Ageing, The Body and Social Change: Agency and Indentity Among Ageing Athletes

Ageing, the Body and Social Change Running in Later Life

Emmanuelle Tulle

Ageing, the Body and Social Change

Also by Emmanuelle Tulle OLD AGE AND AGENCY THE BODY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY: An Introduction (co-edited with Hancock, P., Hughes, B., Jagger, E., Paterson, K., Russell, R., and Tyler, M.)

Ageing, the Body and Social Change Running in Later Life Emmanuelle Tulle Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

© Emmanuelle Tulle 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230517592 hardback ISBN-10: 0230517595 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Abbreviations

vi

Introduction

vii

1 Embodying Ageing

1

2 Debates in the Sociology of the Body

18

3 Social Fields as Spaces of Disruption

40

4 Capturing Ageing Embodiment

61

5 Disrupted Biographies

77

6 The Embodiment of Athletic Mastery

94

7 Managing Ageing

114

8 Mapping an Embodied Sociology of Ageing

140

Conclusion

161

Notes

167

References

168

Index

178

v

List of Abbreviations HR LD LD/r T&F T&F/r UR

Hill runner Long-distance runner: specialising in distances exceeding 10 km Retired long-distance runner Track and Field athlete: mainly sprinters and triple jumpers Retired Track and Field athlete Ultra runner: specialising in distances exceeding marathon distance (26 miles)

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“We’ve got to run here’’, Marc said, tapping a brown puddle sonata with a Nike-clad toe. “You must fight the postmodern experience! You’ll have the time of your life’’. His youthful enthusiasm belied his 54 years. (Ottati 2002: 19) Can we really change the world by running? Or put another way, can the way we use our bodies reflect or even initiate significant social change? How do we know that any changes observed are really significant? In this quote the narrator and his running partner have reached ages at which most people have stopped aspiring to physical competence of the kind inherent in the pursuit of athletic excellence. These older runners and those who will give flesh to the sociological analysis to be presented in this book are deadly serious. Over several years, and even decades, they have shaped their lives, their psychological tendencies, their aspirations and, above all, their bodies, by subjecting themselves to demanding training regimes and racing schedules. At the same time they hold down demanding jobs and are active spouses, parents and friends. When Marc is encouraging his running mates to choose the muddy running trail over the drier and more dependable course, he is not only urging them to embrace a full physical experience over a more sanitised one, but also testing their discipline. Running is a challenge to postmodern (read, inauthentic, virtual) living and a test of one’s physical competence. Is it also a significant challenge to ageing? There is a clue to the problem in the last sentence of the quote. In this last sentence the narrator draws attention to his friend’s age and contrasts it with his “youthful’’ attitude. This is a typical trope in accounts of age, which serves to challenge preconceptions. Juxtaposing a relatively elevated age with a claim to youthfulness implies that age need not be a time of narrow horizons and negative attitude. At the same time it also implies that old age is not desirable. Does this trope challenge stereotypes of old age and old people? Is having youthful enthusiasm exemplified by the will to challenge the body the way to transform the vii

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arguably diminished status of older people? These questions are useful to kick-start the analysis that will be developed in the book and the central questions which will help generate it. I propose that to address these questions, the sociology of ageing and old age needs to be embodied. I will undertake this by focusing on a very specific group of older people – Veteran elite runners such as Mark above – and explore how this process of embodiment can be achieved by investigating their lived experiences, with a primary focus on the everyday management of the body as it has evolved over time. More specifically, I wish to throw light on the interrelationship between bodily processes (by which I mean not only the sensations of the body but also the engagement with idiosyncratic physical and physiological structures), social location and identity, within the context of ageing, that is within a context of change. In this way I hope to open the way for theoretical development and refinement in sociological understandings of ageing and old age to challenge the erosion in social and cultural capital which threatens us as we enter old age. The concerns which animate this book continue a project of critical enquiry in ageing studies which has been ongoing for some time. In the last 20 years the building blocks of a critical sociology of ageing have been laid. Key texts, steeped in Foucauldian thought, have unpacked in minute detail the modalities of the social construction of ageing and old age since the advent of modernity (Green 1993; Katz 1996). These contributions have affirmed that ageing and old age need no longer simply be slaves to biological processes. The fact that they were was shown to be the result of the development of biomedicine, with the latter providing the primary discursive framework within which old age and ageing came to be known and experienced. These analyses confirmed the role of the ageing, medicalised body in attitudes towards older people. Other publications have signalled the arrival of postmodernity in studies of ageing. The cultural context in which ageing and being old is experienced has been scrutinised (Blaikie 1999; Featherstone et al. 1991; Featherstone and Wernick 1995; Gilleard and Higgs 2000; Hepworth 2000). Much of what people fear about ageing and old age has been shown to be associated with the cultural marginalisation and concomitant loss of identity which arise from the stereotypes of old age. These stereotypes were seen as underpinned by bodily ageing or rather by beliefs about bodily ageing, with the latter largely and unquestioningly perceived within a biomedical framework. Thus the body occupies a central place in the problematisation of old age. However, it also plays an ambiguous role in the strategies described

Introduction

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in the literature which ageing social actors have at their disposal to manage their physicality. As we will see in Chapter 1, there is a tendency to respond to bodily ageing by rejecting its salience. And yet, according to Turner (2003), impending frailty is an inherent feature of our ontological position. If this is the case, then ageing embodiment cannot be sidelined and we need to attend sociologically to its social, cultural and personal implications. Indeed how can one respond meaningfully to the ontological unsettling that would come from increasing frailty? The question is not aimed purely at individuals but must be set in a wider social and cultural context. Rejecting the body to protect ontological integrity and maintain cultural relevance is fraught with dangers. It confirms that the ageing body has no value, that it is devoid of any kind of capital. And yet, as some of the literature is beginning to uncover, ageing social actors do manage their bodies and they do so within specific structures – such as discourses, institutions, economic conditions – which variously open up or restrict the range of body work available to them. In some settings, such as beauty salons or in the gym, people engage in what one might call active body work in an attempt to restore value to what they perceive is diminishing capital. In other settings, such as in nursing homes, people engage in more passive – albeit no less powerful – body work to cope with the depersonalisation and loss of independence arising out of the routines of these settings. Therefore the body is always present and it is always used in some way by ageing social actors and those around them. This leads to another question: does the management of the ageing body lead to meaningful change in the ontological position of older people (at an individual level) and in their social status? As we shall see, there is much danger in the strategies currently at the disposal of ageing social actors to manage bodily ageing. The danger is that these strategies, far from rehabilitating ageing, would in fact reinforce the negative position of older people; that is to say, they would leave the age order undisturbed. Currently there is little in the literature which can help us find a way towards the rehabilitation of ageing experiences and provide a challenge to the diminished social location of people who are becoming or have become old. Therefore I propose to turn to two other areas of sociology which I think can supply much fruitful theoretical and conceptual tools to develop what I will hopefully convince the reader is an innovative framework to make sense of contemporary ageing experiences and to work out ways of challenging the age order.

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Introduction

The first area of sociology that I will draw upon is the sociology of the body. Debates in the sociology of the body have opened interesting opportunities for making sense of embodiment in later life (Faircloth 2003; Tulle-Winton 2000). In particular, the discussions which deal with the lived experience of the body and with the structural and local conditions in which people come to embody themselves seem highly relevant to the study of ageing and old age. Shilling (2003, 2005) and Crossley (1996, 2001a, 2001b, 2006) both propose that embodiment is a process through which particular structural configurations are made manifest. With a concept such as embodied agency, Crossley seeks to establish the body at the centre of opportunities for agency. With the notion of corporeal realism, Shilling (2005: 13) establishes “the body as an emergent, socially generative phenomenon’’, that is as instrumental in the production and reproduction of social structures. There are two concerns here: first, to keep sight of the materiality of the body in an embodied sociology; and second, to find valuable ways of merging this materiality with the structural conditions in which our corporeal existence is experienced. The aim is to establish how social actors are embodied and embody themselves, in what context they do so and with what outcomes. Indeed, some modalities of embodiment reflect and yield greater social and cultural capital than others. This is not to say that bodies are reducible to the wider social context in which they are caught up. It may be that the disjunction between structures and some bodily needs gives a unique insight into alternate social conditions. Shilling is quite clear that a sociology of the body should be critical, that it should examine the potential of embodiment to resist or change existing structures. Thus a key focus of sociological investigation is the way the body is brought into action, is given meaning in specific contexts – that is, how social actors engage in body work – how this affects identity and how this body work challenges the prevalent system of distinctions. This brings me to the other area of sociology which I will draw upon in this book to throw light on ageing embodiment – the sociology of sports and more particularly its treatment of sporting bodies. Sporting bodies are prime examples of bodies at work, where bodily processes interact with phenomenological processes, to yield sporting, social, economic and aesthetic capital. There is little stability in the type, amount and durability of the capital obtained by this type of body work. For instance, sporting bodies are prone to injury, which can have a catastrophic impact on sporting careers and identity, and of course they are subjected to the passage of time. This raises issues for the management of identity.

Introduction

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Crucially, sporting bodies also force us to pay heed to social location, in large part because the type of sport that is practised or even the ability to engage in sports at all may reflect or challenge the prevailing system of distinctions and discourses, which includes the modalities of bodily engagement which are perceived as socially and culturally appropriate. These insights from the sociologies of the body and of sports are useful to illuminate ageing embodiment because they force us to apprehend the latter in its social context whilst continuing to pay heed to its phenomenological and individual dimension. They may also help us rethink how to restore cultural capital to the process of growing older in ways which go beyond the encouragement to adopt a youthful attitude. Focusing on Veteran athletes will provide rich material from which to “test out’’ the cross-fertilisation of the sociologies of ageing, the body and sports.

Introducing Veteran runners Veteran runners embody modalities of physicality which are quite remarkable. Aged over 351 and deemed too old for peak performance, these athletes do not let up in effort and commitment as they get older. They join clubs, train several times a week, sometimes seven days a week and twice a day, follow strict training regimes supported by the latest scientific evidence, compete regularly in races and generally orientate their lives around the demands of their sport (even if they work full-time). With such discipline, runners of very advanced years often break records of speed and endurance. Veteran runners are not that rare – look closely at most of the joggers and runners who will cross your field of vision in your neighbourhood and you’ll find that most of them are over 35, with a high proportion of them in their forties and fifties. The over-sixties are a little less ubiquitous, but they are around nonetheless. Master runners are supported by clubs and local, national and even supranational associations. These associations hold competitions in which all the track and field and running disciplines, indoors and outdoors, are represented. I was inducted into the world of Master athletics when I looked for Veteran runners who would talk to me about their ageing. They were not difficult to find and to recruit, an issue to which I will briefly return in Chapter 4. They are quite an engaging lot and their stories were fascinating, rich in self-reflection and anecdotes. Many had diaries, photographs, medals and cups which they used as aides-memoire and to show off their

xii

Introduction

achievements. These runners undoubtedly had a strong sense that they stood out but their very status as outside the norm also made them quite defensive about what the non-initiated or the non-sympathetic might refer to as obsessive behaviour. Twenty-one runners (14 men and 7 women), ranging in ages from 48 to 86, form the empirical backbone of this book. All the research participants lived in the central belt of Scotland, that is in the narrow corridor that links Edinburgh and Glasgow and has the highest population density in Scotland. On the whole, the men were older than the women and I will explore why in Chapter 3. They were or had been elite athletes, by which I mean that they had at some point in their athletic career competed as representatives of their clubs, with the expectation of achievement which came from team selection. With one notable exception, they were all still very active runners and competed in Master and even open events.2 There is some justification for investigating the potential for resistant embodiment in Master athletics. Athletics itself has an ambiguous history, with a cast of heroes – largely long-distance runners – who since the 19th century have been challenging the established order with their bodies. Participants in athletics have over time developed a keen awareness of their bodies and a language to talk about their experiences. As ageing social actors they also have to engage with the same discursive context as their non-athletic counterparts. Therefore they are well placed to provide us with an insight into the minutiae of their embodiment, what changes they have experienced and noticed over time and the potential for embodied resistance.

Structure of the book The book can be read in two parts. The first part consists of a review of a range of literature across three sociologies: of ageing, the body and sports. Chapter 1 will start with an exposition of the dominant discourse of old age. This analysis will pick up where I left off in a previous publication (see Tulle-Winton 2000) and draw upon more recent literature concerning the opportunities for increased medicalisation contained in current biological research in ageing. I will be inspired by Foucauldian analytics, according to which discourse refers not only to systems of knowledge but also practices of regulation, ways of asking questions about the “problem’’ as it has been posed within discourse and the particular practices and narratives in which we tend to engage and which contribute to our subjectification, that is our self-constitution as ethical

Introduction

xiii

citizens. This gives me the bridge and justification to link the medicalisation of ageing to the cultural position of old age. The point is to review much more systematically and explicitly than has hitherto been done the embodied dimension of ageing. In other words I will begin charting the sociology of ageing bodies. However I will recast this sociology in a wider sociological context, by drawing on insights from the sociology of the body. This will be done in Chapter 2. The sociology of the body has already been ably developed by Featherstone, Leder, Hepworth, Crossley, Shilling, Turner and others so I will not reinvent the wheels they have so creatively set in motion. What I will do instead is retell the story of these developments from the perspective of ageing. I will seek out in the story of this sociology what can help illuminate ageing bodies and experiences. I will also explore the potential for social change contained in embodiment and the phenomenological apprehension of bodies (ageing or otherwise). One particular condition which needs to be fulfilled to understand embodiment and its potential for change is to recast it not only in specific social contexts or “fields’’ but also in the wider social structure. This will serve as a bridge with Chapter 3 in which I will focus more specifically on sports and athletics as an example of a field. Drawing upon the history of athletics, including Veteran athletics, and examples of embodiment from the literature, I will distil what I see as the key conditions for discerning social change. The second part of the book will deal with the empirical material which will feed into my overall argument. Chapter 4 is a reflection on the methodological challenges thrown up by investigating ageing embodiment and, in particular, how to get the phenomenological insights needed, I would argue, to develop a sociology of ageing and older bodies. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 will examine in detail the experiences of runners in the athletics field. In Chapters 5 and 6 I will focus particularly on the biographical trajectories which constitute running careers and on the incorporation of sets of dispositions consonant with athletic competence. The interaction of discourse, bodily dispositions and identity will prove crucial. What will emerge here is how fluid and unstable the relationship between body and mind always is and how important the field is for managing and perhaps exploiting the fluidity of this relationship. This will prove particularly important in the management of injuries and ageing. The latter will form the exclusive focus of Chapter 7 and I will seek to answer a series of questions. How is bodily ageing narrated and actually experienced? What role does discourse and the field play in the potential

xiv Introduction

attrition in physical, that is biological, capital which is held to accompany the passage of time? What of identity? Is running a challenge to age habitus? In Chapter 8, I will discuss alternative ways of making sense of ageing in which the sociologies of the body, sport and ageing are mutually informed.

1 Embodying Ageing

A few years ago, Öberg (1996) wrote that bodies were largely absent from social gerontology. Until this call to order, most theoretical accounts of ageing, whilst paying heed to the devalued status of old age in Western societies, had made no explicit link with bodily ageing, leaving this dimension to the biomedical sciences. There are other lacunae: ageing bodies have also been largely absent from the sociology of the body, and where they have appeared it is generally not with a view to altering the social and cultural position of ageing and old age but to explain it. This chapter will seek to embody the study of ageing by reviewing how ageing bodies have been brought to our consciousness both in culture and also in the ageing literature. What will emerge is the centrality of bodies to any understanding of ageing, both as experience and as the generator of theoretical development. The role played by the body is crucial in the management of the later years. Despite the inescapable and prominent presence of the body in ageing experiences, we must agree with Woodward (1999) on her remark that we are culturally (but also theoretically) unimaginative about ageing bodies. Traditionally, ageing bodies have been constructed as posing a challenge to agency and identity (Gilleard and Higgs 2000; Shilling 2003; Turner 1994). The social and cultural context in which ageing and later life are experienced appears to lend support to this. There is a strong literature which examines critically the relationship between ageing, social action and identity. Therefore, in what follows, I will examine the cultural and social structures which have contributed to orthodox knowledge about ageing bodies. I will start with the role played by biomedicine in the emergence and consolidation of the dominant discourse of 1

2

Ageing, the Body and Social Change

ageing and old age and examine critically the development of sociological insights into ageing bodies, before presenting quite different modalities of ageing embodiment.

The discourse of decline The medicalisation of ageing and old age The biological sciences have provided the primary discursive grid within which to understand and know the ageing body (Tulle-Winton 2000; Vincent 2003a; Vincent 2006). Or, to put it another way, biomedicine has codified dominant knowledge about the ageing body. As Katz (1999) demonstrates, this originated in the “pioneering’’ work of Charcot at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which provided the foundation for biomedical knowledge about old age and for scientific methods to develop. This work was carried out exclusively on the bodies of older, albeit healthy, long-stay female hospital residents. Through its medicalisation the ageing body has primarily been seen as a malfunctioning body, a body in decline (Haber 2001/02), as well as a female body. It is a body of loss, caught up in its own gradual obliteration (Gullette 1999; Vincent 2003a). Vincent (2003b) finds evidence in contemporary biological literature of the opposition drawn between “adult’’ (male) and ageing (female) organisms. Ageing bodies are almost always described unfavourably, using a vocabulary of decline with terms such as “defective’’, “deleterious’’, “abnormal’’, “in disequilibrium’’ and “faulty’’. In contrast, adult organisms are described as normal, in a state of homeostasis, able to repair themselves. The association of bodily ageing with inevitable biological decline has given rise to what has been termed “the discourse of decline’’ (Gullette 1997) and “the narrative of decline’’ (Gullette 2003). Decline has been expanded to encompass not only biological but also cultural processes, with decline apprehended as a property of ageing bodies and, by extension, of older people themselves. Messages reinforcing this association are everywhere around us. The attrition in physical and functional capital which characterises ageing bodies is used to legitimate the social and economic marginalisation experienced by older people. It has also shaped the management of ageing and of older people. Very old people, or people who appear very old, are absent from the public sphere: they are excluded from the labour market, removed from public spaces and rarely depicted in the visual media. When they are represented in the visual media, it is in very restricted and stereotypical ways (Johnson

Embodying Ageing

3

and Bytheway 1998; Miller 1999; Westerhof and Tulle 2007), reinforcing and reproducing the decline and dependency metaphors. (Un)Civilised embodiment Conditions were ripe for the social and cultural marginalisation of older people before their medicalisation. Elias (1978 [1939]) shows that by the early modern period a new relationship to the body was emerging, codified in various books of good manners. According to Elias, Western Europe was undergoing a “civilizing’’ process, by which he meant the greater control of bodily states and dispositions, as displayed by court society and disseminated to an increasingly powerful bourgeois class, the attainment of which came to be regarded as civilised normality. This immediately placed older people and their bodies in a vulnerable position. Biological ageing, by compromising the ability to tame the body, deprives the latter of its civilised normality and evokes disgust at, and fear of, this uncontrollable body. Another analysis has shown that the de-civilising of the body as it ages has attained particular significance in late modern Western societies, societies which are characterised by the cult of youth and of the “body beautiful’’. The proliferation of images of bodies which valorise youth, beauty, slimness, perfect body shapes and physical competence prevalent in late modern Western societies is problematic for older people, whose bodies are held gradually to lose these attributes (Featherstone et al. 1991; Shilling 2003; Turner 1996). Ageing bodies contravene the cultural obligation and potential to be beautiful. The sexualisation of bodies (Öberg 2003; Öberg and Tornstam 1999) also plays a part in the devaluation of older bodies, as the latter are denied sexual attributes. The opposition young/old, which I highlighted earlier, ensures that any quality associated with youth cannot be attributed to the old. Thus, as Gullette (2003) argues, the pressure as we age to hang on to youthfulness to maintain a sense of social inclusiveness is strong. Regulated embodiment Ageing places people at increased risk of control by welfare and health professionals. Older bodies are subjected to forms of professional control and surveillance, whether at home or in institutions, justified and legitimated by their declining properties (McKie and Watson 2000; Twigg 2003). Older bodies are also regulated by very real age-based norms, enforced not by compulsion but by the expectation of behaving appropriately for one’s age. One area in which this process of regulation takes place is dress and consumption.

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Ageing, the Body and Social Change

Laz (1998) argues that older women are caught up in an ambiguous position with regard to the presentation of self and dress codes. They are expected to “act their age’’ by dressing appropriately for their age. This involves choosing forms of dress which, on the one hand, are not too dowdy and, on the other, do not reveal too much flesh, lest their wearer be accused of being “mutton dressed as lamb’’ (Fairhurst 1998). Twigg (2007) takes the argument further when she proposes that norms of dress are reinforced by consumption. The fashion retail industry is addressed almost exclusively at an audience of young buyers, both in design and in cut (by not designing fashionable clothing which follows the changing body shapes of ageing consumers), and in this way contributes to the reinforcement of the age order via the body. Older bodies are also controlled by their confinement in the private sphere of the home or in institutions. Mowl et al. (2000) argue that perceptions of bodily competence and spatial mobility are closely linked. Public spaces can be perceived as hostile and inaccessible and are increasingly avoided. Those who have to enter a nursing home will find that their experiences become entirely reduced to the functional status of their bodies (Gubrium and Holstein 1999). Any chance to reassert oneself through regaining bodily competence is not entertained nor possible as the routine of the institutions is oriented towards the control of the residents via their further enfeeblement. Even staying at home, once the rallying call for reforms of social services to older people in the United Kingdom (Twigg 2003) and a justification for the increasing privatisation of residential care, is ambiguous. It can be perceived both as oppressive by people who have lost their mobility or by retired men and as a refuge from the ageist gaze of both lay and professional onlookers. These examples illustrate the interplay of forms of domination imposed on ageing bodies by broader structures and discourses, and their impact on opportunities for agency. What is also apparent is the historical contingency of these processes. So far I have shown the pervasiveness of the discourse of decline, its incorporation into Western culture and its impact on the control of older people. I now turn to its impact on the self and on the individual management of old age.

The ageing body and the ontology of ageing Bodily ageing reflects badly on the self. Kontos (1999) argues that the medicalisation of ageing has led to “hierarchical binaries’’ between body and self, with primacy given to biological ageing in the construction of

Embodying Ageing

5

self. Thus older people, she continues, are “prisoners of biology’’ (p. 680) and of the construction of ageing as universal, linear and not amenable to variation or change. In other words, the loss of control which characterises ageing is extended to the self. Indeed, an important theme which has been addressed in the literature is the problematic association between bodily ageing, decline and identity (Gullette 2003). Bodily ageing is constructed as a threat to both social and self-identity (Öberg 2003; Öberg and Tornstam 1999, 2001). Twigg (2003) used Goffman’s (1959) concept of “spoiled identity’’ and Wainwright and Turner (2003) used Bury’s (1982) concept of “biographical disruption’’ to articulate the negative impact of bodily ageing on our sense of self and our ability to locate ourselves in the social sphere. The threat that bodily ageing poses to the self is echoed by an analysis of frailty developed by Turner in a set of reflexions on disability (Turner 2001). He noted that human beings are inherently at risk of frailty, “[. . .] a universal condition of the human species because pain is a fundamental experience of all organic life’’ (Turner 2001: 263). Any manifestation of frailty, from injury, illness or biological ageing, threatens to disrupt our sense of self. He concluded that frailty is a key constituent of our ontology. Later, reporting on a study of ageing ballet dancers, Wainwright and Turner (2003) stated that bodily ageing constituted the “ontology of ageing’’. The ontological insecurity which bodily ageing fosters is catastrophic for individuals and for everyday life. Managing bodily ageing There is no doubt that ageing bodies can pose considerable problems for the conduct of everyday life and for one’s sense of competence (Hepworth 2004; Gilleard and Higgs 1998). The reality of the loss of status is also undeniable. What we might term “cultural and social ageing’’ (Hepworth 2004), that is the cultural and social processes which lead to and reinforce the marginalisation of older people, also plays an important role in the experience of later life. The challenge for older people, and for social gerontology, is to find ways of managing biological and social ageing to recover social and cultural value and, ultimately, to manage the ontological unsettling which is held to arise, as a consequence or concomitant of bodily “betrayal’’. Mask and masquerade Several “strategies’’ of resistance to this ontological vulnerability have been identified. One such strategy is the Mask of Ageing approach, symbolised in the claim “I don’t feel old’’ (Thompson et al. 1990), which

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has been elaborated theoretically by Featherstone and Hepworth (1995). According to this approach, ageing social actors identify their ageing bodies as challenging their social and cultural status and as a threat to their sense of self. Ageing elicits negative attitudes from onlookers and regulates behaviours, as Fairhurst (1998) has already shown in relation to age-appropriate clothing. Ageing social actors do not recognise themselves in the stereotypes which their bodies appear to elicit and therefore experience the body as a mask which conceals and ultimately betrays the real self. One strategy to counter the potential for betrayal is to “conceal[ing] or mask[ing] inner feelings, motives, attitudes or beliefs’’ (Featherstone and Hepworth 1995: 378). Another line of defence is to promote the self as the true site of social value. Here ageing social actors seek social and cultural rehabilitation by distancing the self from its physical shell. The self is presented as ageless, as having stopped ageing at a point much earlier in the lifecourse than suggested by the appearance or functioning of the body. Hepworth (2004) has recently pointed out that this approach risks disembodying the self, an issue to which I will return. Another danger is that it denies older people the opportunity to develop an ageing self. The experiential separation of the mind from the body can be taken one step further. Featherstone (1995) muses on the potential of modern technological developments, such as the Internet and surgery, to override the age-structuring of interpersonal relations. Thus, one could almost get rid of the body altogether or alter its appearance significantly. Electronic communication allows aesthetically deviant and symbolically unacceptable bodies to be removed from interpersonal relations. Surgery can be used to correct or efface the visible signs of ageing – Featherstone (1995) envisages the systematic replacement of faulty body parts and the creation of cyborgs as a potential way out of ageing. The denial of bodily ageing by the disembodiment of experience which the Mask of Ageing approach appears to represent has echoes elsewhere in the literature. Woodward (1991) and Biggs (1997, 2004) have both used the notion of masquerade to articulate the disjunction people experience between their ageless selves, their ageing bodies and the resulting social undesirability. Both emphasise the personal labour on the psyche that is entailed in trying to deal with this tension (a point also made by Featherstone and Hepworth (1995)), and also the cost to “authentic’’ ageing (Biggs 2004) that masquerading represents. Biggs in particular argues that masquerade can be used to protect the ageing self from ageist attitudes and the attendant denial of a viable identity. He is particularly concerned that masquerade should be used to draw attention away

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7

from the ageing body to allow others to see the “real’’ person beneath, someone with accumulated experience and maturity, still developing aspirations for the conduct of what remains of his/her life and embarked on reflections about his/her finitude. This formulation is contrasted with a more inauthentic project which would involve using masquerade to escape from the “real’’ practical and psychological concerns brought on by ageing. To this end, he uses the notion of persona to bring to life the myriad identities which people have developed over the lifecourse and which in the course of a life review can be assessed, kept or discarded in order to forge a suitable, aged, identity, albeit not one necessarily in conflict with the ageing body. However, masking and masquerading both make demands on bodies which warrant further scrutiny.

Being and feeling older The evidence that people experience ageing as disjunction between bodily deterioration and an ageless self is not without equivocation. Kaufman and Elder (2002) in an analysis of age identity claim that being old is not to be confused with feeling old. They go on to confirm, based on a study of the grandparents of young people involved in the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP), that people do indeed feel older as they get older. Their respondents set an entry point into old age, at around 74 or 75, although not all of them identified themselves as old at that age. Thus we find differences in age identity, between actual age, desired age and subjective age. Öberg and Tornstam (2001) and Öberg (2003), in a Swedish study of people aged 20–85 years, also differentiate between feel-age, ideal-age and look-age to show that, generally, beyond their twenties, their respondents had a lower subjective age (feel-age and look-age) than their chronological age and this discrepancy increased with increasing age. However, even subjective age increased with age, albeit more slowly. Typically, people in their eighties reported to be looking seventy, feeling like sixty and wishing they were fifty (Öberg and Tornstam 2001). They also found that people continued to be reasonably satisfied with their bodily appearance, with more older women thinking that they looked feminine than men of corresponding ages thinking that they looked masculine. The authors concluded that in their responses “men and women – of all ages – have internalised [these] images of youthfulness’’ (p. 127), and thus the older men and women in their sample expressed greater anxiety about their bodies betraying the appearance of age. Nevertheless on the whole they were also satisfied with their own bodies.

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Ageing, the Body and Social Change

Postmodern ageing Do the responses of Kaufman and Elder’s (2002) and Öberg and Tornstam’s (1999) research respondents – by suggesting a complex relationship between chronological and subjective ages, a greater awareness of bodily ageing and a greater acceptance of its role in self-making – contradict a Mask of Ageing analysis? Gilleard and Higgs (2000), having stated the intractability of biological ageing, suggest that postmodernity might provide opportunities for less marginalising agency and for protecting identity. They identify consumption and choice, in particular, as opening the door to strategies of social inclusion not predicated on the construction of the ageing body as declining. Here they show how Laslett’s call for a Third Age of activity (1989) and self-fulfilment has borne fruit. Third Agers, they argue, can remain present in the mainstream of society and redefine their identity by choosing from a myriad of lifestyle options. They can choose to join lifestyle communities, through consumption, Third Age education (Laslett 1989; Moody 2004) and the management of appearance. The body itself can be altered by surgical intervention, noting the increase in cosmetic surgery and less invasive procedures in the United States throughout the 1990s, a trend which UK consumers are keen to emulate (refer www.cosmeticplasticsurgerystatistics.com/statistics. html). Elsewhere, the literature is replete with examples of strategies designed to resist ageing, such as active ageing, positive ageing, productive ageing and even successful ageing (Baltes and Carstensen 1996). Katz (2000) argues that these are part of a project of agelessness in which people’s anxieties about ageing are exploited, commodified and even medicalised. Guiding Third Agers towards productive ageing or selling them products to prevent problems and conditions traditionally associated with ageing, such as erectile dysfunction (Katz and Marshall 2003b; Marshall and Katz 2002), is part of a broader agenda promoting the individualised and privatised fight against ageing and obsolescence via an extended middle age.

The fight against ageing Fighting ageing has become a well-established endeavour. This is nowhere more visible than in biology and medicine. Programmes of research designed to test biological theories of ageing in human organisms and to find ways of eradicating ageing processes and disease as well as prolonging life are well under way.

