Sensing Athletes: Sensory Dimensions of Recreational Endurance Sports

Abstract

Sport has become increasingly popular with recreational athletes over the last couple of decades. This has only gained minimal attention so far from scholars interested in the relations between recreational sports and everyday culture. With this paper, we seek to contribute to this field by scrutinising the sensory dimensions of recreational sport. Rather than probing into or highlighting isolated senses, we look at sensory dimensions understood as a combination of different, non-separable sensory experiences featured in recreational endurance sports. We are interested in how the senses play a role for recreational endurance athletes in running, triathlon and cycling both in training and competition. We start by examining how cultural and social dimensions are inextricably linked to doing sports. Secondly, we show how different configurations of the senses and their communicative mediation are contingent on sport disciplines, specific settings, technology, development and change as sensory careers over time. Thirdly, we discuss the kinaesthetic dimensions of doing sports in relation to the senses and the role of atmospheres. We conclude by arguing that highlighting specific senses by athletes is a cultural practice that calls for a holistic analysis of senses in sport, and outline some methodological implications for research on the senses. Going to the gym, attending yoga classes, jogging or cycling are part of everyday routines for many people, permeating everyday practices and shaping parts of everyday culture. Being a member of a fitness studio, a local sports club, participating in marathons or cycling races, as well as being physically active in general, has become an integral part of everyday routines and a broad spectrum of lifestyles. Advertisements on TV, lifestyle reports in magazines and self-presentations in social media feature the ideal of the active sportsman and -woman; health insurance institutions and health ministries foster these images as benefits claimed from an active lifestyle. Rather than having to justify oneself for doing sport, one has to justify oneself for not doing sport. Endurance sports take up a considerable share of such sporting activities and images of fitness and healthiness. The lunch run at work, the bike ride with a local club in the evenings, 5K races or city marathons, as well as sports holidays, such as cycling vacations or training camps (Strüver 2010) -endurance sports like these have become a frequent and important part of everyday culture, shaping leisure time as well as perceptions of the self (Krahn and Groth 2017). As European ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba (1989: 154) argued more than two decades ago, "sportivity" as a "social pattern of behavior and interpretation" has become "omnipresent" and "taken for granted". This image still holds: runners, cyclists and other recreational athletes in public spaces are perceived as normal, and mega events, such as city marathons, are a common part of urban event calendars (Berking and Neckel 1993;Müller 2015). Pra...

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