lens (e.g. Allen-Collinson et al, 2019; Bluhm and Ravn, 2021; Gross, 2021; Rochat et al, 2018). Embracing aquatic environments, and employing Merleau-Pontian perspectives, McNarry et al (2020) explore competitive swimming, while Liu (2021), also drawing on Sheets-Johnstone's work, considers waka ama (Māori canoe) paddling.…”

Embodied Learning in Physical Activity: Developing Skills and Attunement to Interaction

“…Yet the fact that running, for example, is initially considered an ability does not mean that running skills cannot be developed. Depending on the running discipline, these kinds of skills might include, for example, adeptly adjusting one's running speed in relation to other runners in a race, optimizing one's running efficiency in long-distance running, and/or ideally coping with noninjurious pain in middle distance running (e.g., Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2016;Lev, 2019Lev, , 2020Bluhm and Ravn, 2021).…”

“…The growing amount of research focusing on how senses and attention take shape in the process of incorporating skills confirms this and illustrates how the incorporation of skills involves the development of sensing and ways of attending to these sensations. Examples of these descriptions include Gunn Nyberg's work on experiential aspects of embodied learning (Nyberg et al, 2020) and on the somatic grasping of practical knowing of free skiers (Nyberg, 2015); Bluhm and Ravn's analysis of middle-distance runners' expertise in handling their sensation of non-injurious pain while running (Bluhm and Ravn, 2021), and several analyses of how professional dancers use their sensorial awareness when practicing and performing (e.g., Ravn, 2017;Ehrenberg, 2021;Pini and Deans, 2021).…”