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At least three concerns animate biomedical endeavour in ageing research. First, there is a concern for improving the technical know-how to understand how to combat ageing more effectively (Binstock 2003; Hayflick 2001/02; Vincent 2003a, b). Second, the ethical issues inherent in the search for extended lifespans and tinkering with biological processes are well recognised. Third, these endeavours are associated with the construction of ageing as a normal process of change which is deleterious for the functioning and survival of the organism, which increases the risk of disease. In the United States, this research is conducted under the aegis of various institutions, such as the National Institute of Aging (NIA), the President’s Council on Bioethics and the International Longevity Center. As Vincent (2003b) shows, ageing and mortality are problems of biology, which further advances in technology will be able to address. What form would this take? Here the evidence is patchy. According to Vincent (2006), current advances in understandings of the biological processes associated with ageing, such as the work on free radicals or telomere shortening, have not led to any specific viable “treatments’’. Even caloric restriction, which has been shown to increase longevity in mice, is not easily applicable to humans. Nor is there any evidence that the latter’s application – either through behavioural therapy or in pill form – would result in increased years of life, at both individual and population levels. Quite apart from the ethical questions raised by this type of research, there is also an issue about the availability of applications derived from it (Vincent 2006). Gilleard and Higgs (2000) note that strategies designed to manage ageing, be they biotechnical or lifestyle-based, are limited by one’s socio-economic resources. In addition, postmodern lifestyles are available to those still young or mobile enough, that is with sufficient physical capital. In other words, these lifestyle choices are available only to those whose bodies are still amenable to management and whose deficiencies can still be concealed. They are of limited usefulness to those who are very frail and/or very poor. This forces them to draw a distinction between what has been variously termed “Third Agers’’, “midlifers’’, or “midlifestylers’’, and “Fourth Agers’’ (Laslett 1989). It is not made clear what can be done for Fourth Agers however. Andrews (1999) has termed the tendency to efface the signs of ageing “agelessness’’ and in a strong critique has argued that, rather than rehabilitate ageing, the turn to agelessness devalues it further. She suggests that we should celebrate agefulness and the full lives that living longer enables us to have. Vincent (2003b) argues that the promise of release from ageing offered by biology is predicated on the further medicalisation of the

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later years, with a specific focus on bodies as the source of both the problematisation of ageing and its effacement by a range of medical interventions. Thus there is some uncertainty about the desirability of the fight against ageing, given that it is targeted at the refusal to age via the disembodiment of the self, the transformation of bodily appearance and the fashioning of identities around quasi-production (Katz and LaliberteRudman 2004), activity, positive attitudes and individual responsibility. This fight does not enable the development of accounts of ageing in ways which promote what Biggs (2004) called authentic ageing, that is in ways which either resist or transcend the dominant discourse of old age. Nor does it help those whose bodies have ceased functioning at levels to which they had grown accustomed. Furthermore, one needs to examine the lived experiences of the body. Hepworth (2004), in a response to critics of the Mask of Ageing approach, makes the point that it should be seen as one particular strategy to resist cultural ageing and the reduction of older identity to bodily competence and aesthetics (Hurd 1999) forced upon social actors. He notes that recent work in social gerontology has sought to uncover alternative strategies (see for instance Lawton 1998). In theoretical terms, according to Kontos (1999), this means recovering the interaction between bodily experiences, self and the social, among different groups of older people and perhaps, as Twigg (2003) argues, recovering the intimacy of the ageing body, including the myriad ways in which people manage its failings.

Lived experiences of bodily ageing The literature documenting the lived experience of bodily ageing is slowly burgeoning. The year 2003 saw the publication of the first social gerontological collection entirely dedicated to older bodies (see Faircloth 2003). The book deals with the impact of dominant representations of ageing bodies on individual, everyday experiences, not only as the targets of social care intervention, as the sources of personal meaning and identity, even when they are challenged by illness, as constraints and enablers, as sources of uncertainty, but also as harbouring intentionality. In other words, ageing embodiment creates specific conditions for agency. Hepworth (2004) argues that we should think of embodiment and agency as a fluid relationship dependent on circumstances, both internal and external to the body. Kontos (1999) uses Lock’s (1998) concept of local biology to make sense of the complex relationship between the

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body and the social. Lock questioned the notion of universal biological functioning when she noticed that Japanese women had a social, psychological and also biological experience of the menopause which contrasted with that of North American women. The broader social and cultural context in which the lifecourse was experienced appeared to influence the extent to which the menopause was recognised as a significant threshold. The Japanese women whom Lock interviewed identified other events as significant to their lives as ageing women – the changing relationship with children, the loss of their spouse, house moves and others. Various physical discomforts were noted but not attributed to what is a largely Western medical name. Thus the menopause as a biological process is not an invariant, universal experience. Rather it appears to be subjected to cultural, social and geographical variations. In other words, in certain circumstances biological processes may be accorded less symbolic importance than the management of difficult social obligations for instance. In a discussion of the different circumstances in which the body is brought into play in the experience of everyday life, Gubrium and Holstein (2003: 225) argue that “the visibility of the [aging] body is thus a confluence of personal, physical, situational, and institutional factors that are interpretively sorted in practice’’. What is highlighted in all these claims is the need to explore ageing experiences over time, in changing social situations, and go beyond the interpretive framework or the cultural stories (Silverman 2005) that social actors have at their disposal to make sense of their experiences. Marshall and Katz (2002), in their study of the medicalisation of the sexual problems of ageing men, note that a distinction can be drawn between ageing itself and the functionality of specific body parts.

Challenging bodies? Gubrium and Holstein (2003) use Charmaz’s study of experiences of chronic illness as a model of the variability, from day to day, of personal constructions and experiences of illness. Charmaz’s respondents drew distinctions between “good days’’ and “bad days’’ to make sense of the fluctuations in the pain and discomfort which they experienced. Good days represented the periods when the illness did not intrude on their ability to be “engaged in the normal rhythms of daily living’’ (p. 221) and was less visible and less intrusive than on “bad days’’. These fluidities in the manifestations of the illness impacted on identity cumulatively: “Their fluctuations provide the basis for repeatedly designing the selves

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their sufferers live by’’ (p. 221). Thus what is shown here is that longterm illness operates transformations in the self. Different conditions of embodiment could be said to lead to different modalities of “enselvement’’ (Rose 1990). In fact if we look at claims of ageless selves, such as those reported by Thompson (1992), we find that they come with the caveat of continued physical health. Hepworth (2004) argues that ageing individuals may don different masks depending on circumstances and locale. However, there may be circumstances where the ability to control mask changes is restricted. One such circumstance is the nursing home. He quotes Lawton’s (1998) study of residents of nursing homes who turned negative stereotypes about deep old age to their advantage. Some constantly called on care assistants, others soiled themselves or pretended to be deaf to unsettle the direction of power. In this instance, agency was reclaimed in the performance of stereotypical aged embodiment. Twigg (2003) provided an alternative model of agency in care homes which consisted of some residents distancing themselves from their unbounded body by letting others take care of it and by loosening their own grip on selfcontrol. Hazan (1986, 1994) has vividly reported on his ethnographic study of a Jewish daycare centre in the East End of London and found that the ways in which centre users managed bodily deterioration was by a collective process of suspending time and living in the present. Characteristics which we ordinarily attribute to ageing bodies were literally “toned down’’ or manipulated to distract attention from, and offset, differences in physical and cognitive abilities amongst centre users. Although the centre was housed in a two-storey building without a lift, and thus made access to the upper floor difficult for disabled members, the social relations were organised in such a way that choice rather than mobility dictated members’ use of the two floors. Thus users could choose not to go upstairs because they wanted to involve themselves in the activities held downstairs. Furthermore, contact with other “disabled’’ groups was shunned, to avoid any association of centre members with them. Within the centre, members avoided activities which would render visible the physical and cognitive impairments of others, denied the possibility that illnesses could either deteriorate or improve, and refused entry to potential users who by their mode of dress disrupted the social and cultural order of the centre. On one occasion they enthusiastically allowed themselves to be photographed but only chose photographs which did not render their physical condition visible.

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In these examples the mask metaphor applies unevenly. Unlike Hazan’s informants, Lawson’s and Twigg’s research participants made no attempt to hide or ignore their bodily deterioration. Twigg’s research participants apparently stopped making a claim to agelessness by surrendering to the control and care of others. Lawson’s informants had no control over their lives other than resorting to bodily defiance. In other words, people engage with bodily deterioration, self-making and agency in ways which are apparently consonant with a shared local culture of embodiment. Embodied intentionality Kontos (2003, 2004) approached the potential for agency and selfmaking in the context of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). She is critical of the “prevailing paradigm of AD’’, which “is founded upon an assumption that memory impairment caused by cognitive deficiencies leads to a steady loss of self with the concomitant erosion of individual agency’’ (2003: 151). People whose cognitive skills are affected by dementias, such as AD, are held to be losing or to have lost cognitive intentionality, that is any claim to volition and agency. She places particular emphasis on painters who continued painting with AD, such as Willem de Kooning. When he was not painting he exhibited all the well-documented symptoms of AD, but when he painted he did so purposefully and with confidence. However, the work that he did after his diagnosis was dismissed as having little value, precisely because the artist was held by both the medical and the artistic communities to have lost cognitive intentionality and creativity (Kontos 2004). Kontos counters this by proposing that de Kooning had, over time, acquired bodily intentionality through the repeated practice of painting. In other words, using insights drawn from Merleau-Ponty, Leder and Bourdieu (to whom we will return in the next chapter), she proposed that the painter had acquired “embodied intentionality’’ and that “his artistic style is literally inscribed onto the brain of the artist, allowing him to create art despite [my emphasis] cognitive impairment’’ (p. 165). One might alter this statement to say that de Kooning continued creating and retained his sense of self as a painter with his cognitive impairment. So far I have been looking largely at bodily experiences which fought their oppression through performances which did not actively set out to change functionality or appearance. These strategies will not necessarily force the carers or onlookers to revise their own assumptions about ageing and later life; in fact they may reinforce them. In sociological terms, they did not appear to affect the wider structures around them. What I

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would now like to explore is what we might possibly term “a competing discourse of ageing’’, one which emphasises the “malleability’’ of the ageing body, incarnated in “active’’ bodies.

Towards the trainable ageing body? The social gerontological literature has given scant attention to older active bodies. However, as Chodzko-Zajko (2000), Grant (2002), Grant and O’Brien Cousins (2001), Kluge (2002), McPherson (1994), Poole (2001) and Wearing (1995) note, there is an increasing proportion of Third and, perhaps even, Fourth Agers engaging in physical activity. Among these are people, including a small proportion of women, who have been physically active throughout their lives, as well as people who took up exercise in their later years. In view of the degenerative discourse of ageing and the consequent cultural invisibility of ageing bodies, one might wonder whether exercise and leisure can be used by older people as a way of resisting the narrative of decline, restoring their social position and constructing valuable ageing identities. The malleable body? Goggin and Morrow (2001: 58) note that it is now widely accepted in the sport science literature community that physical activity is beneficial to older adults, regardless of their health status, in “reducing or preventing functional declines linked to secondary aging’’. Thus exercise may help prevent frailty and improve health (Mazzeo et al. 1998). Morley and Flaherty (2002) argue that frailty in later life is caused partly by a decline in physical activity. Singh (2002) notes that among older people there appears to be a tendency towards resting, which exacerbates the ageing process. Singh (2002: 264) differentiates between “usual’’ ageing, on the one hand, and the weakening processes affecting cardiovascular capacity and musculoskeletal vigour exacerbated by disuse, on the other (locating herself firmly within mainstream, orthodox biogerontology). She defines disuse as the attrition in “maximal effort in physical domains’’ to which “most sedentary individuals’’ subject themselves. In other words, as we get older, we are more likely to reach our fitness threshold early. In response, rather than attempting to regain fitness to raise the threshold or, at any rate, minimise its lowering, we stop and rest, thus contributing to the further, rapid lowering of this threshold. This, she argues, is more

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rapid in women not only because women have lower muscle mass than men, but also because of what she terms “lifestyle factors’’. It appears therefore that disuse is not an inevitable consequence of biological changes, but it is learned through a shift towards greater sedentariness, at all ages. Thus a circularity is established, where ageing processes and the consequences of sedentariness are not only confounded but used to explain each other: There is a great similarity between the physiologic changes that are attributable to disuse and those that have been typically observed in aging populations, leading to the speculation that the way in which we age may be modulated with attention to activity levels. (Singh 2002: 263) She concludes by making a number of claims about the benefits of exercise. Indeed, exercise can help reduce the problems of disuse and disability associated with later life and improve well-being, increase longevity by improving systemic function and reducing the risk of onset of chronic diseases, such as CVD, Type 2 diabetes and stroke, or simply by reducing the incidence or recurrence of the symptoms of the disease, serve as treatment for particular problems such as recovery from falls and the reduction in the accumulation of visceral fat, which contributes to the development of Type 2 diabetes, counteract the side effects of medication, for example to rebuild muscle tissue damaged by corticosteroid treatment, and lastly to prevent the onset of, or correct, disability. In the social sciences, a hopeful picture is also emerging. Grant (2002), Grant and O’Brien Cousins (2001), McPherson (1994) and Wearing (1995) see exercise and leisure as a way of improving health and wellbeing. It is also presented as a way of escaping the social isolation that the greater sedentariness associated with increasing age, in interaction with gender, may foster. Thus exercise and leisure are seen as “setting the stage for new possibilities’’ (Grant 2002: 1, citing Carlsen 1996). Exercise can be used to reconstruct ageing as “active living’’, distancing ageing from the mechanical metaphor, and to recover agency, self-determination, autonomy and individuality. In other words, physical activity is touted as a route towards emancipation from social and physical ageing. Enfeeblement Grant (2002) and McPherson (1994) also stress the role of structural constraints which prevent agers from engaging in physical and leisure

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activities as a way of improving the ageing experience. Vertinsky (1998) has conceptualised the exclusion of older people, and most particularly older women, from competent forms of physicality as enfeeblement. She argues that women’s greater physical frailty in later life is attributable to a presumption that physical exertion – already strictly bounded earlier in the lifecourse – should be reduced or even stopped altogether after the menopause to protect the body from rapid deterioration. The encouragement to rest has its roots in the belief propagated in large part by doctors, but reappropriated and internalised by older women themselves, that physical exertion depletes the ageing body of its vital energy and damages the increasingly fragile body. This process of enfeeblement takes place early in the lifecourse (Gilroy 1997; Hall 1996), an issue which I will develop in Chapter 3. McPherson (1994) uses the concept of “learned helplessness’’ to denote not simply the socio-structural barriers to physical exercise that enfeeblement represents, but also the acceptance by older people themselves that they ought not to exercise. He also alludes to the lack of structures in which older people who might want to do so may be encouraged to develop physical activity strategies. Ironically, enfeeblement speeds up attrition in muscle mass and mobility, leading to the decrease in physical competence normally associated with later life (see Singh 2002). Vertinsky (1998) concludes that disability in later life, and particularly among older women, is caused by a set of medical and cultural beliefs about the appropriateness of exercising and engaging in leisure in later life (Wearing 1995), as well as a range of very specific social and structural barriers (McPherson 1994), rather than by biological inevitability. Thus, not exercising is constructed as a health risk, rather than as an optional extra. A lot of claims are currently being made in the literature about the benefits of exercise; there is consequently an interesting reconstruction of exercise as cure for the problems of old age. The point to note at this juncture is that an alternative construction of ageing embodiment is emerging from within science, one which now foregrounds the malleability and ultimately the trainability (Mazzeo et al. 1998) of ageing bodies. Whether this will lead to a reconstruction of identity and will overturn the age habitus remains to be explored. Grant (2002) counsels caution, stressing the need to revisit what he calls the “too frequently prescribed formula that exercise supposedly leads to a good quality of life’’. This is a barely veiled, though underdeveloped, allusion to the postmodern discourse of ageing as active ageing and agelessness.

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Concluding remarks This chapter has sought to “embody’’ ageing by drawing attention to the centrality of the body in understandings and experiences of ageing. Until fairly recently there have been few direct accounts of ageing embodiment in the literature. The medicalisation of ageing, the cultural marginalisation of the old and the ontological instability that bodily ageing is held to herald have been well documented. The examples of embodiment which I have quoted reveal ageing bodies to be caught up in a range of binaries: as medicalised yet social, as the source of ontological vulnerability yet superfluous to identity, as passive yet active, as performing yet performed upon. Embodied agency appears reduced to the management of identity predicated on the denial of the phenomenological dimension of ageing in a bid to retain control and relevance. The relationship between ageing embodiment, the modalities of agency it enables and the structures in which older bodies are caught remains under-theorised. How can we judge whether exercising, for instance, will overturn the marginalisation of ageing social actors? As I argued in the Introduction, we cannot evaluate the potential for resistance of ageing embodiment to the social and cultural marginalisation of the old without an end point, that is the achievement of significant social change. I now turn to the sociology of the body to tease out debates and conceptual frameworks which might help us find a way of bringing to the surface the potential which ageing and older bodies may have for initiating social change.

2 Debates in the Sociology of the Body

We have established that in order to capture ageing experiences, we need to pay heed to their bodily dimension. We have also shown that we need to move beyond descriptions of normative ageing embodiment to tease out the potential for social change. I will draw on the sociology of the body to identify conceptual tools and key debates which could provide a template for the development of a set of questions which would help us interrogate ageing embodiment.

Theorising the body – what bodies? The sociology of the body has spawned a large “body’’ of work which has interrogated the socio-cultural context in which the body has become prominent. Firstly, a debate has emerged about what might be the most appropriate theoretical framework within which to capture the body as a key social process. Secondly, different bodies associated with particular theoretical standpoints have emerged, located in two broad frames: bodies as object and bodies as subject. As sociology has become embodied, it has increasingly endowed the body with agency. The body is now seen as a key agent in the construction of identity and varied forms of sociality. Another significant part of the literature is the one that purports to make sense of where the discipline has got to and what there is still left to do. The production of bodies There appears to be a consensus that “the current popularity of the body is due to changes in the cultural landscape of late modernity’’ (Davis 1997). In fact the “turn to the body’’ appears to have taken place over a longer period of time than this statement would indicate (Turner 1996). 18

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Turner (1994: xiii, citing Morris 1987) attributes the rise in body consciousness and self-reflexivity to “the transformation of confessional practice in the twelfth century’’ and to an epistemological shift in Western thought given shape by Descartes’ exposition of the mind–body dualism. Descartes’ reflexions were carried out against a backdrop which signalled a conflict between different views of human nature and human agency. On the one hand, 17th-century Europe was still in the grips of a powerful theodicy giving primacy to the subordination of human action to God’s will. Against these beliefs, the potential for independent reason and change was reduced. On the other hand, Enlightenment ideas were challenging this view of human nature as powerless and in thrall to an all-powerful God. The Enlightenment symbolised the shift in beliefs in human action as governed by reason. The status of the body and of its relationship to the reasoning capacities of human beings was therefore ambiguous. Descartes addressed this conundrum by positing the duality of human nature and re-attributing this state of affairs to the will of God. Accordingly the body was simply matter and the seat of our animal existence. It was not attributed any sentience or wilfulness, as this was found to reside in the mind, itself located in the brain (Crossley 2001b). Agency, mindful volition, consciousness and the capacity to rationalise and control bodily urges were therefore the realm of the mind or soul. Whilst separating the mind from the body, Descartes also conceptualised the latter as a (very sophisticated) machine. What differentiates human from animal bodies was the ability to think methodically, to doubt, to exercise free will, rather than operate purely within the logic of our mechanical constitution (Descartes 1966). Descartes’ ideas have been the subject of some criticism. Crossley (2001b) and Cottingham (1997) cite Ryle’s (1949) The Concept of Mind as one of the most systematic critiques in English of the mind–body dualism. Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) phenomenology was developed partly as a critique of Descartes. Cottingham (1997), however, shows that Descartes did indeed recognise that there is some interaction between the mind and bodily processes. His attempts to build this insight into his general theory of human agency led him to concede that “the emotions, feelings and passions’’ (p. 48) are part of the mind–body complex because they lead us to feel things, although not necessarily to act on them. The point of this discussion is that, whilst Descartes’ position on the mind–body nexus, or Cartesian dualism, is rightly identified as the

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precursor to modern forms of embodiment, it can also be recast as a “heuristic’’ device. His philosophical work reflected an epistemological shift which made it possible, from the 17th century onwards, to engage in the systematic study of human nature and human volition. This shift also had practical consequences for human agency – it signalled the rise of individualism, the belief in free will arising out of rational thought. The articulation of the mind–body dualism also coincided with the emergence of Modernity in Western Europe and arguably the scene was set for bodies to become the object of greater systematic attention and control (Crossley 2001b; Freund 1988; Shilling 2003; Turner 1996) “[b]y purging the body of spontaneity, wilfulness and occult desires [. . .]’’ (Leder 1984: 29). In sum, the novel conceptualisations of the body which Descartes presaged have facilitated discursive shifts in the way it was apprehended, managed and experienced. One important transformation that this epistemological shift heralded was the emergence of the “somatic society’’ (Turner 1996). Turner (1996: 1) argued that the emergence of the “somatic society’’, “namely a society within which major political and personal problems are both problematized in the body and expressed through it’’ positioned the body as a key tool in the management of populations. The management of populations was made possible by what Foucault (1997a) called “liberal government’’, as the instrument of a new political rationality (Burchell 1996) underpinned by capitalism. This, Freund (1988) shows, quoting Turner (1996) and Foucault (1976), ushered in a concern with the rational and systematic urge to control populations, particularly reproduction, bodies in space and time, the interior of bodies and emotions, and appearances. But it also yielded different kinds of bodies – bodies showed that they could be altered and become the target of cultural manipulation. Correspondingly, in the sociology of the body, the body came to be apprehended as socially constructed and as object. Within this broad framework, several features and moments have been identified as key in the social construction of bodies: social order, biomedicine, consumer culture and the culture of narcissism. These operated in interaction with expert-driven concerns such as population ageing and the health of populations and bodies (Shilling 2003). These processes are key to an understanding of the management of bodily ageing and identity as I showed in Chapter 1, but, as I will show later, they will form part of the conceptual framework which, I believe, can inject new life into the study of ageing.

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The medicalisation of bodies and of society Foucault has had a major influence in the mapping out of the embodiment of society. His work on the emergence of biomedicine as discourse (Foucault 1963, 1972) has been used extensively to support the claim that Cartesian dualism has enabled the body to be subjected to a range of techniques of government regulating its proper conduct at both individual and population levels (Turner 1996). Freed from its intimate relationship with the soul, the body could be acted upon. What has been singularised in Foucault’s work is the subjection of individual bodies to medical attention. Foucault (1963) argued in The Birth of the Clinic that the body could be apprehended as divisible into discrete and observable parts and systems and thus subjected to clinical examination. This enabled the break from the humoural theory of disease which had animated Western medicine until the 19th century, the reorganisation of bodily processes in more mechanical ways, the construction of health as normal functioning and the reconstruction of illness as disease and as deviation from the norm, separated into disease entities, each with its own aetiology. Furthermore, it is argued, biomedicine took on the status of discourse, to be understood as a system of meanings, practices and knowledge within which people act and know things and within which they are also known and constituted as subjects (Smart 1995). This formulation is useful – it allows Foucault, for instance in Madness and Civilisation (1972), to explore the role played by institutional structures and by individuals themselves in the medicalisation of their problems (in this case their madness) and the control of their behaviours, constituting themselves as ill (rather than mad). But it also builds particular bridges between the control of gestures and other bodily habits and the attainment of appropriate subjectivity (Foucault 1997b). This has given rise to analyses of the subjection of bodies to medical power, particularly micro-processes of power in encounters between doctors and patients in the health clinic (Armstrong 1983; Leder 1984; Lupton 2003). Health education and health promotion, as a branch of medical practice, and significantly the shift in responsibility for health onto individuals, has also been identified as a technique of bodily regulation (Bunton et al. 1995). Thus according to these analyses, biomedicine has medicalised bodies, behaviours and everyday life (Zola 1991) but without paying any attention to the lived experience of these processes (and their potential contribution to illness).

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The docile body A third notion in Foucault’s work which has been re-appropriated by sociologists of the body, and particularly feminist sociologists (Hall 1996), is the concept of the docile body. The notion that the body is malleable and prone to compliance and docility was developed in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1975). Here Foucault was concerned with articulating the impact on the bodies of inmates of systems of surveillance, embodied in the panopticon, present in the modern prison. The constant reality, or simply the threat, of being observed makes it easier to instill behaviour changes in those subjected to the “gaze’’ which would both act as evidence that their past behaviour had been deviant and produce rehabilitated subjects. Thus, here again, it is through bodily change that transformations in subjectivity are operated. Davis (1997) has stated that feminist scholarship has played a key role in the development of the sociology of the body and in the identification of the structural and cultural processes which have contributed to the embodiment of society. As the literature almost universally acknowledges, the body in feminism has a political dimension and is therefore a legitimate and essential target of analysis. Patriarchal structures have contributed to the control of women’s lives, the regulation of their bodies and their othering. According to Davis, issues around the control of women’s health and bodily processes were important catalysts for the development of insights which attempted to wrench control of women’s lives away from patriarchal structures and return it to women. An important strand of scholarship is that which is focused on the medicalisation of women’s bodies. Women’s bodies were constructed as inherently problematic and therefore reappropriated by biomedicine. The list of bodily processes which have come under the gaze of the medical profession is long: the menopause (Greer 1991), reproduction (Martin 1992), cervical screening (Howson 1998, 1999), and more recently fertility treatments. Mental health (Ussher 1991) has also been an important site in the construction of women’s bodies as inherently fragile and prone to malfunction. This gives rise to two issues: firstly, women’s problems were naturalised and therefore reconstructed as inevitable. Secondly, women’s bodies were constructed in opposition to men’s bodies. In other words, women’s bodies were deviations from normal, male bodies. Consequently, women’s bodies were apprehended within a female deficit model (Hall 1996) and were inherently risky.

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Furthermore the body, by its appearance, its shape, its location, its health status and its posture is a mirror onto the soul. Shilling (2003) shows that the relationship between body and character was enacted in the 19th century in a series of anxieties about contamination, maiming and, of relevance here, ageing. For instance, a senile body betrayed a correspondingly incontinent and unreliable personality. Senility posed a series of threats to the social body and the onus was therefore on individuals to manage their own ageing, by leading an exemplary life of thrift in lifestyle, aspirations and financial management. The ethical body The control of the body is therefore a moral enterprise in which the attainment of socially appropriate goals (such as the pursuit of health) signifies the mastery of individual moral responsibility. Regulating one’s body enables intervening on the soul, thus producing ethical subjects (Foucault 1997b; Tulle and Mooney 2002). Adhering to health promotion regimes by controlling one’s diet or engaging in a programme of physical activity is similar to the regulation undertaken in the prison – subjects take part in the enfolding (Rose 1990) of their lives, their aspirations, their bodies and their identity with the exercise of authority. Bodies which fail in this endeavour, because they do not conform to norms of appearance and functionality, are transgressive bodies. Thus older bodies, sick bodies, disabled bodies and female bodies are understood within discourses which constitute them as inferior, reducible to their biological characteristics (Katz 1997) and they may set in motion a range of interventions designed to normalise them. This process of normalisation does not necessarily lead to the effacement of their transgressiveness, because the latter is constitutive of their nature, but to the confirmation of their difference. The passive body Feminist accounts of the body have long given primacy to the passivity and othering of the female body (Brook 1999). Women’s bodies have been constructed as weak (Hargreaves 1994; Vertinsky 1998) and incompetent (Young 1982). The passivity of women’s bodies is acted out in medical encounters. Klinge (1997) has examined the treatment of osteoporosis in mainstream medicine and has identified a “debate’’ between two interpretations of this condition: one which defines it primarily as mineral imbalance in the bones and another as hormonal deficiency. These differences

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lead to divergent diagnoses, investigative procedures and treatment programmes and bodies: the mineral versus the hormonal body. Women meanwhile are caught passively between these two approaches. However, these two versions of osteoporosis do have something in common: they both subscribe to the notion of women’s bodies as bodies “at risk’’, bodies characterised by deficiencies and bodies in need of control, through medication or self-regulation. Women diagnosed with osteoporosis have to subject themselves to a life of body management, involving medication, diet and appropriate exercise, to prevent their developing body shapes traditionally associated with ageing ossature. Ironically, it is the embodiment of women as weak, and their consequent “enfeeblement’’, which may increase the risk of developing osteoporosis in later life. Body projects The other process which has provided a space for bodies to be regulated is consumption and narcissism. Featherstone (1982, 1987) has been instrumental in bringing to light the impact of consumption on bodies. From his body of work, notions such as the rationalisation of bodies, the unfinished status of the body and the construction of embodiment as body work in the pursuit of a body project add up to an argument which links the rise of consumption with the achievement of socially and culturally valuable bodies. What is being documented here is a shift in sociality towards a concern with appearance and the achievement of “the look’’. A range of “techniques of the body’’ (Mauss 1973) have emerged which allow individuals to work on their bodies, through an “instrumental rational orientation’’ (Featherstone 1982: 24), towards the achievement of appropriate bodily appearance. Consumer culture transformed forms of bodily control derived from medieval ascetic modes of life into “calculated hedonism’’ (p. 18). The achievement of “the look’’ and of the appropriate body shape can be effected not only through the purchase of goods and the use of cosmetic surgery, but also through the pursuit of physical activity and dietary controls. It is not just the surface appearance of bodies which is altered, but the internal organisation and functioning of bodies. Appropriate nutrition is meant to decrease the risk of certain cancers for instance. But other, more actively invasive procedures are now available for consumption, such as organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery and hormone injections (to postpone ageing). As we can see here, “the technical mastery’’ (p. 27) necessary to achieve the right body not only leads to a better functioning body but also serves the purpose of intervening on the self, with the achievement of self-esteem hailed as the price for body work.

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Furthermore, the extent to which the fashioning of one’s body in conformity with “images’’ of culturally valued, socially appropriate bodies is compulsory or optional is open to scrutiny. According to Foucault (1997a, b), the subjection of one’s body to disciplining through medicine, penal surveillance, consumption and other social processes, and the technical mastery which it generates, is symptomatic of “greater bodily self-consciousness and self-scrutiny in public life’’ (Featherstone 1982: 28). The socially constructed body Therefore according to these analyses, the social transforms bodies into at once physical and “symbolic artifact, as both naturally and culturally produced, and as securely anchored in a particular historical moment’’ (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987, cited in Freund 1988: 842). What is emerging from the analyses of these broad processes is an apprehension of the body as a passive vessel subjected to, and shaped by, a range of techniques of regulation – in other words, a body rendered docile by the social (Davis 1997), a contingent body, that is a body infinitely malleable and the product of its socio-historical context. What is missing from these perspectives is the fleshiness of the body, through an exploration of the relationship between body, mind and society (Freund 1988; Wacquant 1995, 2000) and the agentic potential of embodiment, that is the sense that agents themselves could play an active role in the production of ethical subjectivities or, even, in the transgression of these subjectivities by regaining control of their bodies. Such debates have led to calls for a carnal sociology of the body.

Towards a carnal sociology of the body Freund (1988) has argued that the sociology of the body has relied too much on a conception of the body as passive and he traces the source of this trend to a misinterpretation of Foucault’s own work on the body. He claims that Foucault’s work should be understood to be about bodies and subjectivity. We should recover from his work the close, active and complex relationship between bodily processes and identity. This is well illustrated in Foucault’s analysis, presented in the History of Sexuality Volume III (1984), of the minutiae of bodily and identity transformation evident amongst young gymnasts in ancient Greece. In this instance, body work enables young men to develop highly individuated, though normative, subjectivities. But we could also conceive of situations

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where groups of social actors or subjects would, through particular bodily acts, challenge their subjectification and work towards the fashioning of alternative modes of being, putting pressure on dominant structures. This observation has given rise to a debate about alternative ways in which the body should be apprehended, both theoretically and empirically. In fact it could be argued that debates in the current sociology of the body are about bodies, the role they play in the sociological imagination (Mills 1959), that is how they contribute to shaping the social. Crossley (1996, 2001a) has called for a carnal sociology of the body, that is a perspective in which one can think of bodies both as inscribed by the social and as sentient. By this he means socially situated bodies as generators of individual meaning and of social change. Therefore the focus should be on investigating the ways in which social actors engage in a dialogue and act with their bodies and, in the process, locate themselves in the social world and fashion identity. The work of Durkheim and Simmel has already offered ways of incorporating the body into sociology. Their respective work, Crossley has argued, is apposite for making sense of the interaction between body and what he terms “sociality’’. For Durkheim the body is a generator of social symbolism which transcends individuals and binds them to particular groups. It also shapes individual identities through types of bodily habits acquired during early training. And, through rituals, bodies can foster collective effervescence. Simmel’s take on the body and sociality is through emotions, not simply as raw, unmediated surges, but as mediated by social and cultural norms. For Simmel, emotions are what lead individuals to seek others and bind them together into recognisable groups. But emotions are also made meaningful by the social and cultural context in which they occur (Crossley 2001b). They can be repressed, concealed and institutionalised. Thus they are caught in a tension between their physical manifestations and socially appropriate forms in which they can be manifested and expressed. If the social norms which mediate emotions no longer correspond to people’s emotional needs, this will create pressures for new ones to be created. Thus we can move beyond a conception of the body as a merely docile and passive body, which “merely’’ reflects the social, towards embodiment, that is a more active conception of the body as lived body. We can take into account what has variously been termed the effervescent and emotional body (Williams and Bendelow 1998) and the fleshy or sensate body (Crossley 2001b); in sum, the sensory experience of the material body. What is given greater prominence is a re-appraisal of the

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mind–body relationship, on the one hand, and the agentic capacities of the body, on the other (Crossley 2001b, 2006). This shift owes a debt to the work of Merleau-Ponty (1942, 1945) and Bourdieu (1979, 1980), to both of whom I now turn.

Being-in-the-world Merleau-Ponty (1945) offered an analysis of existence and consciousness in which the body plays a central role: it is the primary generator of self-awareness and self-positioning and it mediates the relation of the self to the world around us. The body is not reducible to the self, nor is the latter conceivable without the former. What is at stake is how our sense of self becomes natural, obvious to us. Merleau-Ponty shows that our sense of being here in the world and the recognition that we are what we are is the result of our constant, embodied engagement with our surroundings. Of relevance here is that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis was a critique of Cartesian dualism, that is of the separation of the body from the mind, with the latter apprehended as the seat of consciousness and selfhood. For Merleau-Ponty, the relationship between the mind and the body is more complex. There is a constant to-ing and fro-ing (va et vient) between the two, striving for unity in the conduct of everyday life. We are, therefore, our bodies although there are instances when this relationship appears to be challenged. This is a crucial point. Our self-consciousness can be challenged by illness or accidents. A relationship which hitherto had been taken for granted is suddenly in some disarray – we are confronted by a hiatus between our self and our bodily state which engenders a re-appraisal and subsequently a reorganisation of the relationship. A missing limb confronts us to a reality we had over time internalised and which is now no longer valid. The relationship needs to be rebuilt and normalised under these new circumstances. What this analysis does is lay the groundwork for a dynamic apprehension of human embodiment, one that is in a process of becoming. It also provides a stepping stone to a more processual, complex and, I would argue, more open-ended conception of embodiment. The question is not whether embodiment is a useful tool to make sense of experience – because this is now established – but what its modalities are and in what context they are shaped. Merleau-Ponty does not really address the sociological dimension of embodiment. Yet, it is quite clear that in his attempts to identify general principles of embodiment, in which the mind–body relationship is constructed, Merleau-Ponty alerts us to the contingency of embodiment.

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Sociologically, this contingency must be captured in relation to social action and variations in the social, cultural and economic context. Arguably, disruptions, their constructions as such, their propensity and also their inscription in body schemas are socially and culturally variable. The body is a subject constantly in touch with its environment. Two further questions can now be asked: firstly, what exactly is the nature of the environment? In other words, how far out of the body can we go to discern structures of influence? Secondly, what is the direction of this relationship? To throw some light on these processes I now turn to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Structure, agency and the body Bourdieu’s work was influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as he readily admits in Meditations pascaliennes (Bourdieu 1997). The attempt to rethink or transcend the mind–body dualism in his treatment of the body, and to render the structure and agency binary meaningful (Shilling 2003), is an example of this influence. However, as a sociologist, Bourdieu’s main objective was to incorporate the conceptual and philosophical frame handed down by phenomenology into a theory of structurally situated social action. Bourdieu’s (1980) objective was to link structure and social action and to situate the body therein. His basic tenet was that action is consonant with power struggles, the search for distinction and the accumulation of capital. Furthermore, one’s social location generates particular modes of actions and of being. His work hinges on three key concepts – habitus, dispositions and capital – which were described and illustrated in two key books: La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Bourdieu 1979) and Le sens pratique (1980), the latter translated into English, tellingly, as The Logic of Practice. Habitus is a space in which certain life choices and practices can be made but in which social actors act out and reproduce their social location. In other words, habitus mediates between the structural profile of society and the individual action. Habitus is dynamic however – it generates social practices and at the same time it acts as a classificatory system of social practices. Habitus denotes one’s social position and one’s capacity for the accumulation of capital. Postone et al. (1993: 4) reinterpret habitus elegantly as the “capacity for structured improvisation’’. This implies that social actors do not have equal access to all social practices and life chances, or what Bourdieu (1979) calls “dispositions’’. Dispositions refer to internalised aspirations, governed by the statistical probability of being prone to particular types of action (or forms of improvisations) and of having particular tastes in accordance with

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one’s class position. In other words, dispositions are not distributed randomly across populations and individuals but according to wider power relations. Social actors are engaged in securing as much capital as their habitus position will allow. Capital, in Bourdieu’s system, refers to “the capacity to exercise control over one’s own future and that of others. As such it is a form of power [. . .], it also serves to reproduce class distinctions’’ (Postone et al. 1993: 4–5). Accordingly, accumulating and consolidating capital can only be done within the confines of one’s class habitus. Bourdieu envisages different forms of capital – social, cultural and economic. One’s class habitus is not reducible to one’s economic capital. Although one can convert cultural capital into economic capital, this is normally achieved within the boundaries of one’s habitus position, not outside of it. The difficulty of converting different forms of capital into an improved class position is attributable to the existence of a distributional grid which is symbolic of the class and status hierarchy prevalent at any particular point in time. This grid serves to mask “the arbitrary character of the distribution of power and wealth’’ and represents the amount of symbolic capital members of a particular social group are able to garner. In other words, one rarely aspires to a different habitus position. Habitus is actualised and expressed across social “fields’’, in which capital may be obtained and on which it may be brought to bear (Bourdieu 1979, 1980, 1984). Fields are semi-autonomous social spaces in which actors, through the deployment of their dispositions, can express their social location. Having access to certain fields already reflects not only one’s habitus but also one’s propensity to acquire capital and bring it to bear, as symbolic capital, in the social structure. Additionally, the modalities in which we engage with any particular field reflect our habitus. Fields are semi-autonomous; each has its own internal system of distinctions and opportunities for the acquisition of capital. Nevertheless their semi-autonomous status does not preclude their relationship to the wider power distribution. Thus fields are homologous, that is they are all subjected to the same dynamic principle of producing and reproducing class relations. The point to highlight is that the body plays a key role in Bourdieu’s system (Crossley 2001b; Shilling 2003). Dispositions are embodied. In other words, the body acts out its own class-based dispositions, its own range of sensations and appearance (Bourdieu 1979). This means three things: first, that different habitus positions produce and require distinctive bodily types, in sum different orientations to the body; second, that

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the body itself can be a site of capital accumulation and conversion and third, that our habitus and attendant dispositions are embodied. For instance, having spare time to do body work is dependent on one’s economic capital and position in the labour market. However, the willingness to do body work and the potential for conversion into other forms of capital is itself a situated disposition. The field of sport is one arena in which the body is brought into play and in which the struggle for domination takes place. In the field of sport it is the legitimate use of the body and the production of the legitimate body (corps légitime) which is at stake (Bourdieu 1984: 181). The literature has been somewhat critical of Bourdieu’s theory of social action, a critique which I would like to address now. What will become clear is that the critique has revealed opaque areas in Bourdieu’s work from which opportunities for useful developments can be built up. A critique of Bourdieu Bourdieu’s work has attracted some criticisms on two fronts. It is seen to be overly deterministic and its conception of the body is devoid of effervescence (Shilling 2005). The first salvo was thrown by Alexander (1995), with subsequent charges initiated by British and French sociologists (see for instance Alexander 1995; Howson and Inglis 2001; Lahire 2001). According to these critiques, Bourdieu fails to allow for social change, derived in part from his lack of a historical dimension, and he fails to accord the body any kind of active and reflexive agency. Indeed, the extent to which fields as sites of class struggle can be the space in which structures of domination are challenged is unclear. Bourdieu (1980) has tended to argue that changes in a field, rather than alter the current structures of domination, merely allowed particular dominant groups to hold on to their symbolic capital. They would be achieved by jettisoning practices which, once constitutive of their habitus position, had been reappropriated by lower-class groups. He also argued that meaningful change could only take place over a long period of time (Calhoun 1993). Calhoun (1993: 70) concludes that Bourdieu’s “sociology does not offer much purchase on the transformation of social systems’’, whilst Lahire (2001) bemoans its lack of a dynamic historical dimension. Alexander (1995) accuses Bourdieu’s theory of failing to transcend the dualisms he claimed would be rendered obsolete by his conceptual apparatus, a criticism echoed by Howson and Inglis (2001). Furthermore, he denounces Bourdieu’s entire system for failing to explain situated social action.

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Habitus is too deterministic and constrained by the accumulation of economic capital. Furthermore, it implies conformity to structures of domination, rather than making resistance and voluntaristic action constitutive of its internal logic. Thus there is little room in habitus for variability and unintended action: every action is constitutive of habitus and reducible to a set of strategies designed to yield some profit. According to Alexander (1995), fields are not given enough autonomy – they are merely microcosms of the capitalist system. This denies the complexity and pluralism of late modern capitalist societies. Alexander proposes that fields should be viewed as both autonomous and interdependent. This, he claims, would allow for contradictions between systems, from which social change might emerge. As far as Bourdieu’s conception of the body is concerned, there are also held to be weaknesses. According to Alexander (1995), Bourdieu’s body is a site of practice, rather than a potential trigger for action or a potential agent of change. In other words, he has failed to solve the body–object and body–subject nexus and has overemphasised the passivity of the body. Shilling (2003: 206) concurs, saying that Bourdieu’s theory, along with other structuration theories, “[condemns] the body to a state of oscillation between the dead weight of structure and the lightness of reflexive choice’’, rather than viewing the body as “a multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society (a source of, a location for, and a means of positioning individuals within society)’’ (p. 208). I would argue that Bourdieu’s further elaboration of “fields’’ and of their relationship to structure envisages a more complex relationship in which not only reproduction but also disjunctions are possible (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Furthermore, we can turn to studies, influenced by Bourdieu’s work, which make visible forms of embodiment that combine the intimate experience of bodily sensations and social location. In any case, Crossley (2001b) and Shilling (2003) propose ways in which the gaps (insofar as they do exist) in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu can be remedied.

The body and the potential for change To begin to restore the potential for change in Bourdieu’s system, Shilling (2003) proposes a return to Elias, and explores how the body is implicated in the drive towards civilisation. Let us briefly return to the work of Elias (1978 [1939]) to tease out his central thesis: that the body is capable of change, not simply at the level of the individual but also at a broader, structural level.

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Elias’ conceptualisation of change as “civilizing’’ and the role played by the body in this process is fertile. Civilisation is “a set of processes which encompass the degree of internal pacification in a society; the refinement of customs; the amount of self-restraint and reflexivity involved in social relations; and the experiences of growing up in a society’’ (Shilling 2003: 132). It is a long-term, evolutionary process, although contingent on local conditions for the particular outcomes it is going to yield. The civilising process is reliant on a view of the body as unfinished and malleable and as both biological and social. Elias identifies three processes which are key to the civilising of bodies: firstly, their socialisation; secondly, their rationalisation; and thirdly, the individualisation of both the body and the self. The latter two are particularly useful here. Processes of rationalisation indicate the detachment of the body from the self, enabling greater control and management of bodily processes. Processes of individualisation point to the presence of barriers between biological bodies and the development of a reflexive awareness of one’s body as a separate entity. The body is therefore constituted by and constitutive of the civilising process. Elias’ work has attracted some criticisms (Shilling 2003). His identification of the civilising process as an engine of change might be confounded with conditions of embodiment in the context of capitalism. Capitalism might itself play a part in the shift towards greater bodily and emotional control. Elias does not consider the difference between the public and the private body and overlooks the gendering of bodily management. Shilling (2003) also identifies a contradiction: the internalised control of bodies is assumed to lead to stable “habitus’’, rather than possessing the potential to change, that is to become more civilised. Lastly, Elias does not give social actors control over the direction of the civilising process. Crossley (2001b, 2006) proposes the notion of “reflexive embodiment’’ as a way out of the impasse.

Reflexive embodiment This represents an attempt on Crossley’s part to synthesise a phenomenological approach to the body and the self with perspectives which give primacy to structural processes, such as the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. On the one hand, he stresses the constant interaction between the body and self in the formation of selfhood. We become ourselves in and through our bodies because we both have and are our bodies. Over time we forge a relationship with our bodies which contributes to the

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development of our self-consciousness and of our ability to be reflexive. Drawing upon the work of George H. Mead, Crossley identifies habituation or repetition as a key process in which self-consciousness and reflexivity develop. The point is that our selfhood is incorporated, that is embedded in our bodily sensations and bodily awareness, such that over time we come to know ourselves as both object and subject. Thus we get a sense of ourselves as both individual and generalised. Furthermore, our reflexivity gives us the opportunity to change ourselves. On the other hand, we are also caught up in a broader structural system, which provides us, among other things, with systems of classification in which to give meaning to “incorporated habitual schemes of perception and discourse’’ (Crossley 2001b: 153). Here, what is foregrounded is the incorporation of the awareness of difference and of the meanings (and expectations of appropriate behaviour) attributed to different types of bodies. Thus through social action we incorporate the value placed on our bodies, our social location, and we embody ourselves accordingly. Class, gender and race are three important structures in which social actors become embodied, that is through which social distinction is realised. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) call this process “hexis’’, that is the embodiment of what he referred to as “political mythology’’, that is our symbolic capital or our position in the social hierarchy which is largely unquestioned. I would argue that age is another important structure through which “reflexive embodiment’’ is accomplished. I have already referred to the critique of Bourdieu’s sociology as lacking the potential for change. Crossley (2001b) concludes his own synthesis by suggesting that Bourdieu’s work could recover the potential for social change by giving greater place to the transgressive capability of social agents. For instance, by opting for more vigorous forms of physicality, women can resist their “enfeeblement’’ and in this way begin to alter their social location. A similar claim might possibly be made in relation to ageing. However, this cannot take place without shifting intractable and pervasive forms of control which disempower women and agers not only physically but also structurally. To recap so far, we can say that recent theoretical developments and re-appraisals of the contributions of theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and Elias have helped give the effervescent and emotional body an important role in making sense of structures and social action. Shilling (2001) claims that the body is indeed “a crucial medium for the constitution of society’’. It is a source of the social, a location for the

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social and a means of attaching individuals to the social. Thus, for Shilling (2005), the body, either as a symbol or as the locus of emotional states, can initiate change in the social. How useful are these developments to make sense of marginalised bodies? Clearly some bodies are problematic. As we saw in Chapter 1, ageing bodies are on the whole experienced as deviant, inimical with social and cultural capital, and ontologically problematic. Theoretical interpretations of the management of old bodies point to the tendency to make them disappear, either by claiming they are secondary in the negotiation of identity (I don’t feel old) or by actively managing away the visible signs of ageing. The problem with this approach is that it leads to the denial of ageing itself. Rather than operating as an effective challenge to the surrounding culture, it in fact reinforces and normalises the rejection of the ageing flesh and, by extension, of older people.

Embodiment and social action The turn to the active body – carnal, situated, intentional and capable or provoking individual and social change – enables us to see how reflexive embodiment works. Aalten (1997), Monaghan (2001) and Wacquant (2000) have given empirical weight to the claim that bodies have a life of their own, that they are important agents in the social positioning of their practitioners and that they may also carry the potential for transgression. The body as capital Fruitful insights into the intimate relationship between embodiment and wider social processes have emerged from studies which deal with sports such as ballet (Aalten 1997), bodybuilding (Monaghan 2001) and boxing (Wacquant 1995, 1998, 2000). Three interconnecting themes are highlighted: body work, the social world in which the activity takes place and the impact on identity. By examining the minutiae of training, Aalten, Monaghan and Wacquant bring to light the commitment of time required to reshape the body and to re-educate bodily gestures and posture to produce a body fit for purpose, one that is recognisable, not simply to lay onlookers but also to those with a professional knowledge of the activity, as that fulfilling all the requirements of the activity. In other words, body work involves learning the correct body moves and achieving the correct level of fitness. All these activities are highly sensate: receiving punches, controlling food and drink intake to maximise muscle definition or doing pointe

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work obviously generates particular sensations, of pain, hunger and dehydration for instance. However, boxers, bodybuilders and ballet dancers have to learn not only to manage the pain, that is to raise the pain threshold, but also the correct techniques to minimise the risk of pain. Thus body work involves training to deal with the pain inherent in the activity itself. In the first theme, athletes embody themselves with musculature and body shapes which have emerged from maximising positive physical characteristics or taming weak points. Aalten (1997) notes that although most bodies can be moulded to the requirements of ballet, not all bodies have acceptable physical and, importantly, aesthetic qualities for inclusion into the elite. Thus through training, the experience of pain, the management of injuries and performance, athletes come to read and sense their bodies’ potential for success. Body work also involves managing what Monaghan (2001) called the “ephemerality of the athletic body’’. Training must be regular and constant. This leads Wacquant (1995) to conceptualise the athletic body as capital, arguing that the body is caught up in an economy designed to transform it from raw, untrained material to one that will yield valuable and valued attributes. The overall competence which is acquired through the intimate relationship, fostered by training, between the athletes and their bodies is termed “mastery’’, a concept he uses to articulate the recursive relationship between body work and bodily capital, that is the symbiotic relationship between training and the acquired need to be a competent practitioner. The urge to train and get better becomes embodied to the extent that athletes may sometimes be reluctant to stop training even after they have lost all hope of matching their peak capital as Wainwright and Turner (2003), noted of some ageing ballet dancers. In the process athletes also develop an instrumental relationship to their bodies, which is precisely what enables them to impose on their bodies the discipline and labour required to acquire and maintain capital. It is important to remember Turner’s (2003) analysis that the inherent ephemerality of bodily resources is lifelong and universal. As sociologists we must explore the structures in which social actors manage their impending “frailty’’. The next theme might be a useful tool with which to understand the situated nature of body management. The second theme is that of the physical activity as social world. Wacquant (1995: 65) talks about examining “ ‘the daily lifeworld’ of pugilists’’. All athletes transform their raw physical capital into competent capital at the track, in the gym or the ballet school. Trainers, coaches,

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managers, teachers all provide a framework in which the rules and the lore of the activity are learnt. Runners, according to Nash (1979), become inducted into the culture of running during races and training sessions. Furthermore, athletes are inducted into the social hierarchy of the sport, their own location within the hierarchy being determined primarily by their bodily competence and the valorisation of bodily attributes functional for the activity. In other words, their physical capital can be used to yield social and, in some cases, economic capital within the social world of the activity. The third theme is that of identity. What boxers, bodybuilders, ballet dancers and runners ultimately construct and achieve through the embodiment of mastery and the acquisition of different forms of capital is their identity as boxer, bodybuilder, ballet dancer and runner. The athletic identity is achieved when the sensations of the body are no longer distinguishable from the dispositions of the athlete. In other words, the athletic body is a sentient body. Identity is also achieved when the changes which have been effected through regular training become visible on the body. Thus with the transformation of the body comes the transformation of the self (Hawee 2001). Transgressive bodies? What emerges from these studies are bodies which are subjected to highly organised forms of control within the broader logic of late modernity. As Wacquant (1998: 346) puts it, “boxers offer us but an exaggerated, idiosyncratic, instantiation of a generic social process’’. Through body work, we come to embody individual distinctions within the confines of a pre-existing structure, as provided by habitus. On the other hand, in their respective ways, these are also marginalised pursuits, as the bodies and values which they produce are ambiguous. Apart from the potential health benefits or injury risks which they all carry, they also require an investment of the bodily capital, time and self outside socially acceptable norms. Wacquant (1995) and Monaghan (2001) allude to the masculinity which is not only constructed but also transgressed or transcended by boxing and bodybuilding. Aalten (1997) explores how dominant constructions of femininity can be reinforced by ballet, or perhaps public representations of ballet. Here she argues that ballet relies on socially and historically contingent ways of representing emotions and actions. Through the body language of ballet, female ballet dancers have to display emotion, grace and fragility, qualities which are associated with the construction of female bodies as weak and passive. However, from close-up, the athleticism, strength and control of bodily

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movement which ballet requires becomes more visible and challenges traditional notions of the feminine body. This “alternative’’ interpretation of balletic bodies offers opportunities for a reconstruction and an expansion of female embodiment. The extent to which this would reach out to other women and allow them to challenge enfeebling modes of embodiment needs to be teased out, an issue to which I now turn. Resisting enfeeblement Hall (1996), writing from a feminist perspective, is searching for ways of liberating female bodies from their construction as docile, passive and naturally weak bodies. She contributes to a re-appraisal of the processes which have enfeebled women’s bodies and to a reinterpretation of women’s strategies to reclaim their physicality. Her work is a critique of approaches to women and sports which seek confirmation that women are physically less adept than men and assume that women’s social status can be restored by emulating male-defined performance criteria. She posits that sports as varied as aerobics and bodybuilding contain within their practice the seeds of resistance to hegemonic constructions of appropriate femininity. In the former, women appear to “perform’’ (Butler 1999 [1990]) dominant femininity, because of the association between aerobics and the achievement of the ideal body type. Yet she also claims that we can think of aerobics as transgression because the women who practice it claim that it makes them feel better in themselves and is a source of enjoyment. Bodybuilding transgresses the dominant feminine body by producing muscle-bound bodies. For its practitioners the achievement of such highly developed musculature is evidence of their self-mastery and of their willingness and ability to dedicate themselves to achieving the required volume and type of bodily capital. Hall (1996) also finds grounds for transgression in basketball. Basketball, a team but also a contact sport, requires displays of aggression not normally expected of sportswomen. However, alongside their physicality, the women also display their emotionality which they use to redefine themselves and their sports. The use of emotionality in this context allows them to reject male definitions of sport, of which the “female deficit model’’ is still an integral part. Thus it is by talking to the women who practice these activities that we can begin to reconstruct women’s participation in certain sports as opening up opportunities for emancipation and the display of agency. On the other hand, boxing, bodybuilding and ballet are presented here largely as reasonably stable social worlds, and the athletes’ agency consists primarily of entering and inhabiting these stable social worlds.

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Furthermore, it could be argued that these activities reinforce existing social hierarchies. Indeed these studies show that Bourdieu’s insights on habitus and the struggle for distinction account quite well for the ambiguity of capital accumulation – becoming a better boxer, bodybuilder or ballet dancer does not mean stepping out of one’s habitus; it might merely consolidate one’s position within it. So we need to find out what might contributes to the emergence of a new habitus, or rather to the destabilising of the social world and its reconfiguration. Running appears to have been subjected to pressures for change emanating beyond the social world of the sport itself. Before exploring whether and how disruptions to social fields might open the door to wider transformations in patterns of social distinction, I want briefly to return to the phenomenological body and its frailty. The disrupted body I have already alluded to Crossley’s (1995, 2001a) call for a carnal sociology of the body. Above I began to outline what opportunities existed to restore agency to the body, through various social practices which variously reflect or unsettle structural relations. By the same token, sensory experience cannot be dismissed as a purely individual experience. A Merleau-Pontian approach, whilst not grounded in a critique of capitalism and structural inequalities (Howson and Inglis 2001), treats the mind–body relationship as experiential and key to sociality. Many of the phenomenological approaches I reviewed in this chapter signal an acceptance of mind–body unity as the key to ontological stability and as the vector through which some form of social stability is achieved. However, the very instability of the relationship, as signalled by Turner (2003), appears to place identity at risk. This is well illustrated by Leder and Bury. According to Leder (1990) and Bury (1982), there are instances when this unity is disrupted, for instance during illness or when the body is injured. On such occasions the body becomes problematic, forcing its presence on the sick or injured person. For Leder (1990), illness or injury causes our bodies to “dys-appear’’, that is these events make us conscious of our bodies in ways that they become external objects. For Bury (1982), the dysappearance of the body has added personal and social significance in that it leads to “biographical disruption’’. Illness represents a threat to an established biographical pathway and thus to identity. Thing (2002) has shown how injury among young athletes leads to interruptions in sporting careers and marginalisation from the sporting lifeworld. It also threatens intimate relationships and identity.

Debates in the Sociology of the Body

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Embodying ageing Arguably ageing may lead to similar processes of “dys-appearance’’ and “biographical disruption’’. It may also signal the incarnation of reduced symbolic capital which has hitherto been addressed by disembodying ageing. This raises two critical issues. The first concerns the very fleshiness of bodily ageing, its very physicality, which calls into question the sustainability of claims to agelessness, especially in the last years of life. There may be a sensate dimension to agelessness which can be incorporated into a more effective strategy of defiance, rescuing it from its current position as, largely, a stopgap to resist the combined forces of culture and biology, or what we might call “cultural biologism’’. Thus, the point is not to deny that ageing may place at risk our bodily capital but to make a leap. Are physical disruptions constitutive of ageing? Perhaps not exclusively, as young athletes are also constantly engaged in the maintenance of their unstable physical competence. The risk of disruption is therefore lifelong. However, to the extent that disruptions do indeed arise, how can these be narrated and managed in ways which protect identity as well as social and cultural capital? Perhaps this imaginative leap can be made by apprehending ageing bodies as capital – physical, aesthetic, social, cultural, economic and symbolic – amenable not only to regulation but also to transformations, with the potential for marginalisation and trangression. This leads me to the second critical issue: how are we to judge that the deployment of capital via certain modalities of embodiment, including reflexive embodiment, reflects oppression or has potential for meaningful defiance or existing structures of domination? The whole point of this book is to craft a theoretical frame which would precisely guide our understanding of resistant embodiment, at the confluence of the intimate experience of the body and social, cultural and discursive structures. This cannot be done out of context however. I will therefore shift my investigation to a specific field – the field of athletics. I agree with Bourdieu that fields are where social action takes place and across which we rehearse and deepen our social or habitus position. Fields may lead us to alter or even transform our habitus because they act as turning points in, rather than homologies of, the wider system of distinctions. The athletic field, particularly long-distance running, may have the potential to disrupt structures of distinction. In the next chapter I examine the shifts which have transformed the athletic field.

3 Social Fields as Spaces of Disruption

In the first two chapters I reviewed the sociologies of ageing and the body in the search for a conceptual framework which would enable me to re-embody ageing. The point of this attempt at a cross-fertilisation is not to search for ways of accounting for ageing experiences which simply reflect the dominant discourse of age but to find more imaginative ways of rescuing ageing from its biological determinism or cultural biologism and in the process alter the social location of older people. This is not to deny the biological dimension of ageing – quite the contrary. We have already established that in the current epistemological climate, old age occupies an ambiguous position – identity is divorced from bodily ageing in response to the devaluation and de-civilising that is held to accompany increasing frailty. Ageing is therefore disembodied and agency in later life is often reduced to avoiding being old. However, disembodying ageing and the pursuit of agelessness are risky endeavours – they do not provide durable solutions to the ontological and cultural instability that bodily ageing might cause. They are viable only when the body works reasonably well. Within a Foucauldian framework, we could understand the turn to agelessness and disembodiment as techniques of the self leading to normative subjectivities which in themselves do not challenge the subordinate position of older people in contemporary culture. Furthermore, they rob the old body of phenomenological depth and flexibility, a victim of its impending frailty. In a carnal sociology of the body, we can begin to rethink the relationship between body and mind in ways which bring to the foreground its complexity, malleability and ultimately its contingency. Thus I am proposing that we may be able to find a way out of the impasse within which bodily ageing has been cast, on the one hand, by exercising the phenomenological imagination – revealing the 40

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minutiae of bodily sensations and practices such as those we witnessed in the work of Loic Wacquant and Lee Monaghan – and, on the other, by paying heed to the wider context in which embodiment is shaped. Faithful to the belief that ageing can be understood only in the specific locales in which it is experienced, and inspired by Bourdieu’s notion of the field, I propose that in order to gain a more fruitful understanding of the potential for resistant agency in later life, we should look for it in the social fields in which it is played out. For this to bear fruit, we need to understand fields as having the potential to disrupt dominant social relations or at the very least to reflect the disruptions of the wider society. The sporting field – in particular the running field – may offer such an opportunity. The case that sport is part of the social no longer needs to be made. Horne et al. (1987) have eloquently established the intimate relationship between sport and the social, paying a debt to Elias and Dunning’s elaboration of the figurational sociology of sport which, according to Horne et al. (1987), “succeeds in providing [. . .] an account of the origins, codification, diffusion and consolidation, and general character of modern sport’’. Bourdieu (1984) recognised the importance of sport in the development and consolidation of modern capitalist societies, and was particularly concerned with sport as a field in which habitus positions were reproduced. Featherstone (1987), Shilling (2003) and Turner (1996) also recognised the growth of sport as a leisure and consumption phenomenon which had the ability to crystallise normative forms of embodiment and body discipline. The place of ageing therein is worth keeping in mind. However, the sociology of sport has tended to focus theorising on the hegemonic dimension of high-profile team and spectator sports, such as football and rugby, studying its class effects and its role in the construction of masculinity, either for participants or for “hooligans’’ (Blake 1996). Since then, there has taken place a re-appropriation of sport by the sociology of the body, with a greater focus on the minutiae of bodily engagement, as was shown in the previous chapter. Furthermore, there has taken place a disaggregation of the broad hegemonic but reified function attributed to sport, towards the identification of more differentiated modalities of sociality, as expressed through sport. Running has not featured heavily in the sociology of sport, with even less emphasis given to the gender or age dimensions of running. However, there are several features which make running amenable to sociological enquiry, not least its class, gender and age underpinnings and its embodied aspect.

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In what follows, I will explore how running, as a field (Bourdieu 1984), has been structured. I will pay particular attention to the structural influences which have allowed running and athletics to be segregated by class and gender and how these barriers came to be challenged by discursive shifts. I will briefly explore the running literature, that is texts which document personal experiences of running, bringing to the surface the ways in which the sensations of running are brought to the reader’s attention. Featherstone (1987: 129) remarked that “participation declines with age’’. This is reflected in the relative absence of sociological analyses of sport participation in later life. Nevertheless the literature on running and ageing is developing and the issues raised may reflect in large part the changing status of ageing and old age in society.

Sports and the struggle for distinction I have already signalled Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of sport as a social field in which struggles for distinction and domination take place. Arguably running is also a site of situated social action and struggles for capital. In its current incarnation as a mass participation sport, long-distance running is the result of significant changes which have taken place in the sporting field since the 1950s. Hargreaves (1987) argued that modern sport, throughout several phases of its development, was tightly linked with the patterning of power relations and the prevalent discursive context. Throughout the 19th century, sport was popularised in various ways to channel the “ludic’’ dispositions of populations. Sport was also disseminated as physical education, which served a number of purposes: to reinforce and give legitimacy to class and gender differences, instil moral fibre and to fulfil a hygienist imperative. Thus, according to Bourdieu (1984) and Hargreaves (1987), physical education was a means of regulating populations, bodies and selves. Other developments such as the creation of organisations regulating entry into different sports, the inclusion of physical education in school curricula and the class-based differentiation between professional and amateur sports created a widening space in which sports could become evermore visible as a cultural form and a legitimate arena for body work (Bourdieu 1984). This is particularly relevant to the status of the body in these processes: Bourdieu (1979, 1984) argued that in professional sports the body became the instrument through which sporting prowess was achieved and economic capital obtained. In this tradition, the transformation of

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the body is of primary importance. Boxers, footballers, rugby players and so on need to alter their body functionality and subject themselves to rigorous forms of training to improve their economic, and therefore their social, capital. In contrast, in an amateur tradition, the body is simply a way of displaying through sports existing levels of capital. The place of running in Bourdieu’s categorisation is interesting: he saw practices such as walking, running and gym work as the preserve of the rising middle classes, whose members wish to achieve delayed improvements in their social capital through bodily improvements. He also highlighted the rigorous training and physical expenditure to which runners and walkers are prepared to subject themselves (Bourdieu 1984). The body is not only a sign for others, the locus of hedonistic tendencies, but also a health project. However, the health benefit may be deferred because exercise may not pay off till the later years. Bourdieu also drew attention to the ascetic orientation to body work, which is a characteristic of middle-class dispositions and is in line with deferred benefits. The usefulness of the concept of field can also be gleaned from Bourdieu’s observation that different bodily orientations are reflected in the practice of different sports, calling for different sets of skills and also yielding different types of physical capital. For working-class (male) actors, sports is linked to the fashioning of a muscled, masculine body that can yield an income as a professional, for instance in football, rugby or boxing. The working-class habitus predisposes social actors towards an instrumental relationship to their bodies in the present, for instance by earning a living from it and thereby improving their economic capital. In other words, the distribution of economic, social and cultural capital has an impact on the modalities and patterns of sport participation. As we move up the social hierarchy we find that the body as the target of transformation for economic gain gets less attention and that sports is used as a form of leisure or as a way of perpetuating one’s social position by nurturing social contacts with others in similar habitus positions. For upper-class groups, the relationship to the body is devoid of instrumentality. However, bodily capital is already present in the form of upright posture, an affinity with particular sports and a sport ethos inculcated through family and school socialisation, yielding symbolic capital during the adult years. Furthermore, there is a tendency to practise sports which allow for the nurturing of social or professional links irrespective of the physical resources which they demand. Sports like tennis, polo or golf act as such a gathering point for people with similar economic and symbolic capital. Golf has the added benefit of enabling social actors to

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continue playing well into the later years. So for upper-class actors the relationship to the body is distinctive, not only literally but also theoretically, and is oriented towards the maintenance of class and status dominance. The practice of certain sports (such as tennis, dance or gymnastics) in the amateur tradition will at the very least also lead to improvements in bodily functioning, whilst others such as golf make minimal demands on these resources. This, Bourdieu (1979, 1984) noted, has implications for the later years: improved muscular functioning and posture derived from tennis or gymnastics will have a beneficial impact on ageing processes. And low-energy sports like golf can ensure longevity in their practice. What is less evident here is the opportunity for social change represented by running. Therefore in what follows I will explore a range of processes which have transformed the distribution of participants in running and the consequent expansion of running. More specifically, in the first instance, I will highlight the changing class and gender profiles of running.

The popularisation, gentrification and feminisation of running The literature points to at least three major sources of transformation in the organisation of running and, by extension, athletics in the second half of the 20th century: the popularisation, gentrification and feminisation of long-distance running. Arguably these have challenged the traditional structure of running (Cooper 1998) as well as the structural position of its participants (Gregson and Huggins 2001). But until these transformations took place, the organisation of athletics reflected the distinctions identified by Bourdieu (1984). Long-distance running became a recognised sport during the 1896 Olympics, held in Athens, when Pheidippides’ run to marathon to bring news of victory over Sparta was re-enacted. The historical accuracy of this first “marathon’’ is open to dispute but its symbolic significance is nonetheless undiminished. With this re-enactment, marathon running was given historical presence and those who ran in such events were endowed with physical and moral qualities celebrating endurance and hard graft. However, as Cooper (1998) notes, marathon runners were recruited mainly from the working classes. Restrictions based on class shaped the development of long-distance running amongst men. Cooper (1998) shows that long-distance running was excluded from track athletics because it clashed with elite

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constructions of athleticism, the athletic spirit, the athletic body and amateurism. Thus the marathon movement encountered hostility from athletics clubs. Athletics clubs promoted track and field disciplines and amateurism (a few long-distance runners were professionals). In contrast, long-distance running was associated with a different bodily aesthetic, borne out of endurance and in many cases shaped by employment in skilled but physically demanding occupations. Cooper (1998) argues that track and field athletes perceived marathon runners as second-class athletes who were therefore shunned. Consequently, long-distance running, though part of the Olympic tradition right from the start of the latter’s revival, was accorded a secondary place in athletic circles and athletic organisations paid their teams little attention. Benyo (1983) showed that the US marathon teams sent to successive Olympic Games until the 1960s did not have a dedicated coach and were therefore at the mercy of poor coaching, designed for shorter distances rather than endurance events. Despite its marginalisation by amateur athletes, long-distance running provided a focus for migrant groups to show off their American credentials as hard working, whilst at the same time holding on to their original ethnic or national identity (Cooper 1998). What is noteworthy about Cooper’s analysis is the role played by long-distance running as a force for social change. She shows that the struggle to establish the discipline as a legitimate athletic pursuit meant challenging the class biases upon which elite athletics were organised, to which, crucially, she adds racism, anti-semitism and gender biases. Thus one could conclude that running grew to provide dominated groups with counter-narratives to fend off oppression. In the 1950s, long-distance running became more visible. Runners like Emil Zatopek, the Czech athlete who was exploding on the international scene with phenomenal training regimes and performances to match, brought running to the attention of the media and spectators, thus helping to popularise the sport. In addition to its reflecting class and ethnic tensions, long-distance running also had an ideological underpinning. Athletes, in their training methods and their success rate, came to embody the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism (Murphy 2000). In the next decade the sport made even deeper inroads into public consciousnesses with the more systematic concern with illness prevention and the advocacy of regular physical exercise, such as running, as a health promotion tool (McPherson 1994) and the concern with aesthetics (Benyo 1983). This opened long-distance running to mass participation,

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particularly among middle-class urbanites and suburbanites (Cooper 1998; Gregson and Huggins 2001). Benyo (1983) identifies Frank Shorter, winner of the marathon gold medal at the Munich Olympics in 1972, as a key agent for change: Shorter was an Ivy League graduate who specialised in long-distance running and thus helped change the reputation of road racing. The popularisation of long-distance running was accompanied by its “gentrification’’ (Cooper 1998) or “embourgeoisement’’ (Benyo 1983) – long-distance running appealed to a wider range of runners, both from middle-class and solid working-class backgrounds and from runners with a wide range of abilities. The running field expanded and led to the proliferation of races open to runners of all levels, ranging from 5 km races to marathons, ultra races and hill races. Thus as we can see, class is a key element in the analysis of sports, although it is becoming evident in a counter-intuitive way. Whilst longdistance running became popularised, its allure partly symbolising the wider ideological battles which raged on the broader political scene, in the West it was re-appropriated, in its mass form, by the middle-classes, from which its participant base grew. As I have already alluded, gender (Hargreaves 1994) has also been identified as a prominent factor patterning the development of sports, and most particularly of running. The modern history of long-distance running by Western women can also be traced back to the 1896 Olympics. A woman known as Melpomene tried to participate in the first modern marathon. She was denied official entry but ran the course nonetheless, completing the distance of 40 km in 4 h 30 min. As Kuscsik (1977) adds, Melpomene’s experience did not immediately lead to the acceptance of women in running disciplines – in fact, quite the contrary. Until the 1970s, female athletes were officially and in practice excluded from taking part in long runs. They were excluded from running distances exceeding 400 metres on tracks or on roads from 1928, despite the fact that in some cultures women had been running long distances both as a ludic pursuit and also as a mode of transportation for centuries (Kuscsik 1977). The barriers to women’s participation in running any distance over 400 metres were erected by official athletic organisations, not only at international but also at national levels. This was spurred on by the public outcry generated by media reporting of women fainting following a closely fought track race (Kuscsik 1977). As both Hargreaves (1994) and Mewett (2002) showed, it was the naturalising of women’s physical weakness and the consequent danger at which running or

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any kind of strenuous activity allegedly placed women which fuelled the tendency to restrict their participation in what were deemed to be “inappropriate’’ pursuits. This was supported by medical opinion which counselled against over-strenuous exertion on the grounds that it may interfere with women’s reproductive capacities. Furthermore, women’s bodies were deemed not to be compatible with the development of visible muscularity. Stories of pioneer women using a variety of subterfuges to be able to compete abound in the literature (see Cooper 1998; Kuscsik 1977; Murphy 2000) and have become part of the folklore of women’s longdistance running. Throughout the 1960s, particularly in the United States, women who wanted to compete in long races had to hide in bushes before the start of a race and jump to the starting line at the last minute. Then they had to run the gauntlet of male competitors or spectators attempting physically to remove them from the race. Kathryn Switzer entered the competition as K. Switzer and was given a number which was collected by her male coach. She waited with a hooded top for the race to start and then joined the rest of the field. Even when these women succeeded in running, their times were not officially recorded. Nevertheless these women, in their actions and also in public statements, showed that they felt physically capable to run and that they derived enjoyment and well-being from it (Kuscsik 1977). However, Jutel (2003) warns that these women gained acceptance in athletics only partly by maintaining what she called the “gender order’’, that is by reconstructing athletic ability around prevalent notions of desirable femininity, for instance by reassuring onlookers that athletic prowess did not interfere with the feminine body or with women’s ability to fulfil their social roles. Limits on the distances women were allowed to run were gradually relaxed by the national organisations, eased in the United States by the passage of Title IX in 1972 (Murphy 2000), the latter encoding women’s equality in any educational pursuit receiving federal funding. At international level the International Olympics Committee (IOC) did not allow the inclusion of a women’s marathon until the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (Cooper 1998). However, as the literature shows, it is the doggedness and stubbornness of women themselves which made these organisational transformations possible. Thus, an important feature of contemporary running is its “feminisation’’, signifying not only that women were allowed to compete in the same disciplines as men but also that more women took up longdistance running. As Slade et al. (2003) record, women accounted for only

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11 per cent of all entries to the 15 km River Run in Florida in 1978, which then increased to 37 per cent in 1997. Similar increases in participation are noted for other races and one can also mention the emergence of women-only races. I have already alluded to the role played by female pioneers, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, to bring the participation of women into focus. But what led women to aspire to a career as long-distance runners, in addition to the daring deeds of the pioneers, and to the health education imperative was the desire to shatter myths that women were physically unsuited to this type of sport and to show that in fact it had beneficial effects on women’s health. However, there continued to be a tension between competing discourses: the healthy lifestyle discourse on the one hand, and the medicalising of women’s physicality on the other. On the one hand, according to Cooper (1998), long-distance running was used to promote healthy lifestyles and wholesomeness. The Avon Corporation was instrumental in disseminating long-distance running globally, by tying up product promotion events to women-only races, in a bid to market their products as the key elements of a healthy lifestyle. Concerns over weight control also helped to popularise running amongst women. On the other hand, the scientific community was debating whether running was contraindicated for women. The physical weakness of the female body was reasserted in warnings that overtraining might lead to amenorrhea. Furthermore, differences in performances between male and female athletes were explained with recourse to women’s biological attributes (Wilmore et al. 1977). Twenty-five years later, Heinrich (2002) used evolutionary biology to explain why women, on average, achieve slower times than men. A key element which transformed long-distance running is its accessibility to runners of all ability (Cooper 1998). Non-elite runners can compete alongside elite runners in the same event. Apart from the competitions organised for elite athletes by regional, national and international athletic bodies, it is the proliferation of races, open to male and female participants, without any (strict) restrictions based on times, and increasingly, age, which is relevant here. Thus not only can long-distance running itself reflect wider social and structural shifts, but it has itself contributed to important transformations. What marks out long-distance running from track and field athletics is its openness to mass participation and its ability to reconstruct performance, beyond championship medals and the breaking of

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world records, towards the accomplishment of personal goals. Cooper (1998: 133) adds that running is a way “to validate personal identity in a mass society’’.

The running body But beyond the concern over changes in the internal structure of sport as a field in a Bourdieusian sense, two additional elements emerge: the bodily experience of running and its impact on identity. Obviously perhaps, the body features very prominently in the running literature. By the latter I mean training manuals, books recording the achievements of famous runners and histories of running. Heinrich’s (2002) book is a case in point. It promises a natural history of human beings’ propensity to run. The narrative is both a very personal account of the author’s running career and a natural history, taking in the evolutionary development of running as well as its physiology. The author’s running and professional lives constantly intersect because he is a natural scientist trying to make sense of the growing popularity of ultra (50+ miles) running and of his performance as a runner. He also grapples with the argument that running has specific physiological characteristics and that the body can be trained to acquire those. He relies on a number of discourses to make sense of the experience of running: evolution, biomedicine, the machine metaphor and the animal metaphor. The reliance on the evolutionary discourse is notable: evolution is used to explain early humans’ development of endurance capacities as well as gender differences in performance. Thus according to Heinrich, we have inherited the propensity to run and we have the biological capacity for it. Women as much as men are endowed with this urge to run but their performance on average lags behind those of men because of early divisions of labour in the search for food and childrearing. The biological discourse is also used to ground running in its physiological processes. Thus the ideal runner’s body has to fulfil a set of characteristics: low body fat, long muscles, an efficient oxygen supply and biomechanical efficiency. Here Heinrich splits the body into its constituent systems, in line with the biomedical discourse. He makes use of the mechanical metaphor, describing himself as a running machine, and constantly makes use of animal imagery. But this discourse is also put in the service of a more lyrical construction of running. He refers to its purity and its primeval lineage. The naturalising of running thus serves to give it status as a legitimate endeavour. Another important theme which he introduces is that the purpose of running is to make the runner’s body

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fitter for purpose – thus the action of running, the training and the object of running are tied in a recursive relationship, each giving the other its justification. These themes are found elsewhere. Benyo (1983: 143) describes Frank Shorter as “the biomechanically perfect textbook runner’’. Abebe Bikila, who represented Ethiopia at the Rome Olympics, is described as “the marathoner incarnate’’, “the running animal anyone who takes a step wishes to be’’ (p. 120), who provides “an image of the perfect runner’s infinite grace’’ (p. 127). The fact that he ran barefoot also reinforced the mystique of the natural runner. Injuries are a constant worry for and threat to runners, and they are ever present in the running literature. For instance, Benyo (1983) not only describes Derek Clayton’s achievements as an American runner who won a marathon in 2 h 08 mins 33 s, but also highlights his experience of injury and his eventual decision to retire because of the heavy physical toll endured by his body. Clayton justified his decision thus: Towards the end I retired from racing, not because I was too old; I just felt I’d had enough. (p. 139) Murphy’s (2000) book, which is a history of women’s long-distance running, focusing particularly on the (largely American) heroines of the sport, also describes injuries and recovery from injury in great detail. Heinrich (2002) refers to the recovery process as healing. The latter is a key point. Runners are engaged in an economy of running, requiring them to harness several systems to perform at the required level (increase capital) and to continue performing (maintain capital). These systems include not only their physiological and their biomechanical resources, but also their psychological resources, because, ultimately, running is more than a physical activity – it encompasses the runner’s physical and internal life. As Benyo (1983) states, long-distance runners embody their sport and derive their identity from this intimate relationship. Their recognition as heroic actors in the field of sport also contributes to their identity. Thus an injury is not simply a physical problem. It poses a threat to psychological resources and, ultimately, to identity (Thing 2002). Training the body According to Nash (1979), non-elite running, and particularly racing, constitutes an “eventful experience’’, fulfilling three conditions. Firstly,

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there is a shared system of cultural knowledge about the race (e.g. who the heroes are, best performances by key runners, etc.). Secondly, the existence of rules and of a code of conduct gives participants a concrete framework within which racing is experienced. Thirdly, there is convergence between the aims of the organisations which regulate the race and those of the participants. Racing is a shared culture which drives participants to train their bodies in systematic, time-consuming ways, periodising their lives around race preparation and training development. It is also a source of identity: performances provide feedback on fitness and ability and can lead to “modifications in self conception’’ (Nash 1979), based not only on their “objective’’ achievements but also on the sensate confirmation of the body’s preparedness and ability. From the combination of objective and subjective experiences of their abilities, runners derive personal meaning (e.g. being a six-minute miler). Lastly, non-elite racing and running can be understood as careers, with the race acting as a “symbolic reinforcement for a career commitment’’ (p. 214). Thus, on the one hand, running is a highly structured activity: national associations, the club, racing and training regimes transform running from a mere physical pursuit to a wholly social activity. On the other, running itself is a sensate experience which impacts on identity: the runner is, looks like and feels like a six-minute miler. Running as a sensate experience Many personal accounts of running emphasise its sensations: On I went, out of the wood, passing the man leading without knowing I was going to do so. Flip-flap, flip-flap, jog-trot, jog-trot, crunchslapcrunchslap, across the middle of a broad field again, rhythmically running in my greyhound effortless fashion, knowing I had won the race though it wasn’t half over, won it if I wanted it, could go on for ten or fifteen or twenty miles if I had to and drop dead at the finish of it, which would be the same, in the end, as living an honest life like the governor wanted me to. (Sillitoe 1994 [1959]: 44) Here the runner, who is a young offender, entrusted to win a race for the personal aggrandisement of the director of the borstal, is describing his surroundings, his own physical sense of running, the sounds of his footsteps and the quality of his stride.

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The following account graphically describes the complexity of the sensations that are experienced: Leaving the meadow, we enter the first of five long switchbacks to the top of the next ridge. I glance at my watch. We’ve been running for an hour and eleven minutes, and we’ve climbed more than a thousand feet. The material world tugs and snaps at us, reminding us that we must return soon. The burn of lactic acid fills my right calf. The cells in my thigh muscles call out for fuel, and a hollowness has formed in my stomach, begging me to eat. A metallic taste on the sides of my tongue reminds me that I’m quite thirsty. But I am peaceful and happy. (Ottati 2002: 122) Just like Sillitoe’s young offender, Ottati has learned to understand the messages his body is sending him, in this case fatigue, hunger and thirst. But he expresses these sensations as welcome intrusions from the physical world which running promises. The runner’s lifeworld Given the emphasis on the harnessing of physical and psychological capital emerging from the running literature, running may be thought of as a sub-field of the athletic field. There is a strong suggestion that physical capital can be transformed into other forms of capital, and the emphasis on identity is so strong in the running literature that it may be one such form of capital. In addition, running is not simply a space in which the legitimate body (Bourdieu 1984) is at stake; it also constitutes the athletes’ lifeworld, in which training and racing occupy a central place. This applies equally to elite and non-elite runners. The place of running in the runner’s lifeworld is well illustrated by Ottati (2002: 264–265): It’s about realizing that running is just one footpath through the wilderness of human experience. Some of the other trails are marriage, career, raising a child, thinking, and feeling. When I write about running, I have to write about marriage, my job, and raising Zach. I have to write about thoughts and feelings. All the trails that make up our lives intertwine and interconnect. For Ottati, running is more than a simple pastime; it is fully embedded into the conduct of his life. However, there is another dimension which he also raises: running as social action.

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Running as agency We have already seen that class, gender and ethnicity were key structures in the development of running. What is also emerging is the potential for running to be used as a way of taking cognisance of wider structures and challenging them. Ottati (2002: 106) says that “the language of the long distance runner is the language of heart and spirit, which isn’t the daily medium of exchange in postmodern society’’. Running is a metaphor for his life trajectory and his potential for agency. Through running he is able to undertake a personal challenge to the demands of corporate business and step out of the pursuit of material gains at the expense of other needs. Sillitoe’s young runner sees running as a way of challenging the establishment and the latter’s efforts to turn him into a respectable citizen. Thus he uses his race and his decision not to win it as a way of resisting the powers-that-be, embodied in the director’s efforts to break him, and of regaining the initiative and sense of control lost in the borstal: For this is war – and ain’t I said so? – and when I hit him in the only place he knows he’ll be sure to get his own back on me for not collaring that cup when his heart’s been set for ages on seeing himself standing up at the end of the afternoon to clap me on the back as I take the cup from Lord Earwig or some such chinless wonder with a name like that. And so I’ll hit him where it hurts a lot, and he’ll do all he can to get his own back, tit for tat, though I’ll enjoy it most because I’m hitting first, and because I planned it longer [my emphasis]. (Sillitoe 1994[1959]: 46) As we can clearly see in the above, the structural position of the social actor gives the race conflicting meanings. The race therefore becomes the site of a power struggle, which in Ottati’s and Sillitoe’s cases they nearly win. So far we have examined the class and gender patterning of the field of long-distance running. We have found that the field has undergone significant transformations which reflect wider transformations in the wider society. The participants themselves have displayed modalities of agency which have challenged wider assumptions about appropriate embodiment amongst working-class and female athletes. In addition, the labour of shaping one’s body to the demands of running is accompanied by a shaping of identity. Therefore what is beginning to emerge is that the potential for social change can reside in unstable fields. What is less clear is how age can also act as a focus for resisting the

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wider age order. Here again, we find that the field of running contains the potential for a challenge to age-appropriate expectations, initiated largely by runners themselves. I would now like to chart the development of Veteran or Master athletics, that is the emergence of a space in which the pursuit of athletic competence into very late age can be carried out.

Age and running Nash mentions age as an important factor in the appraisal of one’s performance, although not in the direction one might anticipate. Runners may be late developers and start performing well past what would be regarded as their prime, that is beyond their mid-thirties. I have already explored the impact of ethnicity, class and gender on the transformation of athletics and the popularisation of long-distance running. Age is also playing a crucial role in these developments. In the 1960s there emerged a new social movement which appears to have altered the internal organisation of the field of running: the Veteran Movement, now renamed the Masters Movement. Athletics and long-distance running have expanded their participant base according to age and there currently exists an organisational framework to support what became know as Veteran sport. According to Carlius (2002), Veteran athletics was kick-started by long-distance runners and quickly grew to encompass track and field athletics. Right from the start, there has been an international dimension. The first organisation – IGAL (Interssen-Gemeinschaft Alterer Langstreckenaufer) – was formed in 1968 by athletes from Germany and Belgium. National organisations quickly followed; Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, UK and the US organisations being among the first formed (Carlius 2002). In Scotland, the Scottish Veteran Harriers Club (SVHC) was formed in 1970 (Parsons 2003). This allowed for the formation of world and European bodies with matching championships. The first World Championships were held in Toronto in 1975, and this prompted the formation of a World Veterans track and field body, which became known as the World Association of Veteran Athletes (WAVA). Each national association became affiliated with WAVA. Participants could compete in championships as individuals, rather than as representatives of their countries. The qualifying entry criterion was age, set at 35 for women and 40 for men.3 The associations, both local and supranational, encompassed long-distance and track

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and field athletes, but championships tended to be geared towards the latter. Road racing events were eventually included into the World Championships in 1989. Veteran athletics very early on showed signs of a very strong participant base: by 1987, World Veteran championships surpassed mainstream championships in participant numbers, facilitated both by the increase in participants and also by the lack of barriers to participation, aside the age entry criterion. What comes across in the history of Veteran athletics is a tension in relation to its status. On the one hand, Veteran athletics had to set up governing bodies which broadly followed the structural features of mainstream athletics, for instance the nesting of local, national and supranational organisations. At policy level, WAVA had to consider issues addressed by mainstream bodies, such as the disaffiliation of the South African Veteran Athletics Association (SAVAA), which they eventually did, or the banning of athletes who used performance-enhancing substances. On the other hand, their remit had a campaigning dimension – to support and disseminate Veteran athletics, especially given its near invisibility among the general public and the exclusion of older athletes from mainstream athletic organisations. Consequently, the relationship with mainstream athletics was ambiguous. In Scotland, the pioneers of the SVHC justified its formation by arguing that its needs were not being met by Scottish athletic governing bodies. And yet, at the same time, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) took steps to forge links with Veteran bodies, notably WAVA, by creating a Veteran wing in 1983. In this respect, Veteran athletics has some of the characteristics of a social movement, welcoming as it does men and women at ages which, elsewhere, would disqualify them (officially or otherwise) from participation. Participation and membership are based on self-selection, rather than on the achievement of benchmark performances. These processes open Veteran athletics to a wide participation base with different levels of performance. Inevitably then, Veteran organisations make great play of supporting and recognising the performances of athletes of any age. In accordance with its individualistic ethos, Veteran athletics celebrates its “heroes’’, including very old runners, some of whom are in their nineties. An additional factor which differentiates mainstream from Veteran athletics is the latter’s claim of enabling athletic careers threatened by age to be restarted, and at the 1989 World Championships, Farquharson (2000: 6)

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noted that “[f]amiliar Olympians of not so long ago were reborn as Veteran athletes’’. Gender is also an important focus of interest: women appear to be well represented in Veteran athletics, both as participants and as members of organising bodies. However, in other ways, Veteran athletics eschews political controversy and social change in some areas. For instance, moves to equalise the entry age for men and women had not yet borne fruit in July 2003 (see Master Athletics, July 2003).4 The IAAF encouraged WAVA to disaffiliate the SAVAA (which it did in 1987), but in 1991, attempts were successfully made to quell displays of political activism in the World Championships held in Turku, Finland. Thus, on one level, Veteran athletics has aligned itself to mainstream athletic organising bodies in their internal workings and by seeking the legitimating affiliation with these bodies. On another level, Veteran athletics, with its avowed aim to promote, give value and make visible the achievements of older athletes, can be viewed as a pioneer movement, seeking to change the social and cultural status of older people (with the caveat that their attitude to gender and ethnic issues may have remained “conservative’’). There may even be suggestions that Veteran athletics could contribute to the reconstruction of the ageing experience (Benyo 1998) centred on the struggle for, and reconstruction of, the legitimate ageing body. Long-distance runners usually expect longevity in the sport and in some cases look forward to the passage of time, as it signifies entry into new age categories and a renewed chance of winning in the new agegroup. However, this is at odds with the dominant discourse of ageing and old age which gives primacy to physical deterioration, erosion of identity and attrition in social status. In the last few years, press reports have featured the achievements of older runners. An article about a 92-year-old man who was training for his fourth London Marathon in April 2003 highlighted his achievements. Although his running is described as a shuffle and he runs his marathons in more than 6.30 hours, he is also described as a world-beater who does not look his age and who never finishes last (in 2002, 407 participants finished behind him) (Askwith 6 April 2003). Thus there is an ambiguity in the ways in which this man is apprehended – his achievements are perceived as heroic but are not used to challenge the generally devalued social position which characterises entry into the later years. Nevertheless this man’s experience points to modalities of embodiment which clash with stereotypical understandings of ageing and late-life experiences.

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Emergent questions The literature reviewed in these first three chapters has highlighted the usefulness of thinking about ageing and the later years from the perspective of embodiment. The body clearly plays a key role in experiences of ageing, influencing as it does the structural position of older people in postmodern society and placing their sense of identity at risk. Nevertheless, until recently it has not been systematically incorporated into theoretical understandings and empirical investigations of the lived experience of ageing and later life. I am proposing that the study of ageing and old age can benefit from insights derived from the sociologies of the body and of sports to account for situated embodiment. Recent empirical evidence is already pointing the way. As Fairhurst (1998), Laz (1998) and others have shown, the body, bodily functioning and bodily appearance are central to the daily experience of ageing and to identity. Furthermore, whilst in some cases ageing may be perceived as a threat to identity, causing a retreat to agelessness and thereby feeding into the broader cultural denial of old age (Andrews 1999), other accounts of ageing also stress the agentic and liberatory potential of ageing. Lastly, as Vertinsky (1998) has shown, ageing bodies, and especially female ageing bodies, are not inherently weak bodies but bodies which have been enfeebled by wider cultural prescriptions of appropriate feminine, largely middle-class (Hargreaves 1987), embodiment. Thus physical disability in later life is only one modality of embodiment. Ageing appears to be a more open process than hitherto imagined, where notions of reflexive embodiment, the malleable body and situated identity can take hold. Seeking inspiration from developments in the sociology of the body, and from a conceptualisation of running as a social field, we can recast the focus in studies of ageing to have been on the body as object, passive, docile and medicalised. Its transgressive properties have only been noted in relation to its declining status, which posed problems for its efficient management at home or in institutions, primarily by health care professionals. In this way non-compliance with bodily maintenance can be reconstructed as passive resistance to institutional regulation. The overriding image of agers presented here is that of victim. In contrast, we can also conceive of the ageing body as body-subject, that is as an active body, performing age or, in some cases, transgression. Notwithstanding the pitfalls inherent in theorising transgression and resistance in later life (see Andrews 1999 for a critique of agelessness as

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an attempt to transgress cultural marginalisation), what is called for here is a re-appraisal of bodily change and of its ontological dimension. But this has to be done in context, that is not as an aggregation of individual strategies but as an opening out of the field of possibilities for agency. What certainly needs to be rethought is the tendency to biologise ontological security by leaving unexamined the changing relationship between bodily capital and self. Bourdieu’s (1980) theory of social action is useful in this respect. The body is conceptualised as an integral part of social structure and contributes to the struggle for social and symbolic capital intrinsic to capitalist societies. The sporting field is a particularly useful relevant space in which to think of the ways in which bodies are engaged in the (re)production of social distinction. At the level of individual agency, socially situated aspirations and dispositions are rehearsed through body work and the accumulation of bodily capital. Thus the sporting field is a site in which social actors themselves come to situate themselves. We have already explored the gaps in Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, namely the insufficient attention given to the fleshy, sensate body, the lack of a time or historical dimension allowing for changes in habitus and the over-deterministic nature of habitus. In response, the work of Aalten (1997), Monaghan (2001) and Wacquant (2000) has been found useful to bring to the fore the recursive role of the body as malleable and open to new dispositions through training, and as reflecting the characteristics, bodily and dispositional, of the lifeworld and ultimately the habitus position of the practitioners of ballet, bodybuilding and boxing. However, these social actors enter an existing lifeworld. It is not made clear how they could, through training and the reorientation of their entire lives, change the structure of the lifeworld itself and become part of a movement striving for social change. They are shown as merely reproducing their habitus position. The running literature begins to allude to the potential for agency as transgression and to the structural transformation which sport participation may entail. The emphasis is on charting the bodily sensations which running generates as competence increases. These act as a metaphor for the escape from constraining or, in some cases, oppressive structures. Here the achievement of the runner’s body symbolises flight, independence and the search for life’s true priorities. What emerges is, firstly, the investment of time required to achieve athletic competence (Monaghan 2001); secondly, the flexibility of running to act as resistance to structures in a range of ostensibly widely

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different social and historical settings; and thirdly, the embodiment of reflexive identity. Thus whilst Ottati (2002) was looking for a way out of the postmodern rat race and Sillitoe’s runner was cocking a snook at the 1950s establishment, broader historical and structural forces were transforming athletics and lifestyles. The relationship of running to class, gender and race changed in the second half of the 20th century, unsettling the very class, gender and race hierarchies which hitherto prevailed. Whether running is itself inherently subversive is difficult to determine, especially as in other ways, for instance in the routinisation of training and body management, it fits well within the broader cultural obligations of late-modern society, and has also in some cases reinforced gender inequalities (see Jutel 2003). But these limitations open up areas of questioning in relation to the potential of sport to redraw existing structural relations. The literature is also beginning to chart the expansion of the sporting field to incorporate age. Whether it is about older women attending aerobics classes or men continuing to run into their later years, there is an overriding concern over constructing sport as a legitimate pursuit for older people, conferring health benefits and influencing the ageing process (Singh 2002), fostering new social networks, providing renewed or continued sense of purpose and affecting identity positively. As far as the latter is concerned there are signs in the literature that the marks of involvement in sports are visible and felt in the appearance and experience of physical fitness, and that these have a positive impact on self-esteem and well-being. Whether sports can transform the structural position, and thereby the dispositional arsenal of athletes as they age, is not well shown and thus requires further elucidation. Furthermore, claims are increasingly being made that identity is socially situated (Hendricks 2003) and storied (Holstein and Gubrium 2000), reflecting a shift of attention from exclusive concerns with the maintenance of an ageless self. Therefore investigations which address the impact of different modalities of embodiment on later life ought to consider the possibility of both continuity and transformation in the fashioning of identity over the lifecourse. Lastly, the everyday management of bodily ageing needs closer scrutiny. The literature shows that there is ambiguity in the ways in which agers experience, make sense of and talk about their own ageing. On the one hand, claims to youthfulness are being made, and on the other, there are reports of widespread acceptance of bodily ageing, regardless of age (see Öberg and Tornstam 1999). But accounts of the intimate sensations of ageing are rare and theoretically they need to be recast within a

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structural context – that is to open up opportunities for changes in the experience and anticipation of early and late ageing. The literature shows that, for both men and women, physical activity in early life is associated with high levels of activity in the later years. Interestingly, very little is known of those who operate shifts in their biographies from sedentariness to athletic competence in their middle or later years. Whether this is a significant element in the management of the later years and in the construction of identity is not clear. Therefore the intention is to contribute to the development of the sociology of older bodies, paying attention to the sensate experience of bodily ageing (engaging in the phenomenological imagination), the wider discursive and structural context in which older bodies are managed and accounted for, the potential for social change and the impact on identity contained in the pursuit of apparently transgressive forms of bodily experience. At the same time it is expected that the insights thus gained will, in turn, inform the sociologies of the body and of sport. The above gives rise to a set of research questions which cannot be fully addressed without empirical investigation. To this end, in the next chapter I want to explore the methodological challenges and opportunities presented by the development of an embodied sociology of ageing and old age which seeks to tease out the potential for resistant agency.

4 Capturing Ageing Embodiment

So far we have established that ageing is an embodied experience and that the ageing body plays a key role in sociality and the socio-cultural positioning of ageing actors. The debate still going on in the sociology of the body regarding the status of the body in social action can now be transcended as the body is both object – socially constructed, the bearer of prevalent forms of subordination, codified in well-worn narratives – and subject – a body that makes things happen, within which experiences are generated, the source and site of oneself, the source of tolerance of or resistance to attempts at control. The next step is to find ways of capturing this complex body, both object and subject, from which we might uncover the potential for social change. How do we get to embodiment in ways which take into account “the grounded, sensual experience of inhabiting a body’’ (Hallam et al. 1999), and at the same time bring to the fore the constant interplay and intersection of sensed, sensual experiences and the prevailing structures, narratives and scripts within which private and public phenomena make their encounter? Here I am alluding to a debate in qualitative research regarding the role played by what Gubrium and Holstein (1999) called “lay theorising’’ on the one hand, and Silverman (2005) called “cultural stories’’ in the interpretation of data on the other. These refer respectively to ordinary people’s own ability to be reflexive about their experiences and make sense of them within recognisable frames of understanding. In ageing the most often reported claim made by ordinary people is that they do not feel old, usually until they hit some sort of healthrelated buffer or when confronted with some form of marginalisation based on their aged appearance. One could leave it at that. However, as sociologists, how do we begin to envisage a challenge to the structural 61

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conditions which encourage people to make claims according to which, taken to their natural conclusion, they seek to deny themselves the fleshiness of their own ageing and to regard the latter as always external to their condition (which is what Leder’s conceptualisation of disease or ageing as causing the body to “dys-appear’’ would imply)? There is another danger – that reinterpreting ageing and bodily deterioration as the ontology of ageing (see Wainwright and Turner 2003) would leave no way out of a challenge to the discourse of decline. Thus whilst we may start from people’s own accounts and interpretations of their ageing experiences, we also need to move beyond, and following Bourdieu, recognise these as manifestations of their discursive location. Thus if, as a middle-aged social actor, I claim not to be old, it is not because I am not old but because it is the only acceptable way for me to maintain my social and cultural capital. I am acting out age expectations in making this assertion. But where does this leave my bodily experiences, for instance when I embark on injury recovery or select a moisturiser at the chemist’s? We must also be prepared for the observation that, phenomenologically, ageing is not sensed, at least not all the time or not in the way we imagine it would be apprehended. Arguably, then, accepting claims to agelessness as the “truth’’ of ageing pays heed to the marginalising of ageing embodiment but it does not offer us any glimpse of a durable challenge to dominant structures of distinction. What is therefore needed is a methodological strategy which enables us to get past cultural stories, not by rejecting them as invalid – they have real effects as they guide people’s actual practices and policy-making – but by looking for the micro-processes, including phenomenological processes, which constitute them. By micro-processes I mean individuals’ own application of wider narratives and discourses to their lives in specific social fields. Thus I may claim not to feel old but engage in a range of practices of bodily management which juggle conflicting forces – the lack of adequate rehabilitation from ill health, the urge to recover acceptable function and a sense that something has changed. A methodological approach which captures the sense and structure of ageing must be inscribed in a qualitative and interpretive tradition, one which elicits narratives of embodiment made explicit in descriptions of actions, practices, sensations, intentions, explication and emotions and is also embedded in specific fields, that is to say the context and structures in which these narratives are generated and take on meaning. But first I want to explore how accounts of embodiment, particularly ageing embodiment, have been captured in the literature to date.

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Capturing the ageing body Capturing intimate bodily processes has only recently become the concern of social gerontology (Öberg 1996). Markula et al. (2001) remind us that research in old age, in this instance in relation to physical activity, has tended to be carried out within a natural scientific or positivist social scientific paradigm, therefore excluding understandings of ageing which were not premised on biological and functional decline or which explored how people themselves made sense of their own experiences or how they felt as they grew older. However, as Cunningham-Burley and Backett-Milburn (1998) have shown, obtaining accounts of bodily processes and sensations can present some difficulties. In their study of middle-aged people, they encountered embarrassment and lack of familiarity with the articulation of intimate processes pertaining to the impact of ageing on the body. They were compelled to reframe their empirical strategy in order to get meaningful accounts and they elicited data within a framework of health and illness. This means, however, that they unwittingly operated within the dominant discourse of old age which is underpinned by a concern for pathology (Tulle-Winton 2000). But these difficulties are not confined to older people. The bodies of men and women, of any age, can also be difficult to access. Nevertheless there are some interesting examples of research successfully eliciting accounts of bodily processes. Gilroy (1997), Poole (2001) and Wright and Dewar (1997) have all elicited such accounts amongst women of different ages by anchoring them within the framework of physical activity. The data were collected in participant observations and in-depth interviews. Monaghan (2001) and Wacquant (2000) accessed the bodies of male bodybuilders and boxers, respectively, through interviews, not only by observing training sessions and competitions, but also by themselves taking part in the sporting activities in which their informants were involved. What all these have in common is that they have gained access to the meanings their informants attributed to their physicality and also to the physicality itself. In interviews with women who took part in aerobics classes, Wright and Dewar (1997) accessed sensations such as the feeling of the body in motion, the spaces in which the body was in motion, feelings of tiredness or energy, feelings of fitness and strength. But there is more to gaining access to, or rediscovering, bodies. Gilroy (1997) explored the role played by physical activity in her informants’

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ability to reclaim agency and power. Hurd (1999) and Poole (2001) were able to explore the role of bodily ageing in the ageing experiences of older women. Wright and Dewar’s (1997: 88) informants used their “changed sense of embodiment’’ as a way of regaining confidence, colonising the outdoors and recovering a relationship between body and self. At the same time they also uncovered a paradox: by recovering their physicality, these women were engaging with prevailing narratives about appropriate body shape. What these examples confirm is that bodily processes are more easily accessed in specific contexts in which the body is liable to be put in motion. However, these processes are only valuable insofar as they “reveal’’ a broader context, the context of the club, the sport itself, and also the cultural and structural context in which these bodies are experienced and given meaning by social actors themselves. I propose that we should build on the strategies described above and continue the methodological experimentation on how to access the processes associated with the experience of growing old amongst both men and women to interweave sensory and social processes and thereby to contribute to sociological theorising.

Comparing the past with the present By definition, ageing is about change. But how do we know we are ageing? Hallam et al. (1999) argue that we cannot know that we are ageing without some points of comparison, some triggers which would make us realise we have indeed aged. To access the realisation of age we need to compare the present with the past for evidence of change. However, we may not perceive the changes until we have reached a threshold which confronts us with the observable manifestations of change. Thus we need to elicit accounts of experiences as they have happened over a period of time to identify meaningful transition or trigger points (Parry et al. 1999) from which change is revealed. There is a caveat however. As I have shown consistently so far, the tendency is to talk about ageing as if it did not happen, denying its embodied dimension, a tendency which makes sense in a dominant discourse of decline. At the same time, we cannot do other than to start from the informants’ own competence in making sense of their own experiences. Let us not forget that what we are seeking to capture is situated embodiment, that is to say modalities of engagement with the world in which

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the body is itself a key agent, where the body is both a trigger for action and a resource and a tool for reflexion. We have already seen that, particularly in later life, talking about the body or asking research participants to put the body centre stage is problematic. Thus the body has to be captured according to a new approach, relying primarily on the identification of fields in which it is centre stage and in which social actors are deemed to have agency. As we saw in the first chapter, both Lawton’s (1998) and Twigg’s (2003) care home residents exercised agency with their bodies, although the analysis resulting from these was not necessarily intuitive. In both research settings, the informants’ bodily states had been fundamentally weakened by ageing processes, but the field – not the body on its own – shaped the potential for agency. Thus an understanding of the field, its culture and the wider context in which it is constituted must be obtained to access embodiment and to interpret it. The approach I recommend is the life history approach, supplemented by observations. Life history interviews will capture change, both as it happens and as it has happened from the perspective of the present, and detailed descriptions of actions and feelings. Observations will give access to the immediacy of experience, that is the practices and uses of the body which people exercise on themselves. A combination of these two techniques is essential not only as a triangulation or quality control process but also to add depth to the data obtained. The life history approach What is it about life histories which might yield the data needed to make sense of ageing embodiment? The life story or life history interview is “essentially, a telling or recounting of a string of events’’ (Hubbard 2000). It is an encounter during which research participants are asked to talk about their lives, or a portion of their lives, as these have progressed over time. Atkinson (1998: 5) goes further and argues that the life history method enables the informant to share with the researcher “how [he or she] views his or her own development over time and across the lifecycle’’. Thus informants are co-opted into the data collection process: they are asked to select details about their lives which they think are relevant to the research theme and also to themselves. The informants have to be reflective and share with the researcher material which they deem relevant to the course of their lives. The story yielded in interview is not the life, but a representation of the life as it has been led and as it has changed.

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Atkinson (1998), Hubbard (2000) and Parry et al. (1999) have highlighted the flexibility of the life history method and its ability to yield data which shows how structural factors are woven into the conduct of individual lives. In other words, the life history method enables us to navigate the relationship between private troubles and public issues (Mills 1959). It enables researchers to elicit detailed information about the routine of daily life and at the same time to identify meaningful events, triggers and transition points which may have forced a reflection on particular life strategies. The focus of the storytelling can vary in breadth. It can range from a retelling of the life from which a more detailed questioning may emerge, to one organised around a predetermined theme or subject. Whilst linearity (Atkinson 1998), or rather a timeline, will eventually emerge from the life history interview, the focus may in fact be more properly directed at developments in the lifecourse which can be identified and interpreted as precursors to events in the present. Both researcher and informant play an active role in creating the data: the researchers have to understand the life stories to which they are made privy and they have to identify the major structural forces which underpin these biographies. But in the sharing of their individual stories, the informants themselves are involved in a reflective and reflexive examination of their own lives (and, in this case, of the meanings attributed to their own modalities of embodiment). Atkinson (1998) argues that, in this way, the research participants engage in the theorisation of their own life stories, and so the life history interview may also help the informants reflect on the future (although that is not its sole purpose as I will argue later). The latter issue is of interest. Life history interviews can yield dynamic accounts; that is, the story is open to change. This is well illustrated by Ray (2001/02), who identifies two types of narratives used by older people when they reminisce: the fixed narrative and the dynamic narrative. The fixed narrative corresponds to the constant, unchanging repetition of a story, a practice which is traditionally associated with older people, and particularly cognitively impaired old people. In contrast, the dynamic narrative is a story in progress, which is liable, when it is shared with others, to being challenged by competing interpretations, prompted by others and also by the storyteller. Two related outcomes may emerge from this: firstly, informants may change the course of their lives as the narrative proceeds; and secondly, they may reach a solution to a longstanding problem. But then again, they may not want to accomplish either of these things.

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The life history is not the definitive biography However, I am not seeking to provide definitive biographies or life stories of my informants. I will deal with the ethical issues of such an endeavour below, but there is one reason which I think precludes us from expecting more than is “necessary’’ about the accounts yielded in life history interviews. Julian Barnes (2003) used an essay he wrote for The Guardian to muse about the differences between journal-keeping and a biography. The journal bears witness to the future as it “unspools into the present’’ (p. 6). Thus the journal or diary is concerned with the life as it is being experienced. In contrast, a biography is based on a retrospective account and reinterpretation of the life led. Unless I go native and shadow my informants in their everyday lives and collected data as it was being observed through experience, I could not possibly hope to provide a complete story, unmediated by recall problems, post hoc (re)interpretations and the concerns of the present. Nor would I want to: in order to access ageing, I want accounts which are framed by the concerns and the discursive practices of the present. Thus it is important not to view the accounts elicited in interviews as the static truth of ageing but as emerging actively (Holstein and Gubrium 1995) from the interview situation itself. Nothing is said randomly – the stories which informants impart will be interesting in their own right, insofar as they will contain iterations, or anecdotes, of what happened to them. But they are also interpretations of what happened to them. The selections and interpretations and the depth of personal reflection that the research informant will let the interviewer into will depend on his or her apprehension of the researcher’s standpoint and empathy. As Smith (1994) argues, life stories or biographies are mediated by the biographer/researcher himself or herself. The biography of the researcher influences the material that is selected, the process of putting the story together and the interpretation. Furthermore, these personal reflections are vocal rehearsals of wider cultural scripts. It is important to bear this in mind when doing research on ageing with people of advanced age.

Life history and later life The advantages of doing in-depth interviews with older women have already been illustrated by Hurd (1999), Poole (2001) and others. However, the later years are also constructed as a time of attrition in memory, which may prejudice the reliability and validity of the data obtained in

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life history interviews with older people. In response, Parry et al. (1999) argue that recall problems would be minimised because the life history approach relies on the identification of triggers for change which will aid recall. They add that older people often have good recall of public events. Elsewhere, the life history approach is held to be ideally suited to the collection of data amongst older people, particularly in a framework in which later life itself is constructed as a time of life review (Atkinson 1998), reminiscence (Bornat 1994) and tendency towards introspection. However, this close matching often relies on the functionality of the life review as a way of coming to terms with ageing as a process of loss (Coleman 1994). I would advise caution here as, whilst processes of loss and deterioration may indeed be uncovered in life history work, nevertheless I would argue that we cannot know in advance that, firstly, change will be experienced as loss and therefore be interpreted by the informants as such and, secondly, that the informants will be ready or willing to approach the interviews as life review, with a quasi-therapeutic intent. This is especially pertinent if we want to obtain accounts of ageing which challenge dominant narratives, much as Hall (1996) is arguing should be done in relation to women’s sporting bodies. The point is not to save people from old age, but to explore the extent to which people take part in their construction as victims of old age, and if not, what alternative constructions may be discerned from the research relationship. These insights were sharpened during another study carried out with a colleague a few years before the study that I will describe in subsequent chapters (see Tulle and Mooney 2002; Tulle-Winton 1999). We set out to examine the lifelong experience of housing among retired people who had recently moved to smaller accommodation as owner occupiers. Our concern was to obtain accounts which would bring out the opportunities for agency in a very specific structural context: transformations in the production of housing in Britain in the post-Second World War period. The life history approach allowed us to help informants reconstruct their lives reflexively, from the perspective of the present. Thus a personal story, or biography, emerged (Strauss and Corbin 1990) alongside a set of reflections about ageing and the body, triggered by the research encounter itself. Another advantage of this approach was that it helped us locate the informants in a wider discursive framework around which they made sense of their decisions. Thus we could only understand the development of their aspirations towards private property and independence

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in later life by returning to the shifts in the housing market, against the backdrop of rapid social and cultural change which accompanied them and made it possible for a greater number of people to aspire to improvements in their social status. Bodily ageing was mentioned a few times, not because it was necessarily a problem at the time of the interview for the informant but simply because it was a possibility which had to be factored in. Whilst it was anticipated with trepidation from an individual perspective, this was compounded by the disappearance of collective forms of support for the very old which was regretted by all the participants. Thus we interpreted the informants’ housing strategies in later life as part of a set of “techniques of the self’’ consonant with ideological shifts in policy-making and the organisation of welfare. By the same token, however, informants claimed loyalty to collective forms of support in very old age, and thus appealed to another narrative to talk about their stories. Here we see the interaction of age-based expectations of bodily competence and the wider policy context yielding recognisable modalities of agency in later life (trading down). The key role played by the body – not only as a trigger for action but also as a thing invested with a set of age-appropriate expectations – can be brought out more strikingly in social fields of which it is a constitutive element, such as athletics. I now turn to a study which places ageing embodiment as its central focus and brings together all the elements thus far described.

The study The study sought to examine ageing and to bring to bear on ageing studies the ways in which bodily ageing structures and is structured by wider social and cultural processes. The study was therefore designed to elicit accounts of ageing experiences in which the body played a major role. Mindful of the situatedness of embodiment, the investigation was located in what might at first be perceived as a counter-intuitive field. People who age into athletics may indeed not be considered typical agers. However, as the sports science literature readily acknowledges, athletes are subjected to attrition in their bodily competence consonant with biological ageing, albeit in manifestations which may vary from ordinary, non-athletic, agers (Mengelkoch et al. 1997). A key advantage of focusing on athletes is that their bodies are incontestably their key resource, without which their activities would have no intrinsic meaning. As we have already seen, being an athlete requires

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a substantial investment of time and effort in the development and maintenance of bodily capital, irrespective of age. How do these athletes deal with ageing and what might be perceived as the inevitable erosion in their bodily capital? Are they aware of it on a day-to-day basis? If not, what are the triggers to the realisation that they have aged? Do they take steps to slow down or recover from the erosion of their bodily capital? How do they negotiate identity? Furthermore, how does the surrounding environment – specific institutions (such as access to health resources), social and family networks, athletic structures and also the dominant narratives of ageing – intrude on the individual management of ageing?

Research participants In order to address all these questions, I recruited Veteran male and female runners (track, road or hill runners) who had been involved in running (or any other sport prior to running) since their junior years and had trained for competition throughout. A period of piloting had shown that whilst inclusion in the national team was not necessary, regular participation in races was essential at high levels of performance to obtain meaningful stories about development and change in athletic performance. As a guide, and depending on the discipline, high performance was defined as, for both men and women at their peak, a marathon won or completed in less than 3 hours, a 10 km race in less than 40 minutes, being placed in a race and rewarded with a medal, trophy or prize, inclusion in the club team and of course inclusion in the national team at junior, senior or Veteran level. Participation in these events was enough to warrant inclusion in the sample, even if involvement in the sport had decreased or stopped in the recent past (the reasons for this would be explored in interview). The lower age limit was set at 50 for both men and women. However, as we will see below, some of these characteristics had to be relaxed for women. There was no upper age limit – I was curious to see what age the oldest recruit would be. As we saw in the previous chapter, participation in running is gendered and this tends to be to the detriment of women who were excluded from both elite competition by sporting authorities (Hargreaves 1994) and recreational running. There are therefore fewer elite women and they have tended to retire from the sport at the end of their career as seniors. On the other hand, as was revealed subsequently in conversations with Veteran female athletes, many women currently active in the sport are late starters. Usually they tend to take up the sport after they have

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had their children. Many are involved in physically demanding disciplines like ultra distance or hill running, which require intensive levels of training and injury management and are demanding of time. Therefore my research has focused on such women. However, in order to maximise the chances of obtaining a reasonable representation of female informants with the required profile I found that I had to lower the age limit for their inclusion into the sample from 50 to 48. Sample recruitment I found my research participants in several ways. I wrote to the secretaries of 100 running and athletic clubs in the central belt of Scotland, a letter I also posted on the electronic notice boards of the Scottish Athletics Federation (SAF, as it was called in 2000), the UK Road Runners Club and an Edinburgh-based Hill Running Club. I received responses from 17 clubs, 14 of whom sent positive responses, giving details of training sessions. Responses from potential participants were enthusiastic: in most cases the club secretary obtained consent from athletes whose details he/she supplied. One club secretary also sent a newsletter and a membership list. The runners whose names were given to me were sometimes younger than 50 and it is in two such instances that, given the difficulties I was encountering recruiting women in sufficient number, I elected to lower the age limit for women. I had no response from the UK Road Runners Club, but the message on the noticeboard of what was then called the SAF yielded one very useful response from a member of staff of the University who runs for a well-known local club. He suggested a list of names of elite male runners whose ages ranged from 49 to 91. He supplied me with the phone numbers of some of the runners on his list. The message on the noticeboard of the Edinburgh-based Hill Running Club also yielded two responses, one of which led to an interview. I also contacted the SVHC and obtained from the club secretary a list of names and addresses of members. From this list, with the help of the club secretary, I was able to identify women runners and contact them by letter. By all accounts the SVHC has been instrumental in encouraging athletes to continue, resume or take up running and competing beyond the ages of 35 and 40 for women and men respectively. This is especially important when age no longer allows these athletes to compete on a par with younger athletes in senior races, that is races open to all age-groups. This applies most particularly to track and field athletes, rather than

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medium- or long-distance runners, who can continue entering “open’’ races for as long as they want. Another method of recruiting new participants was through snowballing, with informants suggesting the names of athletes known to them or athletes getting in touch with me on their own initiative. This has proved particularly useful to recruit Veteran women who are less numerous and who tend to be concentrated in a handful of clubs. Several clubs had segregated male and female sections, and none of the ladies’ clubs made contact with me. The resulting sample totalled 21 informants, of whom 7 were women and 14 men. Their ages ranged from 48 (female) to 86 (male). The mean for men was 61 and 54 for women. Two women were below the age of 50.

Participant observation It is now time to bring up the other technique – participant observation. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, periods of observation are not necessarily a separate part of the data collection process, during which one would collect “observational’’ data, distinctive from interview data. Secondly, observations fulfil a range of purposes, for instance to aid with the recruitment of participants, to get acquainted with the field and others which might serendipitously emerge. Observing training sessions can yield essential information about the structures of athletic clubs (who goes out training with whom and at what speed) and give access to the immediacy of experience. There is the tricky question of participation in observation (I will not deal here with the pros and cons of overt vs. covert observations or with the ethical dilemmas the latter raise, as this is dealt with more formally and systematically elsewhere). What I am alluding to here is whether the research is better served by the investigator being able to train with potential informants. I was “fortunate’’ to be entering a protracted period of injury when I started my fieldwork. On the invitation of the secretaries of seven clubs, I attended training sessions. I always turned up at training sessions with my running gear and trained at most of the sessions I observed. In the first week of data collection I joined slower groups (faster runners were unwilling to alter their pace to accommodate me) for a long run and totalled 24 miles. This was nearly twice the weekly distance I usually ran as an unaffiliated runner and led to the aggravation of an injury in my left knee from which I had been attempting to recover for several months. As a result I was no longer able to train and could not take up

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other clubs’ offer to train with them. Thus I was forced to confine these visits to periods of observation. Although personally constraining and disappointing, this injury proved to be a useful asset for recruiting informants, for engaging the various people I met in conversation, and it allowed me to watch training in action from the sidelines. One particularly memorable session involved one Veteran runner (whom I subsequently interviewed) undertaking interval sessions with three senior runners, roughly 30 years his junior. I witnessed first hand the effort and pain involved in managing athletic competence. I also witnessed the differential impact of age and experience on performance – the older runner coped better with the hard pace set by the coach than his training partners – and the interaction patterns between the Veteran and the senior runners, between the athletes and their coach and between the athletes and their own personal motivation to subject themselves to sustained levels of physical discomfort. Thus whilst being able to participate had some advantages, in exposing the hierarchy of values prevalent in any given club for instance, the decision whether or not to participate should not obscure the essential message that embodiment is best captured in a multiplicity of ways, participation being only one tool in qualitative methods. My informants proved to be exceptionally enthusiastic to take part in the research. There were no cancellations and each informant made me feel very welcome. There was a palpable willingness to help me with my investigation. I also gained the impression, in successive encounters, that there was a need on my informants’ part to talk about their running, especially to someone who, they assumed, would be familiar with the work, discipline and sacrifices made by runners. This suggests that, outside running circles, they rarely encountered this deep understanding with which they had endowed me. In other words, I sensed that the interview was a trade between informants and me, where the data was given in exchange for the chance to talk about one’s achievements. The evidence for this was in the preparation and swotting some informants had done in anticipation of our encounter. Diaries were produced and consulted not only to demonstrate the extent of the work done over time but also to answer factual questions about personal bests, annual mileage and training schedules. Another way in which this was made manifest was in the tour of displays of medals and photographs on which I was taken on three occasions. One informant sent me what he called a “thumbnail sketch’’ of his life, which was not restricted to running and was designed to embed accounts of his running in the broad framework of his life.

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Doing research with tight-knit groups Qualitative research calls for a pragmatic approach to ethics which emphasises the humanistic concern for research participants (Plummer 2001), especially in a research project which purports to investigate the potential for social change contained in embodied agency. Doing research with tight-knit groups such as Veteran athletes raises ethical issues which ethical guidelines (see for instance the BSA 2002), though providing some guidance, cannot entirely address. Consent was easily obtained from informants who volunteered to be interviewed. All the participants were given a detailed justification of the research and were informed that the research would yield a range of academic outputs. They were given assurances that the information provided would remain confidential and that their identity would be protected by the use of their initials. It became apparent very early in the data collection phase that many informants knew each other, especially those who competed actively in events organised by the SVHC. Informants volunteered the names of potential participants who in fact had already been recruited into the sample. Adopting a snowball sampling strategy made it difficult to protect the anonymity of participants within the sample or from the club secretaries, and participants were informed of this at the start of the interviews. Whilst they were aware that fellow runners were taking part in the research, the information participants shared with me was not communicated to others, except in a few instances in the form of unattributed generalised statements to elicit a fuller response to a particular question and to explore commonality in a range of attitudes. On several occasions I was presented with a dilemma. Several informants mentioned a well-known runner – he was a mentor to one informant, a friend to another and generally a role model to many of the older runners in the sample. They all expected me to interview him, which I considered doing because he fulfilled my selection criteria. However, after some soul searching I decided not to contact him. Although he was well known and may not have minded being recognised, I chose this course of action for a variety of reasons: his reputation was well deserved but I did not want the research to fall into the trap of focusing on “heroes’’. In other words, the relevance of his accounts may have been lost in his near-mythical status and his elevation to fame primarily because of his longevity. These reflections were partly prompted by my interview with DM (M, 86, LD), who commented that the lives of older people tended to attract interest only if they were presented as heroes,

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rather than as ordinary people leading ordinary, although interesting lives. In other words, their achievements were valuable only if these were exceptional and these achievements were evaluated primarily in relation to age. And although I was researching elite runners, I was not necessarily targeting “stars’’ because I wanted to access the experiences of ordinary runners, rather than those of people constructed as “exceptional’’. DM (M, 86, LD) himself also turned out to be quite famous but by the time I became aware of his reputation I had already interviewed him, and therefore I did not feel that I needed another like him in the sample. Another dilemma was how to respond when informants asked me if I had heard of a specific runner who was already in the sample. I acknowledged that I had heard of him/her but without divulging I had interviewed that person. I once admitted that I had interviewed a named person but I did not discuss the content of the conversation I had had with this informant. These issues are a function of targeting a fairly tight knit group for which firm ethical guidelines do not always work neatly. As the above shows, I dealt with ethical issues not as an “ethical absolutist’’ but in very pragmatic ways. Thus I let the situation itself dictate a course of action as the dilemmas presented themselves but I was guided by an approach to ethics as a process, that is, according to Plummer (2001), as a way of thinking, not simply at the start of the research but throughout its duration – well into the analysis and its reporting, as grounded in situations and in a dialogue with the self. Lastly, I want to raise the issue of exploitation. It could be argued that I am using the informants’ stories for my own purpose, without enough anticipation of the aftermath of the research on their lives. However, without exception, all the informants volunteered to take part, and in some cases contacted me to be interviewed. Furthermore, they used me as a way to “show off’’ their achievements. I subsequently wrote to them twice to keep them updated on the progress of the project and on my publication and conference attendance strategy, inviting them to get in touch if they had any difficulties. Eight informants returned a letter to give me an update, not just on their athletic performances but also, and perhaps more importantly, on significant life events, health problems and injuries. A ninth one mentioned the second letter in his regular column in a recent issue of the SVHC newsletter, in which he mentioned his own health problems. He appeared to have little concern for protecting his anonymity! One female informant was invited to speak at a conference on ageing targeted at social and health care professionals.

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Structure of findings What follows in the next three chapters is the presentation of the data derived from the fieldwork. The data obtained will be presented under three themes, or at three levels. The first theme focuses on the pathways to running which were carved as individual biographies intersected with athletic structures. In this chapter what will be made apparent is the close interplay of biography and structures, including gender, class and the culture of athletics. This chapter is, in effect, an analysis of athletics as a social field subjected to social change as manifested in the runners’ biographical trajectories. The second theme relates to the embodiment of the range of dispositions necessary for the fashioning of an athletic identity and to yield the necessary physical capital. The third theme relates to ageing embodiment as a generator of habitus and as the source of alternative constructions of the relationship to bodily ageing.

5 Disrupted Biographies

Introduction This chapter is about two things: how research participants got to be where they are now (Veteran athletes) as individuals and what the shared features of their biographies as athletes are. What made it possible, in the last 30 years, for a group of people of widely differing ages (48–86 years), that is from different birth cohorts and generations in all other respects, to fall into similar pathways leading to a present with significant overlaps? In other words, what I want to bring to life is the dynamic and flexible nature of life trajectories as well as the structural factors which have cut across these lives and made them recognisable cultural forms (female athletes, marathon runners, Veteran runners, etc.). An athlete is not a pre-existing, pre-constituted social actor; an athlete is in a process of becoming, phenomenologically, via the development of appropriate forms of capital, physical and social. This chapter will deal with the ways people’s lives have intersected with a field in transformation, making it variably possible to envisage the development of an athletic career.

Becoming an athlete The women were on average younger than the men – a pattern also visible in the SVHC. The youngest informant was a woman and the oldest a man. The oldest female informant was also the oldest SVHC female member. Ten of the fourteen men in the sample were currently married. Of the rest, two had never married, one was divorced and the oldest was widowed. All seven women were married at the time of the fieldwork. The informants had 53 children between them. 77

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Let us now examine the start and end points of the informants’ sporting careers. Twelve informants started their athletic careers as juniors and eleven did so as track and field athletes. This reflects the dominance of track and field disciplines until the 1960s. Of note is a wide gender disparity – of the junior athletes, only two were girls, which reflects the exclusion of women from athletics. The rise of long-distance running from the 1950s onwards is reflected in two ways. All but one of the male athletes moved to longer distances and on to roads in their senior years. For their part, the men and women who joined athletics as seniors or as Veterans did so mostly as middle- and long-distance runners. The two women who started out as track and field athletes and returned to it later in the lifecourse may appear unusual. These findings are of significance for understanding the interaction between individual agency and broader socio-cultural processes. We can discern moments or waves corresponding to the structural features of the athletic field and the transformations it has experienced since the late 1950s (see Chapter 3). These fairly rapid and comprehensive transformations made the field much more open. They even made possible careers which 30 years ago would have been unthinkable.

Experiencing structures Enfeebled women As I have already shown, women’s participation in athletics has been severely constrained, largely by prevalent attitudes to physical activity and their codification in athletic structures, reinforced by scientific discourses (Cooper 1998; Hargreaves 1994; Mewett 2002). These were manifested as interdicts on distance, jumping and the underdevelopment of training. On the one hand, very few young women were fortunate enough to have access to an athletics club and, on the other, the few who were recruited into a club experienced a range of constraints regarding training frequency, strenuousness of training and distances which would have hampered dramatic improvements in their performance. The women in my sample do indeed reflect these constraints. Only two of them became athletes as youngsters (the other five joined athletics much later, as adults, during the second wave, that is under different structural conditions). These two women were prevented from running distances on track exceeding 400 metres and 3.5 miles in cross-country races, in line with prevalent athletic practice.

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Both BS (F, 67, T&F) and EL (F, 59, T&F) have vivid recollections of these constraints. BS explains: Cross country at that time was not a long, long distance. It is quite interesting to see how women are now allowed to run . . . I mean I have indeed run a marathon but how you are allowed to run a marathon now because when I was young [my emphasis] the most that we were allowed to run was three and a half miles. So that was long distance for me. When I was young I wasn’t allowed to triple jump. It wasn’t called triple jump, it was called hop, step and jump and we weren’t allowed to do it. It was not good for girls because they were child bearing and it was not good for the pelvis, too much jarring. We can clearly see in these two quotes the restrictions young women faced in the 1950s and 1960s. Restrictions were also manifested in the obligation not to show any signs of physical exertion. [. . .] we were warned when we were young not to show signs of distress, the men could fall about, they could just finish a race and just throw themselves on the ground but you couldn’t. Even if you felt like it you couldn’t because it was not . . . that’s all the press caught on to and women used to get the publicity, “is this good for girls to get into this state for running’’ – it was alright for the boys and the men but it wasn’t right for the girls so it was very different in those days. EL (F, 59, T&F) embodied the constraints in the training that women were allowed to undertake. Below she describes her training which, though it brought her success by making her Scottish 100 and 200 metres Champion, was also revealed to be inadequate: Well I don’t think I trained particularly hard when I was a youngster because he [coach] was . . . the reason I think this is because he was one of the old school if you like. She was coached by her grandfather who did not allow his gifted granddaughter to train over distances greater than 100 metres and the training sessions were restricted to sprints. She discovered competing approaches to training when she attended training camps for international athletes. She was able to contrast the light training sessions she undertook

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under her coach’s supervision and guidance with the considerably more strenuous sessions she encountered at the camps. Thus it was natural aptitude, rather than hard training, which permitted her achievements. This is an issue which will recur, particularly in relation to the emergence of “scientific’’ training methods. In contrast, another important aspect of these experiences is that they took place when the informants were young and before they had married and had children. I will now explore how athletic careers were affected by expectations about family obligations and participation in the labour market. “Rebels’’ in the domestic sphere? Both BS (F, 67, T&F) and EL (F, 59, T&F) became athletes in their junior years and before the enlargement of the athletic “field’’. Thus their experiences, whilst singular in the historical and cultural context in which they were lived, nevertheless reflected gender-based expectations of appropriate behaviour, focused primarily on appropriate uses of the body. The younger women in the sample worked much harder and systematically right from the start of their athletic careers. To this extent, they appear to have benefited from the relaxation of constraints on body use. JS (F, 51, LD) recognises her unique position in an answer to a question about the heroes or heroines on which she might have modelled herself: she has a strong sense that they are exceptional, as shown from her reply below: No, I don’t think there are any role models for us . . . pioneering because I am 50 and there aren’t that many women at 50 still running and like 15, 20 years ago there weren’t any so we are like pioneers I think [my emphasis]. These new pioneers have also had to earn their spurs by working around their domestic obligations. Below, KT (F, 50, UR) describes how she fits her training into her everyday life: when I first started running [the children] were still at junior school and so I had all the school holidays . . . when they were at school it wasn’t a problem but the school holidays were a problem for me because my husband is in the car trade so July was his busy month5 and he worked seven days a week. So I used to have a mile measured outside the house and I used to go out and run this mile 20 times?

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(laughter). So I could do it [. . .] Or I had to get up really early in the morning and go out on a run and be back in before half past seven before my husband went to work. She goes on to add that she would also have to cook dinner for her husband but that if he came home earlier, he would wait for her to finish her training by engaging in repair or gardening work (rather than by cooking). She also alludes to their financial situation which released her from the obligation to work at all when her children were smaller and thus led to the relative ease with which she could combine her running with her domestic obligations. Whilst KT and the other long-distance runners have benefited from the pioneering daring of the rebels mentioned in Chapter 3, and have in turn become “pioneers’’ themselves, nevertheless they continue to fulfil gender-based expectations of appropriate behaviour (Jutel 2003) in the domestic sphere. Class and natural aptitude As I will now show, there were more opportunities for men to come into contact with athletics and aspire to a sporting career. Nevertheless men’s careers were also shaped by broader structural processes, notably class, visible in the recourse to natural aptitude as the key trigger to an encounter with athletics. The belief that athletic competence was the result of natural aptitude, rather than something that could be developed by training, was apparent in first-wave men and women. Whilst it might enable someone to be “noticed’’, because of its class and gender associations, it could also be seen as restricting access to the field. For instance, in her history of the American Marathon, Cooper (1998) relates the story of a young female track and field athlete in the 1920s whose training was purposefully kept to a minimum by her coach on the basis that the young woman’s natural aptitude had taken her competence as far as it could go. Cooper shows that natural aptitude or high athletic capital was used both to explain excellence and restrict access to track and field to upper-middle-class participants. Track and field was in effect the correct and natural modality of upper-middle-class (largely male) embodiment. Correspondingly, long-distance running was the natural modality of working-class embodiment. I wanted to understand how the men in my sample had embarked on their athletic careers and what differences and similarities existed between them. Of those who engaged in regular sports as youngsters, only one informant (DM, M, 86, LD) became a long-distance runner

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almost from the start of his athletic career. The others started out either as track and field athletes or as cyclists. DF (M, 56, LD) found the path to athletics via cycling. He explains that his encounter with athletics took place at University. Here he describes how he planned the development of his career as a cyclist and then as a long-distance runner: I didn’t start competing until I got my first degree. I met a racing cyclist at Durham and he tried to persuade me to take up racing and I said I hadn’t time to train. But once I got my degree – I intended to do a PhD and I said “when I come back to Durham to do my PhD I will start racing then’’. And that was when I started. [. . .] I found I had a natural ability for running as well as cycling. In contrast, HW (M, 55, LD), a working-class runner, describes his own athletic awakening: ET You are the odd one out. HW The odd one yes. But my uncle he played football for Celtic, Celtic Boys Club but again running never actually took off until the TV because I don’t know anybody that done a 1500 metres and . . . it is just . . . for a working person [my emphasis] it was always football. It is sad when you think about it. I mean there must have been a lot of kids that were fast runners but they didn’t go to the right school and get the right education. HW (M, 55, LD) is of a similar age to DF but started his running career 15 years later. He himself perceives a class effect in the type of sport he identified with during his school years. Thus, he argues, when he was at school in the late fifties and sixties, working-class boys opted for football, rather than running. However, the picture is more complex: looking at the informants’ pathways to running, of the ten male informants who started out as track and field athletes (one was also a cyclist), seven went to University and/or were in non-manual occupations. The other three became manual workers (although BS (M, 58, LD/r), who left school to become a butcher, moved to a non-manual occupation in his early twenties and is now an accountant). Furthermore, all the University-educated informants started racing at school, compared to only one of the manual workers. Thus, according to this, high educational aspirations and class appeared to increase the chances of being introduced to athletics early, at school.

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The others were more likely to join a harriers club, although the training was also focused around track work and cross-country runs initially. We can draw two conclusions from this section: firstly, track and field athletics dominated and long-distance running was not yet well established. Until the 1970s, long-distance running tended to be seen as a sport for those who had overrun their peak, as BC (M, 69, LD) puts it: Yes. Marathon runners in those days was for the old “has beens’’ – run the marathon in my view. They are harriers, we were racers. Secondly, education and local cultures pointed boys in different directions: athletics, cycling and football being the main areas of physical activity. However, the gender and class barriers which shaped pathways to athletics became unsettled by the growing popularity of long-distance running. From track to roads: the Marathon Boom Only one male informant (HS, M, 54, T&F/r) remained a track and field athlete throughout his athletic career. All the others gradually left the track and moved to roads and, in the process, increased the distances they were running, both in training and also in races. We can see that the shift to roads and longer distances was part of a wider trend, of a wider cultural shift towards long distances, affecting not simply elite performers but also non-elite runners, such as “fun’’ or leisure runners, middle-class runners and women. This biographical shift from track to road racing amongst these athletes reflected a corresponding shift in the athletic “field’’ (Bourdieu 1979; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and this is apparent in the informants’ own accounts of their biographical development. Informants did indeed single out what they termed the “Marathon Boom’’, which they date to the early 1980s, as one of the turning points in their athletic careers. For informants living in Scotland, it was the first Glasgow Marathon (held in 1980) which caught their imagination and provided the impetus for a change in training, distance and expectations of achievements for those already in the sport. For those outside athletics, the Boom provided the trigger to becoming runners, as HW (M, 55, LD) reiterates here: If I had been at University or College I would probably have been running a lot sooner but it wasn’t until the marathons came out on the TV in the 80s say about 20 years ago that people [my emphasis]

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actually got involved with running type of thing. [. . .] I was 35 when I started running. According to HW, the Marathon Boom, as well as the trend towards physical fitness, encouraged a lot of people to take up running. It also brought down class barriers. Thus for informants like HW (M, 55, LD), or for IL’s (M, 61, LD) friends, a career as a runner would have been unthinkable before the Marathon Boom: ET Good. Yes. Would you encourage others to take up running? IL Yes I certainly would. I have written a few articles and the local paper asked me to do something for them and I wrote a wee article saying basically that running was not for the elite it is for everyone [my emphasis]. Thus the Marathon Boom allowed people with no previous history of sports or who had competed in a different sport (such as cycling or football) to aspire to long-distance running, if only for the duration of a single race. As IL also alludes, women were also able to benefit from these processes of change. Not only would they be able to enter athletics through the “fun’’ run route, but they would also be able to take advantage of the relaxing of gender-based restrictions on women’s sports. Thus for women such as JS (51, LD), KT (50, UR), IW (49, UR) and VD (48, HR), who had no history of athletics prior to their first race, it was now conceivable that they might enter a race (as opposed to pursuing a running career, a process which was facilitated by a different factor, as I explain later), either a marathon or, in JS’s case, a 10 km race: ET Have you always been a runner? JS No. I didn’t start until I was 35. ET And did you start as a long-distance runner? JS I started as an occasional jogger really. It was 1984 there was a women’s run initiative, to run a 10k [km], it was training women from nothing up to 10k in six months and it started off with jogging for about half a mile a week then it got to a mile and so on and over the six months they got us round to six miles and that is where it started from. ET Alright. OK. And did you do anything else before? JS No nothing.

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Here JS (F, 51, LD) describes how she became a runner and she highlights first, the specific focus on women’s fitness that this “run initiative’’ reflects. Secondly, the year itself is significant because it is one of the Marathon Boom years, which IL (M, 61, LD) and HW (M, 55, LD) mentioned. As JI (M, 65, LD) shows, the Boom reflected the mushrooming of not only marathons but also a range of other long-distance races: Well yes, 100 metres up to 3 miles on the track, things like that. And there would be different races, team races and such like and then when the boom came in the summer started to be full of 10ks, half marathons and marathons and then it would be slow into the roads [my emphasis]. The track has definitely died as far as Scottish Athletics and British is concerned [. . .]. Here JI compares the past with the present athletic scene: he alludes to changes in the status of long-distance running, which, as BC (M, 69, LD/r) had already argued, used to be the end point of racers who had peaked, to the displacement of track athletics in favour of long-distance running and to the rationalisation of training. Changes in training methods were influential in turning them from modest to individually successful athletes. The rationalisation of training Informants were asked to describe their training over time. My own expectations of their accounts were that athletes would increase their training to counteract decreases in performance brought on by ageing. Whilst many did indeed increase their training, the association with ageing was indirect. Here too we have to relate the informants’ accounts of change in training to concurrent changes in training methods taking place in athletics generally and in long-distance training more particularly. Thus the informants who have built their athletic careers over their lifetime to the present have undergone two “training periods’’: in the first period they trained in very variable ways, depending on the local training culture which prevailed in their club. Even when they became acquainted with marathon training, this was focused primarily on building endurance by running long distances, with variable emphasis given to speed or strength training. This is how WM (M, 72, LD) describes his early training days in the 1940s: WM I did compete. It wasn’t long before I went in the Army but I did compete. And the training – 3 miles, 3 miles and 4 miles and

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that was it and that was considered alright in those days. When I think about it, I mean that was . . . if I was doing the training then that I am doing now I would have been a lot better runner. But a lot of people just did that. In those days even the champions didn’t do an awful lot of mileage in those days. Unless they were running the marathon. So that was it until I went in the Army. I hardly trained at all. [. . .] ET Sure. Yes. And did you do speed work or anything like that? Or was it just like a steady jog, a steady run? WM Well it could be a fairly fast run you know but the only speed work we did was in the summer, with track work. You did your speed work then right enough. In the summer. But even then it was only 2 or 3 times a week – that was a loss! I mean generally we didn’t do big mileages in those days anyway.

In the 1960s things began to change. When most of the athletes in the sample would have started their careers, manuals detailing the training techniques of famous athletes, such as Roger Bannister and Emil Zatopek, were making their appearance but the advice proffered therein was variously adopted by coaches. These tips certainly did not appear to be known to all the informants (although the star athletes themselves obviously were). At this stage, runners were then still in a transition phase, from eclectic and idiosyncratic training methods to more standardised, rationalised or, as JI (M, 65, LD) termed them, more “scientific’’ training methods. A similar process of transition affected track and field athletes and culminated in current training schedules and with the breaking of records. The last 20 years is the second period, that is the culmination of the rationalisation of training, codified in training manuals and coaching methods, leaving little room for idiosyncratic variations. This is incarnated in marathon training. Informants who decided to start training for a marathon, especially those who had been running for several years, had to make significant changes to their training, as BS (M, 58, LD/r) shows:

ET So you actually increased your training in your late thirties? BS Yes, my training increased considerably in that period once I got back running again and there was a constant build up until we came to. I have highlighted the period here . . . uh . . . 82–85, when I did my best racing over the marathon distance, and trained more

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seriously over that. And I ran a PB when I was 42, which is nonsense – you shouldn’t be running PBs when you are 42 but I ran 2h44min05 . . . As we can see, marathon training consisted of increasing weekly mileage, distances covered in training and training frequency. We will look in greater detail at the training that all athletes submitted themselves to in the next chapter. Suffice to say that this account is in stark contrast to BC’s (M, 69, LD/r) description of marathons as being for “old has beens’’. Another point to note is that these waves signal the malleability of bodily aptitude, even beyond the “peak’’ years, manifested in the intensification of training. The fact that it took CMcD (M, 52, LD), DF (M, 56, LD), BS (M, 58, LD/r), BC (M, 69, LD/r), BMcB (M, 70, LD) and DM (M, 86, LD/r) only four years to achieve PBs for a marathon, ranging from 2h40 by BC at the age of 39 to 2h24 for DF and BS at the ages of 38 and 42 respectively, attests to the dedication required to improve performance, as in fact informants, as BS (M, 58, LD/r) shows above, were training the body up for new physical demands but were also making up for the skill deficit they had acquired under the old training regime. The extent to which the emergence of these new training methods “masked’’ processes of decline will be explored in Chapter 7. The Veteran Movement So far I have explored some of the key structural processes which have either constrained or enabled the development of athletic careers. Gender and class, in interaction with the development of athletics and the dissemination of “scientific’’ regimes, emerged as key factors to explain the different pathways into athletics which my sample reflects. However, far from these divergent pathways persisting, there appears to have taken place some measure of convergence in the athletic careers of my informants. Thus whilst women and working-class boys were largely excluded from athletics, the 1960s appeared to signal a shift in the structuring of athletics as well as an enlargement of disciplines and of the backgrounds from which athletes were recruited, as has already been signposted in Chapter 3. Despite being numerically inferior to men, the women in the study trained just as hard and were as competitive as their male counterparts. Their subjection to scientific training regimes similar to those of men has allowed them to overcome performance deficits acquired by their long-standing exclusion from athletics and the attendant enfeeblement

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of their bodies. The Marathon Boom – a reflection of the displacement of track athletics by road racing and of the popularisation of new athletic pursuits – has allowed men and women to aspire to an athletic career outside of traditional pathways. There is another factor which plays a key role in the lives of my informants and has somewhat helped the process of convergence alluded to earlier: the emergence of the “Veteran Movement’’. This Movement, by reinforcing the process of convergence described above, is allowing informants to envisage a lengthy future in athletics and to develop a different relationship to the dominant narratives of age. KT (F, 50, UR) and IW (F, 49, UR), the two female ultra runners, became athletes as Veterans, that is after the age of 35. All the others used the Veteran Movement to continue (in a seamless transition) or to restart their careers. For instance, BC (M, 69, LD/r) dates the emergence of the Movement to 1971, the year he turned 40 and became a Veteran himself. He completed his first marathon in 1970, at the age of 39, as a senior. This is what he says of the emergent Movement: BC So Veterans maybe started in 1971 in Scotland and that gave us more competition both at track level and road running level. So you got a real enthusiasm for track running again. [. . .] ET Right. So the framework of the Veteran Movement allowed you to go back to what you did when you were in your twenties? BC Yes. 10k and 5k on the track. BC is highlighting the boost to what he perceived to be a disappearing track and field career that the Veteran Movement can provide, by creating a new space in which competing at a more “advanced’’ age can be given meaning. Long-distance running is no longer for the “old has been’’! BMcB (M, 70, LD) turned Veteran a year earlier, following a tenyear break from competition (although not from training) because of other obligations. He describes how turning 40, that is becoming a Veteran, lent legitimacy to his wish to return to active training and competing: And it so happened I turned 40 during the Commonwealth Games and I said “well I am a Vet now so I will try’’. [. . .] so I started training

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and then the Worlds was coming in 1980, the World Marathon 10k to Glasgow, so I thought I would train really hard for that which I did [. . .] The role played by big competitions to fuel a renewed interest in training and competing was also important for DM (M, 86, LD/r). He describes a long gap in running after his first wife died. After he remarried at the age of 55, he made his comeback, boosted by the discovery of the Veteran Movement and of its competitiveness: So my training was upset quite a lot by that until a friend of mine went to the World Veterans Championships in Toronto and came back and enthused me with running again and I thought oh here it was ten years after and it took me about five years to get up to my best and by the time I had got up I was really running oh much better than I was four or five years ago. According to these three informants, the Veteran Movement has provided them, in their later years, with a structure within which their performances, which on the senior circuit would have no value, can be given recognition. In fact, DM (M, 86), BMcB (M, 70) and BS (F, 67) have become prominent figures in the Movement, mainly as office bearers, and are partly responsible for its development and its recognition among the senior athletic structures. For the female track and field athletes, the Veteran Movement provided the spur for a return to training after a long break from active physical activity. And it gave the three female long-distance runners, who started running in their mid-thirties, that is in the first Veteran age category, a structure in which to train seriously. Thus through these athletes’ accounts we can see how the Veteran Movement has contributed to the enlargement of the athletic field by creating a space within which athletic careers could be started, restarted or maintained, depending on individual life trajectories. Furthermore, this took place at a stage in the informants’ lives when the decline narrative and expectations of agebased behaviour would normally exclude them from athletic identities. However, three male informants, HS (M, 54, T&F/r), JI (M, 65, LD) and MH (M, 67, LD/r), have rejected the Veteran Movement. JI (M, 65, LD) competed in Veteran events for a few years but found it unchallenging, arguing that it was always the same competitors who turned up for races. HS (M, 54, T&F/r) and MH (M, 67, LD/r), both formerly track and field athletes (although MH became a long-distance runner whilst still in his

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twenties), found the prospect of competing in the same events as those at which they excelled as younger athletes, but with reduced performances, unappealing: I have actually . . . other people have asked me this and it sounds very patronising but I am not interested in being the third best, lefthanded, one-eyed person and I am prepared to be judged absolutely. But I can see that somebody who has come into running late and never achieved anything particularly much is interested in comparing themselves with other people of their own age and I think the Veteran Movement has been very good and given a lot of satisfaction to a lot of people but it is not for me. This informant acknowledges the existence of the movement as an enabling structure for under-achieving athletes or for new athletes but, as an ex-international athlete, he rejects it for himself. He prefers to find what he terms “fulfilment’’ in other outcomes of his athletic past: selfconfidence, travelling opportunities, coaching, organising races and so on, all of which represent part of his athletic capital. Furthermore, his rejection of the movement appears to be focused around a conception of ageing as impairment, thus appearing to engage with the narrative of decline. However, despite their aversion for the Veteran scene, these athletes have continued to be active in athletics, opening the way for contradictory (and rich) positions in relation to decline and ageing.

The present Five informants had retired from their sport at the time of the fieldwork – two because of a specific illness, another from a combination of illness and advancing years affecting his balance, a fourth one from the aggravation of a long-standing knee injury and the fifth one had no identifiable problem, simply a sense that his body could no longer withstand intensive effort and that he should retire from athletics (hurdling). Four informants (all men and long-distance runners) have experienced serious illnesses. BS (58) was diagnosed with arrhythmia (irregular pulse rate) in 1997 at the age of 55. Although he is no longer on medication, he can no longer run long distance. BC (69) had been experiencing problems of fatigue and laboured breathing which was initially diagnosed as asthma but was subsequently revealed to be heart disease. He was fitted with a pacemaker two years

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later. Because of his breathing difficulties he had already stopped racing and confined his weekly mileage to 30 miles but once he was fitted with the pacemaker he had to adjust his activity patterns, and he now alternates jogging and walking. BMcB (70) had a heart attack in 1988, at the age of 58, whilst he was racing in a half-marathon. He was running with the race leaders (who were all younger than him) when he developed what he thought was toothache and fatigue. He pulled out of the race and a doctor who was in attendance advised him to go to hospital. His heart rate had dropped to 30 beats per minute but he was discharged and told to return the following day as the doctors in attendance were not sure how to interpret his low heart rate. He was told that “you may be a false positive because athletes get these kinds of heart’’. The next day it was confirmed that he had suffered a heart attack and he was admitted to hospital. However, he returned to running after six weeks, and was warned against doing any more marathons. His first race on his return to full training was a halfmarathon, which he won, and then, against medical advice, he returned to marathon training and at the age of 60 he broke the British record for a marathon in his age-group (with a record time of 2h46). He now trains every day, running 70 miles per week, and races regularly. DM (86) had a series of serious operations on his abdomen when he was 83, after he had experienced severe abdominal pains. As a result of the surgery, he has lost his core strength and he is now unable to get up from a low chair without kneeling on the floor and hoisting himself by leaning on the chair. Physiotherapy did not help (or rather the physiotherapist argued that she could not offer significant support) and as soon as the pain receded he returned to running two to three times a week. He also has problems with his balance and dizzy spells. He currently trains once or twice a week, alternating running and walking, weather permitting. As we have seen, informants have followed different trajectories to the present. Their life trajectories have been shaped by structural barriers, such as gender, age and local cultures, which until the 1970s would have prevented most people from imagining an athletic career. A range of factors operating at meso- and macro-levels have led to an enlargement of the athletic field and thus allowed those who would once have been excluded from athletics to become athletes. The popularisation of marathon running, the inclusion of women into athletic disciplines from which they had been excluded, the dissemination of fitness messages around physical activity and the emergence of the Veteran Movement were identified by my informants as key moments intersecting with their life trajectories and contributing to their biographical development

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as athletes. I have also shown that contradictions nevertheless remain: these biographies continue to be structured by gender and age. Gender impacts on the management of athletic and domestic obligations, whilst age and the narrative of decline inform the sense of bodily competency experienced by a handful of informants. Nevertheless their athletic identity is not under threat. I would like to close this chapter with a quote from MH (M, 67, LD/r): It is interesting to look back at say when I was young wondering if I would still keep running when I was 30 and when I was 30 I realised that at 40 I would be over the top and you know . . . I still feel . . . it is funny but I still feel like an athlete [my emphasis]. And when I . . . I remember racing about ten years ago in a race in a five mile race in Edinburgh and realising that the time I did was slower than I could do six miles in my hey day. I had trained and I had run just as hard and it didn’t feel any different and the tactics . . . and I still pee myself with nervousness when I am on the start line . . . literally incidentally . . . so it all feels the same. Despite injury, illness and ageing, informants make claims to an athletic identity, derived, on the one hand, from their embodiment as athletes, endowing themselves with athletic bodies and athletic minds, and, on the other, from the persistence with which they have managed to maintain these physical and psychological resources as they have grown older. Furthermore, these accounts are pervaded with allusions to decline, in the context of high levels of physical exertion. However, the relationship between decline and physical exertion is emerging as quite complex. I will examine these issues in detail in Chapters 6 and 7. Furthermore, we can understand athletic careers within the sociological imagination, as made possible by the interplay of structural and agentic processes. More specifically, what emerges from the data is that the process through which this relationship is enacted are lines of demarcation which cut across individual life trajectories and give them a similar shape, and create opportunities or erect barriers in the accomplishment of the lifecourse. These lines of demarcation act as “biographical disruptions’’ (Bury 1982). I do not refer here solely to sudden decisions or sudden events which may force informants to respond directly with a particular course of action, but more broadly to a network of structures and narratives which may expand or contract, thereby affecting the range of decisions which informants can make in the tracing of their individual life trajectories.

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These continue to affect life trajectories once athletic careers are securely underway; for instance, micro-level factors such as illness and the encounter with health professionals’ own prejudices may force a rethink or a reorganisation of expectations. As I will show in the next chapter, we have to look more closely at the bodily labour involved in the development and maintenance of an athletic career, in interaction with discourse, to understand how athletes might decide not to let an event like illness interfere with their athletic career.

6 The Embodiment of Athletic Mastery

Introduction In the previous chapter I explored how the informants’ lives intersected with broad structural forces, the latter constricting or stretching the space in which people might encounter athletics, discover their aptitude for it and develop a durable athletic career. Gender and class were fundamental players in this dynamic process, underpinning the transformations which over time reconfigured formal athletic structures. However, these are not impersonal forces. To understand more fully how these transformations were made possible and literally made flesh, we need to turn our attention to the role played by agents themselves in forcing these changes. In particular, we are compelled, when listening to the athletes’ own stories, to pay attention to the role played by their body. To this end this chapter will bring to light the ways in which the body is deployed in the pursuit of the informants’ running career over time and how they themselves bring their bodies into their accounts. I will place particular emphasis on the relationship which runners develop with their bodies as they hone their athletic skills. Runners are embodied. Just like bodybuilders and boxers, they develop a socially situated relationship with their bodies, and their embodiment takes places in various sites: the everyday management of the body, the process of running itself, the engagement with bodily crises (injury or illness) and in the gaze of others. Running transforms the body – it builds a specific muscle structure, it increases the risk of injuries specific to runners and it requires a specialist type of training. Thus, running is body work and this leads to the production of the runner’s body. As will become clear, this is not a unitary body. In fact the runner’s body is composed of a multiplicity of bodies. That is to say, the process 94

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of becoming a runner calls for a range of strategies, either for evaluating bodily events or for improving bodily capabilities, which signify a phenomenological engagement with bodily processes. These are also reflexively experienced and given meaning through the recourse to a range of metaphors, like mechanical or work metaphors. I will also show that this body work impacts on identity, that is on the achievement of a running identity, and that that this process of construction is circular. One runs to run and in the process one becomes a runner. So one runs to be and remain a runner as CMcD (M, 52, LD) summarises: But it is the one sport, it is running, running and running and that’s all I need to do. To get the best for myself, I don’t need to go to the gym or anything else. Running and more running. What I would therefore like to explore next is how in practice running has become embedded in the informants’ bodies and in their lives.

The disciplined body The informants’ accounts suggest that in order to become accomplished runners they have to control their bodies. Let’s explore the techniques of bodily management to which informants have recourse to achieve satisfactory performance. Most “serious’’ athletes train to race and they race to do well. As we saw in the previous chapter, without exception, all the informants have subjected themselves to regular training from the start of their running careers. We also saw that there were variations in the strenuousness of training which reflected gender-based expectations of appropriate bodily use and the differential acceptance and adoption of modern training methods, such as those pioneered by Emil Zatopek (Benyo 1983). However, training levels have increased over time and training itself has become a composite of techniques designed to enhance strength (weight and circuit training), endurance (the long run) and speed (interval training). At their peak, all the athletes engage in regular, time-consuming and strenuous training. The training is multi-sited and this is particularly apparent when the informants describe their race preparation strategies, their training sequencing and their body maintenance strategies. The theme of bodily disciplining is present in the accounts that athletes give of their preparation for races. For all athletes there is a “periodisation’’ (Nash 1979), that is a disciplining of time, for this very purpose.

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The longer the races (marathon distance and over) or the more strenuous the events (alpine marathons for instance), the greater the propensity to periodise over a long period of time. Ultra and hill runners are particularly reliant on this strategy. For instance, KT (F, 50) eases up on racing in November and December and, just like IW (F, 49), the rest of the year she uses shorter races as preparation for longer races: a 10 km race will provide speed preparation, whilst half-marathons and marathons will provide endurance training for longer races, such as 50 km and 100 km races. They also restrict the number of 100 km races they participate in to one or perhaps two per year. JBF (M, 50, HR) only competes in two major events in the summer and organises his training to lead up to these: And also I have found it is easiest to sort of get fit for one particular thing, base it on wholly. So if I get fit, go for two weeks in the Alps and get fit for one race and another one two or three weeks later, I can maintain a momentum and be fit then and the rest of the year I am just doing other things and just fitting running more round that. Marathoners such as BS (M, 58, LD/r) also plan their training over the whole year. This is how he describes it: Yes. That’s when I built up to training twice every day and running somewhere . . . the most I ever did was just over 110 miles a week. But my weeks at that time were 100–110 miles a week regularly in the build up to the marathons. I did a three months build up . . . to the marathons that I was running, so for the rest of the time it would probably be about 70 or 80, roundabout that, and then once I got into the preparation for a marathon, I built it up to 100 and 110. These informants strike a careful balance between training and racing: some races are used as staging posts towards more important races, training is more strenuous in a run-up to an important race and then “tapered’’, that is decreased just before the race. Furthermore, time has to be made to fulfil these training obligations. Thus periodisation takes place over a whole year and forms a cycle. It enables athletes to manage sustainable bodily effort throughout the whole cycle and to find ways of fulfilling other obligations. But it also means the cycle can be repeated – all being well – in subsequent years or altered to suit changing circumstances.

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This periodisation process is also applied to the training cycle. Informants talked about their training not only in yearly but also in weekly cycles. This is how HW (M, 55, LD) established his training routine: But normally I would do 10 miles a day Monday–Tuesday, the Wednesday you do speed work and maybe just do about 8 miles that day. [. . .] Wednesdays . . . then you do one night hill training. [. . .] you would find a hill and maybe 10 or 15 people together you went up as fast as you could, then you would jog for 2 minutes and do that five times and then jog for a mile somewhere round the town, come back and do that again five times, then go again round the town and then come back again and up again 5 times. Males and females and again when you watched the effort that everybody put into it, it was . . . not delighted but you felt it was part of your medication, if you don’t take that . . . it makes you a better runner. [. . .] An awful lot of runners now, males and females will take the Friday off. I take the odd Friday . . . [. . .] Sunday for most runners, that is the most important day, that’s for your big mileage. You will find most of us will try and get to the countryside. We go up to [. . .] Strathclyde Park and we do about [. . .] 14 miles on a very soft surface, going through the woods and up steps and it is nice, it takes your mind off it. As can be seen, the week is punctuated by different training sessions, fulfilling different functions: Wednesdays and Thursdays to improve strength and speed, Mondays and Tuesdays to work on both speed and endurance, and the long Sunday run for endurance. The rest day to which HW alludes is designed to allow for recovery after a succession of hard sessions. A couple of days before a race, most athletes “taper’’ their training, that is they train less strenuously, in order to “peak’’ for the race day, rather than too early. As we can see here, the primary site of disciplining is the body, the immediate target is adequate training to maintain the body at its peak capacity (whether it is about opting for the steady run or the hard run) and the best method to achieve all this is to periodise, that is to split time into well-circumscribed periods within which specific tasks and activities are accomplished. The point is that athletes are constantly engaged in the search for the most effective way of embodying themselves with speed and strength.

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Deconstructing the body Periodisation reflects the athletes’ willingness to rationalise the use of time by splitting it into specific chunks of training, each fulfilling a specific function in the achievement of elite performance. There is evidence that the body is also subjected to equivalent processes of deconstruction, as EL (F, 59, T&F) shows below: But I still do a longer run and I am doing weights twice a week. When I say weights they are not heavy, you know, they are not great big . . . well like last year after January I went on to three weights, not unexceptionally heavy when I hear what other people are lifting but at the moment it is on the machines and it is more a toning and I am trying to build up the muscles and that, you know, and the body. I do light ones as well trying to stretch the hamstrings and things like that [my emphasis]. But most of my leg stuff is running. EL started training harder late in her athletic career, not directly to counteract bodily ageing, but because of the dissemination and adoption of training regimes far more strenuous than those of her junior years (see Chapter 5). In this quote she describes how she isolates body parts which warrant specific attention to improve performance and biomechanical efficiency. As can be seen, the body has in fact little natural aptitude for running. This aptitude is wholly manufactured and the process of transformation of bodily capital into that suitable for running is lengthy. This is no better illustrated than by CMcD (M, 52, LD), who had the muscle structure and bodily awareness of a cyclist when he started running. He was unused to supporting his body weight in the pursuit of his first sport. His transition to running meant that he had to learn to relate to his body in different ways, and thus the training served a dual purpose: of getting better at running and also of transforming his body and developing the bodily awareness of a runner, that is he had to get used to feeling his body weight. He also initially experienced pains he had not felt as a cyclist. He referred to this period of transition from being a cyclist to a runner as an “apprenticeship’’, in ways which echo Wacquant’s (2000) boxers: because I was cycling every day I thought for me to run 100 miles a week was nothing. You know I have got a 100 miles a week written

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in there [in diary] after a few weeks. 100 miles a week, 100 miles, 100 miles running. So this is when I thought I am going to learn to become a runner. But it took me two years before I called myself a runner, you know, two years before I could honestly say the pains have gone and I was running properly [my emphasis]. But I was racing. I mean my first race I was 4th, that was in a cross country. CMcD’s experience shows that each sport has not only its own disciplining, which encompasses training the body to run, but also its own lifeworld, which involves reorganising one’s life and getting acquainted with local running cultures (for instance by looking for suitable running routes or by joining a club) and, as I will now show, further disciplining of everyday life.

Disciplining everyday life Diary-keeping Disciplining was made manifest in diary-keeping. More than half of the informants mentioned or even produced a diary or a training schedule during the interviews. Diaries and training schedules were used to keep track of training: they acted as a memento of the training schedule and therefore allowed athletes to plan their next training sessions. At the same time they were used to record the training just carried out. In the case of long-distance runners, diaries were used to record the distances run – in this way mileage could be monitored weekly, over any period which had significance for training (for instance in the run-up to the racing season) and of course yearly. A yearly mileage of 1200 or 3000 miles (recorded by IW and KT, both female ultra runners, respectively) lent weight and legitimacy to the effort produced over the year. A drop in yearly mileage could be accounted for by interruptions in training caused by illness or injury, as was the case of KT, who underwent a serious operation one year and had glandular fever another year; it therefore signals a drop in form. Conversely, the return to “full’’ mileage signifies a return to form. Diaries are used for a third purpose: to record races and performance (times, distances or heights, depending on the discipline). Thus the diaries contain information which is both process and outcome: they reflect the athletes’ abilities and they allow them to monitor changes over time, an issue to which we will return in the next chapter. They are also records of volume of bodily effort and physical health. However,

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athletes also report breaks in diary-keeping, when training is disrupted for a period of time, as BMcB (M, 70, LD) explains below: [. . .] after the heart attack I am looking in this diary and I am saying “Oh I have only done 98 miles this week and I must get my 100 in’’ you know. And because the diary says I haven’t done a hundred I will go and do the other two to make it up to the hundred. You are like a slave to the diary at the finish. No with the heart attack I thought I had just better watch it. [. . .] It is all in my mind yes. According to this informant the role of the diary has changed from being a simple database, that is a record of past achievements, to something more normative in intent. His heart attack and the obligation to train less and less strenuously have led him to experience the diary as a technique of regulation. The information contained in the diary becomes a set of targets to emulate but, poignantly, these targets have now become unattainable because of the risk of illness recurrence. Thus, in this instance, diary-keeping was discarded in favour of a more intimate, because not physically recorded, form of record-keeping. Diet and weight control Diet and weight control represents another modality of body disciplining which impinges on everyday life. Long-distance runners have all experimented with diets which are meant to improve performance. One such technique is carbo-loading, held in some running magazines to help counteract, and recover from, fatigue (Fee 1998). Indeed long runs lead to decreases in muscle glycogen levels (Newsholme 1977), which are the physiological processes involved in the loss of energy in the muscles produced by sustained effort of this kind. Glycogen levels can be restored – in part – by strategic fuelling, that is “dietary manipulations’’ (p. 87). Carbo-loading operates on the principle that in order for energy to be conserved during the race, the body needs to be “starved’’ of carbohydrates in the week preceding a race but refuelled a few days before the race, by eating foods rich in carbohydrates such as pasta, and, it is claimed, more efficiently managed by the body during sustained physical effort. The literature continues to debate on the efficacy of this approach. The long-distance runners who used it were variably convinced that it worked but even so subjected themselves to it as part of their disciplining. In other words, carbo-loading was part of the panoply of training strategies, some with proven and observable

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outcomes (such as interval training) and others with less tangible effects, acting as a ritualised preparation for performance. The regulation of the timing of meals and snacks is also essential for those who engage in shorter distances, in this instance to control bodily reactions to running, as DF (M, 54, LD) explains below: ET So do you make a conscious effort for instance to eat lots of carbohydrates or anything like that? DF Yes. I eat a really big breakfast, loads of cereal and two big slices of bread. But I don’t eat in the morning, I don’t snack because I usually do my running at lunch time and I find that unless I have a complete break from breakfast to my run I have to do an emergency stop! I think it is a common problem with runners. ET (Laughter) Yes. Do you get stitches? DF I rarely get the stitch, it is just the involuntary bowel movements. Away from the need to prepare for a race, informants claim not to follow a specific diet but evidence was found of dietary regulation. Food was seen as “fuel’’ and whilst no one followed what was also described as “scientific diets’’, everyone tried to eat “sensibly’’ or “good wholesome food’’ regularly, in suitable quantities and with enough carbohydrate to provide energy. The traditional (i.e post-Second World War) Scottish diet, which HW (M, 55, L/D) referred to as “your mother’s cooking’’, was constructed as ideally suited to the athlete’s energy requirements. Nevertheless some food items, like chips and crisps, were restricted, as BS (M, 58, L/D/r) and DF (M, 56, L/D) demonstrate below: BS I actually started . . . I did start eating differently roundabout European Vets 1995. Prior to that I had had a wee spell and I hadn’t been doing an awful lot, I had just been doing a bit of regular training but my weight had crept up a wee bit, maybe about five or six pounds and I thought . . . when I had planned to go to this I thought that was one of the wee changes I was going to have to make and thought perhaps increasing my training to get back to the level I wanted to be able to race at I also wanted to lose weight to be effective at racing over that distance. You can’t afford to carry five or six pounds extra roundabout a half marathon. So at that time I did make a change to my diet and there were quite a few snacky things that I ate on a regular basis that I cut out. It didn’t make much difference to my actual meals I must admit but I did cut out . . . I had felt that during my marathon days I could have eaten anything at all

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and it wasn’t going to make any difference to my weight, you know, obviously it was just carbohydrates, just plough it all in. But when I wasn’t just as active this obviously had an effect on my weight so I had to cut all that stuff out. BS’s concern was to lose weight after a period of relative inactivity, and in order to return to what he perceived to be a more appropriate weight, he cut out foodstuff which he identified as “snacky’’, that is as bad. The interesting point here is that whilst these food items were not perceived negatively when he was in full training, their status subsequently changed as his own levels of activity fluctuated. The notion of change is interesting as it signals the need to improve competence in athletic performance and also in knowledge about the impact of nutrition on performance. The juxtaposition of different interpretations of the value of food is also well illustrated by DF (M, 56, LD) below: DF As far as diet is concerned I eat a fairly normal diet but the whole family we have always tried to go for a normal diet. We try to only have chips once a week and we don’t go for eating things like beefburgers, and not just because of things like CJD (Creutzfeld-Jakobs Disease) but because we have never tended to go for fatty foods or fast foods. My family and my wife’s family we have always been brought up in a tradition of having proper home cooked meals rather than going for fast food. We avoid fast food at all costs. I try to bake our own bread because I know what goes into it and we all enjoy it and it is worth the time it takes to make it. So we do go in for good wholesome food. But my daughter really is a fad for eating properly. She is properly coached and she has been told exactly what she can and cannot eat. I don’t worry too much. DF’s experience, in common with other informants, reveals a concern for ingesting food items which he deems to be “wholesome’’, that is which will allow him to be competent. Furthermore, he restricts his intake of food deemed to be of poor nutritional value, such as chips and beefburgers. On the other hand, it is interesting to note how he juxtaposes his experience with that of his daughter’s, whose dietary requirements are controlled by her coach and are now accepted as essential for the achievement of good athletic performance.

The body as resource I have already described the rationalisation and routinisation of the body in training and other forms of bodily control currently in use by all active

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athletes. What these practices open a window on to is the understanding of the body as a resource which athletes have to use effectively: they have to strike a balance between pushing the body hard and not exhausting their resources too quickly, especially as they get older. As I have already shown, HW’s (M, 55, LD) training is periodised and he justifies his schedule as follows: Um . . . . You aren’t supposed . . . in yourself you are not supposed to run hard all the time. The only time you are meant to run hard is Monday nights during your training nights and when you are racing. Most coaches will tell you, you should run when you enjoy it. When I run to work in the morning, I started running over the last 18 months, leaving five minutes earlier, so I can ∗∗ and I will check my times, there are certain parts of town when I will check my time to see if I am going at a nice easy pace. You can tell when you run at an easy pace because you are not panting and puffing but some people run hard all the time and at the end of the day you are only going to burn your body out. [. . .] (Note: ∗ denotes inaudible speech) The theme of resource management is articulated as minimising the risk of burnout caused by over-training or its inappropriate periodisation. However, another concern is beginning to make an appearance: ageing, perhaps understood as depletion. BS (M, 58, LD/r) is explicit about the link between ageing and burnout: ET Now what is interesting is that as you got older you actually got faster in some ways and that is when you did you personal best as you got older but you also got slower in some of the distances you were talking about. Do [. . .] you think it is inevitable that as one gets older that things begin to change? [. . .] BS yes certainly. I . . . both . . . two different points probably to that. One. OK obviously your body is getting older and you can’t expect to run so fast but I think that the quality of training that you can cope with when you are younger, which is something I don’t think you can cope with older. OK you can go out and do your long easy runs and all that sort of stuff, OK, but the quality training that is required to run fast I don’t think the older person is suited to doing that and certainly not if they have had a full career of being, for instance, an early athlete. I think if anyone has got the best out of themselves when they were in their twenties and maybe right up to

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their thirties, if they have got the best out of themselves there is no way they can continue that into their forties. It is just inevitable, a slowdown that has got to happen. What is inferred here is that athletes who pushed their bodies early will not be able to sustain their level of performance and will be mediocre as Veterans because of a combination of bodily mismanagement and ageing. BS (M, 58, LD/r) is like most of the other informants who were very competent club runners but did not perform at exceptional levels in their early years. He is also similar to those who joined the sport in their thirties like the female long-distance runners and HW (M, 55, LD) and CMcD (M, 52, LD), in that he achieved his PBs in his forties. Thus, unwittingly, he has shifted peak bodily effort from what should have been his peak years to his later years (this is an issue to which I will return in the next chapter). The association of ageing with the loss, or even the wasting, of energy and resources is a theme which has a constant presence in the informants’ accounts. Furthermore, on an everyday basis, informants have to “calculate’’ the return on their performance of training at high levels. DF (M, 55, L/D) brought his weekly mileage down from 100 miles to 70 miles per week because his experience had showed that he could maintain a satisfactory marathon time with a lower weekly mileage: I have had to tailor my racing a bit more. Time permitting I used to think nothing or running 80 miles in a week but I have found as I have got older it has not just been the time, I have never had the energy to run 80 miles training in a week. Whenever I have tried to build up my mileage I have usually found I have never really reached the 80 miles a week stage, it has tended to be just 60 or 70 miles a week. I have just concentrated on trying to get a long run in on a Sunday. And I have found that as long as I could do the 20 mile run at a reasonable pace I could still do a good marathon without trying to do 80–100 miles a week. I thought well if I can do that what is the point of doing 100 miles a week! Either as a long-term or as a short-term effect, training at optimum levels continuously makes its presence felt in the body, and in order to minimise the risks of burnout, most runners control their energy expenditure in their schedule. Thus, to achieve satisfactory performance and longevity, athletes have to take an “actuarial’’ approach to the body – in other words, engage in an economy of the body – involving factoring in the

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intensity of effort over time, the body’s own natural ratio of effort to performance and ageing. Furthermore, when the correct balance between expenditure and conservation has been achieved and mileage has accumulated over several years, running resources are stored in the body and can then be used later, for instance when recovering from illness or injury, as BMcB (M, 70, LD) illustrates below. Here BMcB, who had just described the circumstances of his heart attack, explains what allowed him to run his next race only months into his recovery: BMcB It was 6 weeks after that I started running. I took 6 weeks off and then I started running again and then I just jogged and then I went into the vets. Half marathon – that was my first race and I said I would take it easy and it was into Grangemouth like you know so I had to win it. My first race after. I did take it easy and I was feeling that good so I don’t know if it was the race and all the miles I had in my legs, I had thousands and thousands of miles before that so I felt good and I won it that day, so that was me back [my emphasis]. Although I was warned off doing marathons I thought this is the thing so I started training, I was approaching 60 so I started training for the marathon again and so I went and broke the British record for the marathon, 2h46 I did that day. ET When you were 60? Thus what had been lost because of, and during, the illness was partly restored by the prior accumulation of fitness in the body. What BMcB’s experience also illustrates is the inscription of running and of correct knowledge inside and on the body. In other words, embodied competence is memoried by the body.

Achieving the runner’s body Thus all the strategies of body discipline described so far, such as having rest days, tapering before a race and eating a wholesome diet, are designed to prepare the body for running well. They are also designed to prolong the running career. And, arguably, they produce the runner’s body. The runner’s body is a lean, and toned body, with its own specific muscle structure (see CMcD’s example at the start of this chapter). Leanness is not only a product of the body work which running entails, but

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is also functional for running. Consequently, lighter runners, such as BS (M, 58, LD/r), expend less energy: Yes, obviously . . . I appreciated at a very early stage that body weight was important, that you know, if you are lumping around an excess 7lbs you are not going to run as fast as you would if you didn’t have the excess weight, so we were conscious I would say, but you get to the stage where you don’t have to be conscious about it, the training takes over in that you don’t have to bother about your weight [my emphasis]. BS shows that athletes can become so attuned to their bodies that the habitual disciplining to which they subject themselves renders the control of body weight unnecessary, and consequently that an excess weight of 7lbs would immediately be sensed. Informants are also concerned about muscle strength and muscle tone. For instance, JS’s (F, 51, LD) concern over poor muscle tone leads her to supplement her already time-consuming training and racing regime with more exercises: Yes, every second day I do 70 press-ups and about 120 sit-ups I think. I do 10 press-ups and then 25 sit-ups and then 10 press-ups so it must be about 70 press-ups and 120 sit-ups every second day. It keeps your stomach muscles tight. I hate having flabby stomach muscles. And also it is good for upper body strength. Achieving and maintaining an athletic body, additionally to maximising the chances of good performance, also enable informants to compare themselves favourably with their unfit contemporaries, as illustrated by IL (M, 61, LD) below: ET Do you think running has had an impact on your physical appearance? Do you think you look your age? IL No . . . Well people say I don’t, I mean I don’t know, I don’t care. It is not a . . . I am not vain . . . am I? It doesn’t bother me. I am lucky I have got all my hair too, quite lucky in that way. No I don’t think so, it has certainly contributed a lot as to how I feel and how I look but people say I don’t look my age so . . . [. . .] But I don’t have the body of a 60-year-old, the ones that I have seen are a wee bit flabby and quite un-toned. No I am quite . . . being so fit – touch wood – it has certainly toned my body and I don’t look like a 60-year-old body.

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We may conclude from the material presented so far that the body is malleable; that is, through its disciplining, the body and its physiological functioning can be altered. What also seems to emerge is that the changes brought to the body are at once localised and systemic. Thus this leads me to examine the nature of the relationship which has been established between the athlete and his or her body to enable these processes of change to take place, that is to identify and explore the discursive framework upon which he or she relies to make sense of these processes.

Embodied discourses I now turn to the frames or discourses athletes utilise to make sense of bodily processes and work out how to intervene on the body. The medical and technical metaphors, perhaps inevitably, emerged as important, especially in circumstances when the body caused problems (such as during illness or injuries). Thus informants objectified their bodies and were inevitably drawn back to the relationship between the corporeal and conscious intention. The informants often compared their bodies to machines. HW (M, 55, LD) was the most consistent and versatile in his use of the mechanical metaphor, which he used to make sense of his training, the need to eat properly and to rest and the occurrence of injury. In the next three quotes he compares his body to a car. In the first one he attempts to explain why his legs, more specifically his joints, have been free of injury: I have always took castor oil, you know the capsules you can get. My mother used to . . . as a kid we used to get . . . you probably won’t remember anything but you used to get castor oil in a big spoon and [. . .] . . . and . . . touch wood . . . they say it is good for your joints and I have had some since I was probably two and my legs are not in bad nick and I feel that has helped because it is like oiling your motor car, oil your joints [my emphasis]. In the second one he refers to his Monday-night training sessions on the track at which, along with younger athletes, he is put through his paces by the club coach. He tries to explain why he takes longer reaching his peak training rate than younger runners but once he does, he finds he can sustain the effort for far longer than them: And they can beat me sometimes for the first eight, they come to the end and they get tired and I get stronger because I have got the big

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mileage in my legs. I can’t go as fast as them but the longer we go my endurance seems to be much stronger. It takes me longer to get up to . . . like a car it is cold to start in the morning and you have got to wait a wee while for the heater to heat up and my body is that way [my emphasis]. It takes a bit longer to heat up but once I get there I can hold it. In the third quote, he describes his most spectacular injury, which took place after a 22-mile run, as follows: So there I was stretching away and I had done about five minutes and all of a sudden I couldn’t move. My whole body was . . . I couldn’t even walk. So they picked me up and they carried me in the shower and oh I couldn’t believe it and they carried me back out again! I thought how can you run 22 miles and you are not fit for nothing, not even to keep your shoes on. [. . .] So I had pulled my hamstring, or so I thought, but I actually pulled a muscle in my hip. But she [physio] was treating me for the hamstring. She thought it was strange, it was not getting better, not healing as it should heal. So then we found out it was the hip muscle and she was saying that because my body was that tired and you are stretching it is like an elastic band, if you stretch it too much it will just snap [my emphasis]. The body is made almost impersonal – variously described as a car or as car parts at the diagnostic stage, in contrast to the phenomenologically rich account of the injury as it happens. The metaphor of an elastic band stretching and snapping not only describes the mechanical process of (over)stretching muscles but also gives the injury an audible quality. Injury and illness featured quite prominently in the informants’ narratives and constituted an important site in which the body is objectified and the mechanical metaphor displayed. Injury and illness are important events in the lives of athletes as they threaten to disrupt, in some cases permanently, the athletic body. I will now explore how athletes make sense of, and manage, injury on the one hand, and illness on the other, particularly at the recovery stage. Although the labour involved in managing injury and illness appears to be focussed principally on the body, we will find that, in practice, athletes operate a return to the mind by seeking to establish a dialogue with their ailing bodies to aid the recovery process. In other words, the mechanical metaphor is not sufficient to make sense of, and recover from, injury. Informants reported a variety of injuries typical of runners and track and field athletes. Injuries to the lower body – such as hip and sciatic

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nerve problems, hamstring pulls and other muscular traumas of the upper leg, knee problems (alignment or cartilage problems), calf muscle tears and problems affecting feet, such as plantar fasciitis or Achilles’ heel injuries – were most prevalent. The process of recognising the presence of a serious injury, its diagnosis and management revealed a complex process at play. In fact I would argue that in the informants’ accounts five types of injuries could be discerned which can be grouped into a “typology’’ (see Table 1). The presence of this typology, as well as reflecting the increasing complexity of the aetiology of sports-related injuries (Tulle 2007/BSA paper), reflects the runners’ propensity to scrutinise bodily events. In other words, injuries and illness are another site in which, firstly, disciplinary techniques are utilised and, secondly, the body is, ostensibly, the primary target of intervention. We can understand how these processes operate by reconstructing injuries and illness as “biographical disruption’’ (Bury 1982). Injuries and illness threaten the integrity of the body, the pursuit of athletic activity and the achievement and maintenance of the athletic body, constituted through the techniques of discipline which have been described above. Furthermore, as Thing (2002) also documented in relation to young Danish netball players, injuries and illness threaten the continuity of the sporting career and of identity. Evidence from the informants’ accounts suggests that health professionals are not always sympathetic to the runners’ plight when they suffer injuries. Therefore as displayed in Table 1 it is functional for athletes to deconstruct injuries and rely on a more complex aetiology than a simple association between injury and running or between injury and ageing. Examples were given by a few informants of other runners Table 1 Informants’ typology of injuries

I II III

Injury Type

Aetiology

Sport-induced: back ache, muscle tears, hamstring pull, Achilles’ heel, hip problems Wear and tear: knee problems (cartilage)

Overuse or change in training, other sport Overuse over a long period of time Revealed by training over a long period of time Not related to running Overuse + ageing

IV

Pre-existing biomechanical or physiological weakness: knee problems (alignment), plantar fasciitis, sciatica Accident: dog bite, broken leg

V

Any from Types I–III

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who had retired because of persistent injuries and it was clear that they themselves wanted to avoid the same “disruption’’. Therefore, firstly, the typology of injuries allows the informants to aim for a more precise diagnosis and aetiology and the design of a recovery plan to effect a return to full training. The risk of misdiagnosing leads, at best, to a prolonged period of disruption and, at worst, to a permanent biographical interruption. Secondly, the diagnostic and recovery process appears to be focused on the affected body part. The repair or fixing metaphor is used in relation to recovery and, as such, is wholly consistent with the use of the machine metaphor highlighted earlier. However, the presence of a typology of injuries and recollections of recovery indicate that the informants’ powers of reflection and reflexivity are constantly invoked: to differentiate between “niggles’’ and serious injuries, to decide whether or not to stop training, to set up a recovery plan (which may or may not include help-seeking) as well as to assess whether the “treatment’’ is working and when to return to full training. Therefore what is also at stake is the establishment of effective communication, of a dialogue, between the runner, his or her body and its sensations. This also applies to serious health problems. This dialogue with the body starts when informants begin to experience symptoms. This is how BS (M, 58, LD/r) describes the lengthy process leading from the appearance of the first symptoms to a definite diagnosis: ET How did you find out? [. . .] BS Well I had had a week’s holiday and went down to the Beach Park at Helensburgh and had a run with my son down there and I didn’t feel well. I felt very weak in the run, didn’t feel very well after it. I had no idea why. It really took a lot more out of me than the run that we had done should have. And I felt . . . the following day I felt very tired. I then had a couple of normal days. I ran Saturday to Sunday and felt alright. Was OK again. I trained on the Monday at lunchtime, trained on Monday night, came home and spoke to my son-in-law and said, “that’s the hardest easy four-mile run I have ever done in my life’’. And he like reminded me of that later and the following morning here in the office I felt as if I was going to pass out. So I decided I had better have it checked out and went straight to Accident and Emergency and it was a sudden drop in pulse rate, I had a very low pulse rate anyway, I always have. [. . .] they kept me in for a few days and said I had an arrhythmia problem.

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[. . .] I had one more occasion when I went into the hospital. I was having . . . always having been a marathon runner I am a compulsive pulse taker, I always have taken my pulse, so I knew exactly what to expect and there was over that period when it was quite erratic and I went in to Accident and Emergency and they kept me in for a couple of days. That was when . . . that would be October 97 and they regulated that by putting me on Warfarin so that was me on the drug up until a few months ago. ET But no operation? No surgery? BS No. Nothing they can do. It is . . . they call it an electrics problem as against being a plumbing problem as far as the heart is concerned.

In this exchange, the informant gives a vivid illustration of the mechanical metaphor when differentiating between arrhythmia and other types of heart disease. Furthermore, the length of time between the appearance of the first symptoms and the final diagnosis (five years) attests to the difficulty of interpreting accurately bodily messages, and appears to confirm the distance between body and mind. At the same time and contradictorily, the introspective and intimate quality of the athletes’ relationship with their bodies, borne out of the disciplinary work functional for athletic achievement, also facilitates the establishment of an effective dialogue. This is in evidence in the informant’s observation that he was a compulsive pulse taker and in a subsequent comment, not reproduced here, that he managed his illness competently, without much current active support from doctors. Thus the disengagement of the body from the mind does not apply at all times, and the mind inevitably creeps back into athletic practice and is wholly implicated in the disciplining and rationalisation of resources functional for athletics. I would like to argue that the achievement and maintenance of a running identity is predicated on an intimate interrelationship between physical, psychological and cognitive processes, rather than the simple preservation of mind–body unity. Leder’s (1990) concept of the “dys-appearing body’’ may apply at the point of diagnosis, but the mind–body unity can be recovered when the dialogue is re-established. The urge to re-establish a dialogue is most graphically illustrated by HW (M, 55, LD), who is otherwise such an ardent exponent of the mechanical metaphor! ET Do you think that sometimes your mind prevents your body from doing things it wants to do?

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HW Oh yes. I mean people saying “Got a new job, work, I cannot do that. I cannot handle that’’. Life in general. I think that running makes you more determined in life. To see a marathon you have got to . . . you have got to do one to know what they are talking about. It is part of your life . . . you bring your body outside in. There may not be enough energy left but it is just sheer determination. If you ask the average person who has done a marathon in the last three miles and I bet they would say, “What the hell am I doing here?’’ They love the running but it is just you want to pick up that wee bus, if there was a bus behind you you could pick up and see you off because actually there is nothing left in your body, you are drained out, outside in and you have used your reserve and other types of things, there is nothing there, it is just to get to . . . ET So do you reckon it is your mind that makes you, that keeps you going the last two miles rather than your body? HW Oh yes . . . . I mean you will find most runners have always had bad marathons and my worst ones were . . . done before ∗∗∗ ∗∗∗∗ and this leg went, that was gone, this one went and the medical people there, there was a . . . your common sense just stops. I mean the last mile you couldn’t have called it running, it was just . . . ET You were shuffling? HW I mean where’s the common sense. I don’t even need . . . you are not even going to win a jackpot, you aren’t going to win anything, it is just your personal achievement. I think your pride is at stake. You want to finish it, the time doesn’t matter, you just wanted to finish it. You are watching people in the desert out there saying “how did you survive?’’ No water for five days but there is something there for them to survive. I know it is not the same thing but I mean . . . . I know something up here says “keep going’’ [my emphasis]. If it tells you that, don’t bother. It can work for you or work against you and I think it only makes you more determined in your personal life to cope with anything. This informant’s commentary articulates the complexity of body work and the constant interaction between mind and body which underpins achievement. Athletic competence is achieved through a range of techniques of regulation, predicated on the deconstruction of the body and its objectification, and the development of an economy of the body. Thus the body is literally made fit for purpose, inscribed with the correct dispositions and attributes. However, according to HW, and as is also reflected in the management of illness and injuries, competence also

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extends to acquiring knowledge about the body by learning to “read’’ the body. In this way, becoming a runner is an apprenticeship during which experience is acquired and embodied. Ultimately, what is achieved is both the runner’s body and embodied mastery (Monaghan 2001) as well as the enfolding of competence in the body and self of these athletes, and it is in this symbiosis that the runner’s identity is achieved. However, some of these processes are potentially put at risk by ageing, an issue to which I now turn.

7 Managing Ageing

Introduction As I have already shown, my informants are all physically active, and thanks to the enlargement of the athletic field, they have been able to pursue an athletic career into their later years. Athletics has come to occupy a prominent position in the conduct of their everyday lives and this has been fostered by the development of practices of regulation designed to maximise bodily resources and the development of an understanding of bodily processes which intersects with dominant narratives. The long-term nature of my informants’ engagement with sports suggests not only that they have successfully harnessed their bodily capital but also that they might be in a position to contribute to the reconstruction of the traditional discourse of old age and ageing. Unlike other agers, even those who are encouraged to lead physically active lives (Grant 2002), my informants, over a time period ranging from 16 to 70 years, have systematically and intensively been striving to improve physical performance. They have subjected themselves to timeconsuming training regimes which have led to dramatic improvements in their physical abilities. They have in the process put their bodies, bodily characteristics and personal resources under scrutiny and have developed mental resources enabling them to maintain high levels of exertion over a long period of time and to the present, except for a few notable exceptions. They have therefore developed a working knowledge of their bodies, supported by a language drawing on conventional ways of talking about the body framed within dominant narratives of bodily management, whilst reflecting on the relationship of the body to the mind in the process of achieving athletic competence and an athletic body and developing a running identity. 114

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How useful is the acquisition of this bodily capital in the experience of ageing and old age? In a cultural context which constructs older bodies as feeble and therefore incompatible with athletic dispositions, the social and cultural position of ageing athletes is contradictory. I will therefore examine the ways in which the apparent conflict between ageing bodies and athletic bodies is negotiated. First of all I will focus on the realisation of age, that is on how informants know that they are ageing (Hallam et al. 1999), including the bodily sensations which ageing generates and how they manifest themselves to the informants. I will examine how informants make sense of ageing, and its role in unsettling the mind–body unity. I will then look at the strategies informants put in place to respond to ageing, that is how informants work to maintain or recover their athletic bodies and identities. This will be interwoven with a signposting of the broader narratives, such as the association of ageing with decline and involution, which informants draw upon to make sense of their ageing, and of their apparently contradictory cultural location as embodying both athletic discipline and ageing. Here I am referring to the interplay between bodily ageing and what Gullette (2003) referred to as “cultural aging’’, that is the intrusion of external processes (discursive, rather than bodily or internal, signifiers of old age and ageing) into the experience and interpretation of the later years, and how this regulates people’s behaviours by encouraging them to assess the legitimacy of their activities according to whether or not they are appropriate for their age. This will lead me to a reflection on the extent to which informants, not only through their participation in athletics but also through their own interpretations of their experiences, are consciously rewriting the discourse of ageing, particularly the relationship between bodily competence and identity.

(Not) being old Ageing forces athletes to confront the ephemerality of the athletic body and identity (Monaghan 2001). The disciplining of the life and of the body required for the achievement of elite performance is threatened and this threat is a constant presence. This is reflected in the ways in which informants talk about age, and particularly about their own location as ageing athletes.

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Informants made a number of claims about their age. They almost always claimed not to be old when asked directly. A typical response to a direct question about age goes like this: ET Now then, are you old? HS What do you mean exactly? Do I think I am old? I am getting on I suppose is what I would say, no one ever likes to say they are old do they? No I wouldn’t say “I am old’’. No. It is all comparative of course against other people but I don’t feel [Informant’s emphasis] old I suppose. Of course when I was younger I would say middle-aged is halfway to the grave so if you lived to 72 then when you are 32 you are middle-aged but of course middle-age starts later, the older you get, doesn’t it? Here HS (M, 54, T&F/r) is drawing several distinctions between being and feeling old, between biological and cultural ageing, and between his own idiosyncratic ageing and that of other people. Thus according to this, there is no real point at which one can say that one is old, given that the label does not really apply to oneself and is a moving target. However, informants have less hesitation to label other people as old, that is to “other’’ those they construct as old. Old people look and act old. Informants made unflattering references to their unfit contemporaries, highlighting weight gain, saggy abdomens and breathlessness during the merest form of physical exertion and the inability to walk at a brisk pace. Being old means letting oneself go, both physically and socially. Expressed differently, one becomes old through both bodily carelessness and the performance of old age. And yet, the informants themselves are not protected from the effects of physical and social ageing. The physical competence achieved by running becomes compromised by ageing processes and this calls for a variety of strategies to protect athletic mastery and identity.

The realization of age The informants have developed a sophisticated language to make sense of their experiences. This language is informed by the long-standing engagement with athletic pursuits at a high level, the intimate knowledge of bodily processes derived from training and competing but also these athletes rely heavily on dominant understandings of ageing and

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old age. Thus athletes know old age primarily through the decline narrative and their familiarity with theories of ageing. The extent to which this “theoretical’’ knowledge is experienced in a sensate way is, as we will see, a moot point. The association of ageing with decline (Gullette 1997) and loss (Thompson 1998) holds a prominent place in the informants’ accounts of their recent experiences. This pervades the way in which they talk about their first encounters with ageing and with the rationalisation which they have undertaken to attempt to accept the changes in performance of which they have become aware. Decline is expressed in several ways: as loss or depletion of bodily strength, as comprehensive and “catastrophic’’ (Thing 2002) and as irreversible. Ageing was brought to the informants’ attention through attrition in performance brought about by loss: loss of speed with shorter strides for runners, or loss of height for jumps. Regardless of age and of the timing of entry into the sport, they reported that they had peaked in their early forties and that by their early or mid-fifties their performance had started to deteriorate in a way which required explication. Usually, loss of speed was noticed in races or in training. Informants noticed it both in speed work or when running over a fixed distance. JS (F, 51, LD) was describing a period of injury and weight gain which she felt had slowed her down. I prompted her further and she described a more fundamental loss of speed: When I go out on a Sunday, we run . . . , we used to run steady seven and half minute miles for 12 miles and it was always 1.15, now it is maybe 1.31, 1.32 and I don’t really feel I am deliberately going any slower but I think maybe we are jogging a bit slower than we used to, so there must be a decrease in performance somewhere I think. The loss of performance is articulated as a permanent rather than as a temporary process. The sense of permanent change is also expressed by HS (M, 54, T&F/r) when he reflected on his own status as an older man and associated it with a shortening of his stride between hurdles: ET What makes you say that [you are getting on]? HS Well I know how much I have slowed down and I know now that I am not going [. . .] to try the hurdles again [. . .]. Your elasticity goes you see and you maybe have noticed yourself but your stride length shortens when you get older.

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What he adds to JS’s own account is a more precise description of the decrements he is experiencing: not simply a loss of time but the need to run more than three steps between hurdles. What HS also stresses is that these changes are located in the body – the body loses its spark and is deprived of strength. The ageing body is thus a more fragile body. The notion of fragility in their encounter with ageing is a recurrent theme amongst the informants’ account. Below I am showcasing two informants with widely different responses to increased perceived fragility. IL (M, 61, LD) continues to race as a Veteran athlete but he is realistic about his chances of winning: In my age category. In the open races some of them only go as high as 50 and I know I will never win another open race, there is no two ways about it, I just . . . the physical power to win an open race is very, very . . . it has gone now. Here IL’s loss of power prevents him from aspiring to beating senior runners. HS (M, 54, T&F/r) has completely retired from track and field athletics. His justification is the risk of injury which would accompany an intensification of training to make up for the losses brought on by ageing: ET And how about achieving the height of the jump, over the hurdle? HS Yes, well, I was able to do that two years ago but I think it would be foolish to train regularly for that now and I would certainly get injured. I am positive. What these two informants are articulating is that they are losing confidence that their bodies would continue performing in desirable ways, that is that they could continue sustaining past achievements. They are experiencing their body as fragile. Furthermore, for them the relationship between ageing and loss is a direct one. This is how HS (M, 54, T&F/r) sums up his situation: Yes, I just do . . . um . . . I’m more of a jogger now because of age preventing me from sprinting and hurdling and jumping [my emphasis]. What this informant is also articulating is his powerlessness in the face of ageing, a point he will make several times over the course of the interview:

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Yes, well the speed really wasn’t there I think. The speed was missing. It had deserted me I think [my emphasis]. Apparently, ageing deprives the athlete of performance and according to this informant this is experienced passively. Thus the ageing body is a body of loss, a fragile body, deprived of power, but which also deprives the athletic body of performance. Furthermore, the ageing body is imprisoned in its essentialism, that is in its declining state. However, paradoxically, the fragility of the body is articulated within a language of (absence of) power. Thus the power and drive in the legs is not necessarily entirely exhausted. Inevitable decline? What is beginning to emerge from these accounts is a reliance on a view of ageing as affecting the whole organism and as inevitable. Therefore it is something that informants anticipate, as expressed by KT (F, 50, UD): ET You think it will be quite sudden? KT No I think it will be a gradual thing. I don’t think I will just get up one morning and run two minutes slower. I think it will be a gradual thing and I hope I have the sense to realise that is what it is and don’t go out and try to train harder to get my times down. I think I have to accept it. It has got to happen [my emphasis]. This informant anticipates her performance to start gradually deteriorating around her mid-fifties. To this extent these accounts appear to be in line with the decline interpretation of ageing. Here KT is also giving hints about the ways in which she might respond to this process of decline (an issue to which I will return later). But she is not yet experiencing the decline she is anticipating despite the fact that, by the time of the fieldwork, she has just entered her fifties. Those who started running much earlier date the process of decline to their late twenties and early thirties: ET So did you find that changing jobs and having an expanding family curtailed your running because you had less time? IL It did yes. ET Or less willingness? IL A bit of both I suppose. You get to a stage . . . I think my peak was when I was 27 or 28, so then you are on a downward spiral. It is not a happy situation because you don’t like getting beaten by guys

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you were beating before but it is a downward spiral [my emphasis]. It means you begin to question your analysis of the situation. And so, I kept going because it was a new club and I was working that way and then I think after that the boom came along and we found too that there were more people beginning to take it up longer because between 32 and 40 I wasn’t doing that much. IL (M, 61, LD) had four children by the time he had reached what he describes as his peak and the start of his “downward spiral’’. Then as his family was expanding further and his job began to get more physically demanding, he entered a fallow period. Despite these other intervening factors, he appears to give greater weight to a decline explanation for his loss of form. When he was 29 year old, MH (M, 67, LD/r) developed an Achilles’ tendon injury which prevented him from competing in championship races. I was interested in the frequency of injuries he had suffered and for several minutes he made a number of points about the inadequacies of sports medicine and the failure of athletic structures to support injured athletes. Upon complaining that he was not receiving adequate help for his injury, he was eventually referred to a doctor: MH Yes, so they sent me to see Sir Adolf Abrahams, so I took a day off work or half a day off work to go and see him and he suggested, “you ought to take up golf old man’’ [my emphasis]. ET And how old were you when he said that? MH 29. ET Oh dear. The discrepancy in the start of the decline process is noteworthy. It is informants who started running in their late teens and twenties and who performed well as juniors and seniors who report such an early decline, a belief which is sanctioned by expert opinion. We are also getting more hints that encounters with medical professionals do not leave open the possibility that “older’’ athletes, that is athletes who are perceived to be past their peak, may be restored to full fitness and thus allowed to resume their activities. In other words, the decline is both inevitable and irreversible. The timing of its onset is highly variable as we have seen, which raises questions about the presence of universal biomarkers of ageing (Butler and Sprott 2000) dear to biogerontologists.

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I will close this section with a quote from BS (M, 58, LD/r), who has had a long running career. He described himself in his late twenties and early thirties as “a good runner’’, good enough to be selected for the top teams in his club and contribute to their success, but not enough for him to win races. On prompting he admitted that, at the time, he did not train strenuously enough to improve on his individual performances:

Oh I didn’t train hard enough, but I didn’t realise that until much later, much later in my career when I started running well as a Veteran I realised that I . . . you know, then realised the importance of different aspects of training which I hadn’t really considered earlier in my career.

At first glance, BS’s critical evaluation of his senior years does not appear to rely on the decline narrative. However, later on, when the interview had shifted to events in his late senior years and early Veteran career, he describes a period of injury and a return to training, focused on marathon training. This proved to be more personally fruitful, and this is how he makes sense of it:

BS Yes, my training increased considerably in that period once I got back running again and there was a constant build up until we came to . . . I have highlighted the period here [on a chronology which he had prepared for the interview] . . . uh . . . 82–85, when I did my best racing over the marathon distance, and trained more seriously over that. And I ran a PB when I was 42, which is nonsense – you shouldn’t be running PBs when you are 42 but I ran 2h24min05s . . . . ET Why not? [...] BS Well you should be able to run your PBs when you are in your prime in racing [my emphasis]. So here I was and I actually progressed on that period through to this period probably when I got interested in running marathons, that I had started off somewhere roundabout . . . I think my first one was about 2h36 min and I just came down and down as I got more interested and realising the training . . . [ . . .] And certainly the 2h24 min certainly equates to a much better marathon performance and my 14min41s in my 5000 metre performance, which led me to believe that had I done the training that . . . a different type of training earlier in my career I could have

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probably been more successful. [. . .] And by the time I had reached that age obviously I had lost some of the speed that I had had earlier on in my career. BS is making three points here: first, his shift to the systematic training required to meet the demands of marathon racing led him not only to complete in under 3 hours for his first marathon but to improve his times in successive years. In effect, the training led to faster finishes and to a PB. Second, he minimises this achievement by pointing out that such improvements are nonsensical, that is they run counter to age-based expectations. He can only give the result meaning by transforming it into its peak age-equivalent, this being located in his late twenties. Thus the PB is only useful for emphasising the value of the training regime which he followed. In itself, and in the context of age-based expectations, it literally makes no sense. Third, the phrasing of the last claim about the loss of speed confirms that it is experienced as the depletion of a reserve caused by age. But BS’s “confusion’’ could also be reinterpreted as the embodiment of a conflict between dominant discourses of ageing, as they serve to codify expectations about body malleability which are age-based, and actual achievements.

Bodies of ageing The fragility and depletion which runners report or anticipate experiencing results from a general “wear and tear’’, that is a comprehensive process which pervades the whole body and imposes what MH (M, 67, LD/r) referred to as “physical limitations’’, which in turn lead to changes in performance. Some informants give a more precise (although not necessarily accurate) or localised interpretation of bodily ageing. CMcD (M, 55, LD), for instance, understands ageing as a process of deterioration which affects the cellular structure of the body: I don’t know, I just presume, I mean I don’t know anything about the body but I just think it is maybe the cells in the body turning off, slowing down [my emphasis], they don’t recover the same. I talk to other colleagues . . . runners who are equals, they do the same training, run as hard, mentally apply themselves to it, yet some are half a minute down.

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JS (F, 51, LD) articulates ageing as loss of elasticity in the tissues, a gradual stiffening, which imperceptibly shortens the stride and deprives the muscles of elasticity for efficiently propelling the body forward: ET If there is a drop in performance, what do you do about it? JS Run harder (laughter). Um . . . what would I do about it? (pause) . . . Well I guess I would reckon I was getting fat or something like that or had not been training hard enough and I would pick up my training probably and try and . . . though this past . . . where we have been running about 1.30 for about 12 miles, this past three weeks I have done that so I think you just have to work harder. As you get older you certainly have to work harder. ET Do you think it is an age thing? JS I think there must be . . . I think that also your tendons and your muscles tighten [my emphasis] so I think that your stride may be shorter, maybe that has got something to do with it. You are not covering . . . you do the same stride but you are not covering the same distance. So I think if you had time . . . if you could stretch more I think that would probably help be more flexible. Thus on the one hand, the biomechanical efficiency of the body is compromised by stiffening. On the other, the body loses its ability to repair itself because of impaired cellular reproduction, which leads to corresponding losses in function. These two interpretations of ageing are located in different body “systems’’ which, it could be argued, correspond to two bodies of ageing: the biomechanical body and the cellular body. The relevance of this is twofold. Firstly, the difficulty for informants to pin ageing down to one single event or locus reflects the paradox of their situation as declining, yet competent athletes. Secondly, ageing takes place in a fragmented way, paving the way for devising strategies to manage topical problems as they appear and thus maintain “functionality’’ (Marshall and Katz 2002). To what extent are informants aware of the biological and biomechanical processes upon which they rely to describe changes in training and performance?

Sensing bodily ageing? Informants initially claimed that the ageing processes which they variously described as wear and tear, stiffening of tissues and cellular

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deterioration were not sensed. In other words, there was nothing in the practice of running and the physical sensations experienced which signalled a drop in speed. In fact, it was only when they had checked their times during (split time) or after a race, or even when they had reviewed entries in their diaries, that they noticed they had lost speed. Such accounts would appear to lend credence to Thompson’s (1992) findings that as people age they feel old only when reminded of being so by illness or by external cues. Thus they take refuge in the ageless and active self (Katz 2000) as a strategy to resist “social’’ ageing. In what follows, DF (M, 56, LD) describes how he came to realise that he had lost time: DF This year I did the Glasgow Marathon in 2h48. I have slowed by 24 minutes in 17 years. ET Does that seem like quite a lot to you? DF Well it has taken me by surprise the way my times have slowed down. I feel I am running just as fast as I was but I know I am not [my emphasis]. I keep saying to my daughter and the other people I am training with that I am struggling to do interval training now at the pace I used to run a marathon [ . . . ]. DF is drawing a distinction between different ways of apprehending change: between objective, linguistic and non-linguistic or sensate cues. DF claims that the change is known, not because it is brought to his attention through the sensation of running more slowly, but because of the evidence presented to him by his times. However, his choice of terminology brings in some ambiguity. This ambiguity is found even more prominently in JBF’s (M, 50, HR) description of his encounter with speed loss (what he terms “slippage’’): JBF No I just know I am not going as fast. I mean, I just think I know I was running Zeerzinale this year and I did 3.16 or something and my best time is 2.55 and I was aware that I wasn’t running as fast but I . . . well I mean I was taking split times anyway but the body can’t . . . felt it was not running as fast here [my emphasis] but there isn’t much I can do about it. ET Right. It is interesting that you said the body felt it wasn’t going as fast. JBF In some races I know I am not quite as fast. I mean, the body doesn’t notice I am going slower but yes I am slower [my emphasis].

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There was a short hesitation from JBF, as well as a contradiction in his analysis, which reinforces the suspicion that there is a conflict over how to factor in the body in claims about feelings of age. There is an attempt to draw a sharp distinction between feeling and knowing that changes are taking place, consistent with resistance narratives, such as those described by Thompson et al. (1990), but, as I will now show, this distinction becomes difficult to sustain. Informants are in fact well aware of their ageing in sensate ways. For instance, they often make reference to needing longer recovery time than in the past, experiencing muscle soreness and fatigue following hard races, as exemplified by DF (M, 54, LD) below: ET So do you feel tired or do you have aches and pains? DF I feel tired. It is not so much aches and pains. I just go out and I feel I can’t run hard today [my emphasis]. This feeling of tiredness has led him to restructure his training schedule: DF [ . . . ] I used to say I can’t run that slow. I never really had an official coach but people say to me that you have got to run at a recovery pace, less than 7 minute mile pace. And I said, “I can’t run that slow’’. [End of side of tape] ET yes, so now you find that you can run 7 minute miles? DF Yes. I mean I do train with my daughter [who is 23 years old]. In the old days she used to tell me off; on a Sunday, she would say, “This is a recovery run, slow down.’’ But now I am telling her to slow down. We set off on a Sunday, we used to set off together but now she sets off down the road in front of me and I have gradually got to wind up the pace and I find that the first two or three miles I am struggling a bit, running with her, and then I get into my pace. I suppose that is just getting the looseness, stiffness out of my joints. In this exchange, DF concurs with other informants that it is his body which is imposing changes in his training strategy: not only does he need to have two recovery days but on those days his training speed is much less than he ever expected of himself. He is also describing some sensations associated with ageing – feelings of stiffness which attenuate as his body warms up. Furthermore, with the use of “now’’, he is contrasting his current form with past performance (his daughter used to ask him to slow down, now he asks her to slow down). Thus in these accounts,

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the informants reproduce a tendency to resist ageing by claiming it does not make itself felt, as if therefore it did not take place. But it certainly must do, especially given the “catastrophic’’ (Thing 2002) nature of the change which both JBF and DF reported. Furthermore, in other instances the informants talk about the pleasant sensations which running generates: the joys of running outdoors and enjoying the scenery, the sensation of the wind coursing through one’s hair as one runs well, or even, as in the example below, the near hypnotic trance that IL (M, 61, LD) experiences in racing and training: Well you feel . . . basically it is just looking around you. What happens is you feel good and you are running good and you feel as if you are doing very well and then eventually you get your time at the end and you say to yourself, “well that’s fair for my age-group, I am quite happy with that’’. You are actually not thinking about too much when you are out there. When you are running fast it is not a conscious effort, it is a sort of sub-conscious effort because you are not actually thinking about anything. You are just running and you are on a plane and then you get the pain then OK so then you are waking up and say, “OK so I am going to push that wee bit.’’ But when you are going fast, when you are going good then it is a sort of different world. I don’t know if that is an easy way to describe it, does that make sense. You are on a different plane, and you could call it hallucinating probably and “aye you can do that’’ in a race. When you are training . . . but I found when I was training too I could go out and if I had any problems I could think them out when I was out running and get a solution for them and that was fine but that’s away from your question. Thus, although ageing appears to lead to a limiting of physicality, that is of performance, and also of mobility, as found in all the accounts without exception, nevertheless it does not lead to a dulling of the physical experience of running. On the contrary it appears to sharpen the athletes’ proprioceptive6 skills, that is their awareness of bodily movement and their bodily competence in their physical environment. Nor is running an exclusively physical experience – we can see from IL’s account above that a dialogue, similar to that necessary to manage illness and injuries (see Chapter 6), becomes established between the runner and his or her body to assess athletic ability, to structure training and also to improve performance.

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The ageing body is therefore a body in flux – literally because it is constantly changing, but I also refer here to the to-ing and fro-ing that informants undertake in their attempts to describe their encounters with bodily ageing. Thus perhaps we could understand accounts of ageing as organised around a series of polarities or dialectical statements, for instance not only between sensing and not sensing ageing, but also between change and constancy, decline and functionality – in sum, a complex process involving existing discourses, personal experience and external changes. In view of the observation that the ageing body is a body of increasing limitations, I would now like to examine in detail the strategies which athletes put into place to respond to ageing processes, that is how they perform and talk about age and how they manage bodily decline.

Managing ageing The ambiguities in the realisation of ageing which the informants’ accounts reflect are also found in the strategies they report having put in place to manage ageing. Each informant navigates on a continuum between compliance and resistance to biological and to cultural ageing. Three broad, but by no means well-circumscribed, groups have emerged in the current management of the later years: one group comprises informants who have continued training and competing at levels largely unchanged for the last ten years, or, at any rate, they have approached their training according to principles similar to those acquired earlier in their athletic careers. A second group gathers people who have largely abandoned competitive athletics and have refused to join the Veteran Movement. There is a small but significant third group of informants who have been driven to partial or near complete retirement by illness. The extent to which the ageing body is the source and focus of these different strategies also varies. Thus continued high levels of involvement are not incompatible with an acceptance of bodily decline. Retirement from the sport is not necessarily connected with a high incidence of injuries. And the pleasures associated with athletic pursuits may override the bodily decrements brought on by ageing. Thus what is striking is the complexity of the informants’ repertoire, and particularly the tension which may arise between dominant narratives of ageing, including those that pathologise bodily change, the lived experience of bodily ageing and the maintenance of the athletic body.

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Body at risk What emerges from the informants’ accounts is that they sense their bodies to be at risk. As we saw in the previous chapter, they are placed at risk by injury and illness. But ageing is another risk factor which renders the body fragile and deprives it of performance. In fact, as I will highlight below, ageing operates both in and on the body and also as an external factor acting to enfeeble the older body. Both internal and external ageing place the informants’ athletic identity at risk. I will show how athletes protect performance and their athletic identity. As has already emerged, informants perceive a causal link between the passage of time and injury. However, the direction of this causal link is difficult to establish from their accounts. The most striking illustration of this perception is HS (M, 54, T&F/r), who, as we saw in Chapter 5, has retired from track and field athletics without any remarkable history of injury but an awareness of the body placed at risk of injuries by ageing. This informant pathologises ageing, and this is his cue for retiring from active training and competing. In contrast, JI (M, 65, LD) reverses the causal link established by HS, by identifying his injuries as the primary cause of his loss of form, in interaction with ageing. One of his main concerns is to retain functionality. In between these two positions, we find that there is continued reliance on the typology of injuries developed in the previous chapter, according to which ageing is only one cause of injury alongside accidents, overtraining and overuse, and poor biomechanical efficiency. A similar strategy is adopted by some of the informants who have become ill and have been forced to retire from competitive sports, such as BS (M, 58, LD/r) and BC (M, 69, LD/r). They deflect the risks brought on by ageing by advancing the hypothesis that running postponed the onset of illness, despite some of the evidence presented by Hood and Northcote (1999) which suggests that the hearts of endurance runners may be placed at risks of disease similar to those of strength trainers.

ET [ . . . ] I was just wondering whether the arrhythmia episode, if you interpreted this as a kind of old age thing? BS Um . . . No I don’t think so. Yes obviously it is a problem that I have got but I don’t think it really is. And I don’t really feel that my running has been a contributory factor in me having it. I think maybe that my running had been a contributory factor in keeping

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it at bay for a greater length of time. I think that maybe if I had been less active and much heavier then the arrhythmia might have hit me earlier and maybe harder than it has done. The relationship to ageing and its impact on the body is indeed quite complex and ambiguous: here BS (M, 58, LD/r) takes a fatalistic attitude to his illness – running itself is not seen as a contributory factor in the development of his arrhythmia and thus he subscribes to a disease prevention model of exercise. He also resists any causal association between ageing and the development of his illness. Elsewhere he appears to resist the association between ageing and immobility. He has retained a training routine, alternating walking and jogging, orienteering and coaching. It could therefore be argued that, in their practice, what most informants resist are the pressures to give the body over to ageing, that is the internal enfeeblement of the older body. However, as will now become clear, the pressure to enfeeble bodies may also originate from external sources. The enfeebled body I have already alluded to the pressures to stop training applied by some medical professionals. JI’s (M, 65, LD) account is rich in detail about various, largely negative, encounters with medical professionals. He reports hostility from doctors and in at least two instances was refused treatment. Below is a long exchange prompted by a question on the greater frequency of injuries over time, which this informant had already mentioned earlier in the interview, and during which he gave vent to his frustration. It is worth reproducing a susbstantial section of this athlete’s account: ET That’s good. Let’s go back to the injuries. You said they have been getting perhaps a bit more frequent? JI Oh in the last 14 years I have had serious ones. I broke my leg, stress fracture, I have had my cartilage out and my hip started bothering me as well and I have had X-rays on that and they have told me it is wear and tear on the hip and as I get older . . . they won’t define how old but they say the hip might go, there is a lot of wear and tear there [ . . . ]. I think injuries come back, there is always something missing. I don’t know if it helps you slow down. I think as well when you get injuries when you are older and things start . . . you are not doing great in a race and not doing a very good time and you think to yourself “ach I am getting older’’ and you have got to accept this and then you do start accepting it a wee bit. Although I don’t feel I am an

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old fogey or anything like that but I think you do accept it, you start making excuses for yourself a wee bit [my emphasis]. You think “I am getting older, I can’t go on forever.’’ I don’t know . . . sometimes you do hide behind your injury but when your performances take a dip you . . . your times . . . you start running rotten times . . . it is terrible. ET So are you suggesting perhaps you are not doing as much to recover from injuries? JI Probably but as I say it is very difficult, you have got to get treatment for anything. Like that time I told you I broke my leg. I got chased out of the hospital and walked about with a broken leg for three weeks because I told them I did it when I was running. The doctors are . . . most weird . . . the doctor I have got is not bad but I have been to the hospital twice with injuries and each time I have been chased and they wouldn’t X-ray my leg and so eventually I had to go to my doctor and said, “Look give them a ring. I will pay money to get this X-rayed there is something, it is driving me nuts, I think it is broken.’’ He gave them a ring to get me an X-ray and they X-rayed my leg, after three weeks of walking about, sweating, breaking into sweats every time I turned in bed breaking into a sweat. And it turned out you see the fracture line of the bone was starting to heal after three weeks and I got to the hospital complaining about this, saying I had told the guy I felt it was stress fracture, I had heard the crack and all the rest of it and he chased me. And I got a letter back and actually the doctor’s explanation was a load of lies you know but nobody . . . I tell people in the club if ever you have got to go to the hospital with an injury don’t tell them you are a runner, you have got to lie to get treatment. Because as soon as you say you are a runner their attitude is it is self-inflicted. [ . . . ] I went with that cartilage I told you. I went there, I went to the National Health and the doctor told me to go and play bowls. I was 55 and he told me to go and play bowls. I said “I don’t want to play bowls, I want to be a runner, I have been a runner all my life and I am still running well apart from this knee that is hurting me.’’ He said, “Well just don’t run.’’ I said “That’s not the point. If it is hurting me when I run there is something the matter with it, don’t you agree?’’ I tried every argument with him but he wouldn’t do anything for me, he just told me to come back in three months. So I went private and the guy told me, “I think it’s your cartilage.’’ So I had to pay about £1700 to get my knee operated on and get my cartilage sorted out and I was back running in three weeks, so . . . [ . . . ]

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JI complains that runners are often denied adequate treatment by doctors, and this is informed by two separate narratives. The first is that runners’ injuries are self-inflicted and the second is that injuries are the result of ageing and are therefore not amenable to treatment. In the latter, the discourse of bodily decline on which doctors appear to rely gives rise to prescriptions to moderate or even to give up physical activity (for instance taking up golf or bowling). Thus the appropriate response to injury in later life is to engage in forms of activity which are more appropriate to one’s age, perhaps exacerbating the descent to immobility that ageing threatens (Singh 2002). Other informants reported similar assumptions from lay people, usually friends and neighbours. When KT (F, 50, UR) turned 50, she was given a present which signified that her athletic training was perceived, by some, as inconsistent with her age, despite the encouragement and support that they also gave her when she was competing in important races: ET Right. So for instance you have never experienced people saying things “you should rest at this time in your life’’? KT Oh I have had a few comments lately because I had a 50th birthday in July and I had a few people saying, “no doubt you are hanging up your running shoes!’’ KT’s encounter with critics of her running appears consistent with the construction of menopausal women (Vertinsky 1998) as at greater risk of frailty and needing to rest, whose shrinking levels of energy should be diverted to more appropriate, less physically demanding, activities.7 And although she claims not to feel affected by such challenges, nevertheless she deploys a range of counter-arguments, one of which is the commitment and performance displayed by Veteran athletes. In the face of such hostility, how do runners give legitimacy to their continued engagement with athletic pursuits? To elucidate this let us now turn to the meanings which they give to their performance and the training to which they subject themselves. I will show how these processes contribute to the reconstruction of the ageing body as an athletic body. Reconstructing the athletic body Without exception, all the informants continued to “move’’, regardless of injury or fear of injury, serious illness or professional and lay expectations of age-appropriate behaviour. This is reflected in their participation

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in the Veteran Movement (with only two exceptions). BS (F, 67, T&F) made a case for a Veteran athletic structure, that is for the reconstruction of competitiveness in the later years. Because of the speed and strength attrition which affects bodies as they age, older runners cannot aspire to winning outright against younger adults, especially in “explosive’’ events. The Veteran Movement provides a more meaningful framework in which to compete: the five-year age-groupings allow competitors to pit themselves against others in the same age-groups, and the age-adjusted tables can be used to locate one’s performance against other competitors of the same age, against younger athletes and against one’s own performance over time. Thus age-adjusted tables can act as a handicap tool, allowing athletes of widely differing ages to compete together by factoring in expected age-based decrements, whilst remaining meaningful to individual runners. For instance, BS’s performance in the indoor 60-metre sprint in 2001, at 10.05 seconds, had world-class status for her age and would equate to a 7.64 seconds race by a 30-year-old sprinter. It is thus more impressive than the performance of the 36-year-old who won the same race in 8.27 seconds, but was off the same comparator by a wider margin and was also only of national-class status for her age (Steedman 2001). SW (F, 56, T&F), another track athlete who only started competing in her early forties and has therefore less experience than BS (F, 67, T&F) above, has accumulated several PBs for the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the triple jump and the long jump when she was in her early fifties. SW My peak was (long pause) . . . um . . . um 95 [age 51]. I done 4.62 for the long jump, which was a world record. ET Oh. SW A world record, a world record for that. And the same year I done 9m21, indoors, which was a world record and the same year I done 9m40 outdoors, which was a British record. Indoor and outdoor are separate, different, so it was the same year I got the world record and the British record. Although SW’s long-jump distance is nearly 3 metres shorter than the distance achieved by a female athlete in her “peak years’’, when subjected to age-grading the difference shrinks to roughly 1m25. And its status as a world record in that age-group that year gives it both value and meaning. The situation is somewhat different for long-distance runners who have greater opportunities to race and can do so either in open races

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or in Veteran events. Because of the popularisation of long-distance running and a corresponding increase in races generally, the opportunity to compete in events which combine an elite field and amateur runners of all abilities is great. This is how IL (M, 61, LD) makes sense of his own performance the previous weekend: IL And even nowadays the standards are very, very high. I mean I was number 100 in the whole race on Saturday and I ran very well even if I say so myself. They were categorising it in different age-groups as well, five-year age-groups, 40–45 and I dare say there were a lot of 45s and 50s behind me as well but um . . . . ET So you were 100 out of a field of how many overall? IL I think it was 320 they said. So I was in the higher third of the race. But then you find any open races like that these days there is more veterans competing than there ever was. You will probably find half and half, half are over 40 and half are under that and it is just the fact that people are beginning to realise that “oh I am not a crock because I am turned 40’’ and they are really taking it on. It is a good sign in some respects. I have no regrets. Despite his age, IL finished in the top third of the race, whilst coming third in his age category. In this instance both results are meaningful although it is the second result which attracts a medal. Endurance events, such as ultra and hill running, also enable the normal criteria for judging performance to be challenged. JG (M, 50, UR), in a letter dated 20 March 2003, wrote that he had placed second the previous year in the Antarctic Marathon (the winner was 31 years old and won by only 5min14s). A few years before the interview, JG entered and completed the Marathon des Sables. This event is held in the Moroccan Sahara, and consists of five races run on consecutive days in desert conditions. The distances range from 18 km to 76 km. It is a physically demanding event: over and above having to cover 198 km in a maximum of six days, runners have to deal with dry heat, boulder strewn terrain and sand. He shared a tent with eight other British competitors (all male), one of whom was in his twenties and failed to finish. He attributes his own performance (compared to that of younger runners) to his 36 years of experience in running and greater biomechanical efficiency. Thus in these two instances, age aided performance. Female ultra runners like KT (50) and IW (49) can also measure their accomplishments in their ability to outrun other runners, whether

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younger ones or men, or to take part in events which test both physical and psychological endurance. IW specialises not only in 24 hour track races, 50 km and 100 km races, but also in events which she organises with her husband. For instance, she ran mostly on her own in the Southern Pennines, covering 212 miles (132.5 km) in eight days, whilst her husband provided back-up. She also remarks that in ultra running gender differences disappear: ET So do you sometimes beat men? IW Oh I beat loads of men. Yes. I usually come quite far up the ranking. When it comes to . . . I beat T [her husband] at the ultra distance running too, it is very rare for him to beat me at ultras because I am stronger and I am determined and I will keep going. Now I am trying to think what particular ones . . . but there’s always men and always quite a few. I remember the year that I did the West Highland Way . . . (looking at diaries) . . . not that one but the first time I did it I think 50 started of which 22 finished and I was 14th. And there were only three women in it so that gives you an example on an extreme basis what it can be like. Later she adds, in response to a question on her recent training and performance, that she has experienced little change in her times. However, her times could improve if she changed her approach to training, tailoring it more closely to race preparation and introducing speed sessions. Therefore, long-distance events give both the ageing body and the female body an advantage to measure performance because they allow competitors to deploy a different range of skills and to show off their biomechanical or even psychological advantage over other runners. Thus, to sum up, with the enlargement of the athletic field, that is the development of Veteran athletics, the popularisation of long-distance running and the emergence of endurance competition, older athletes have developed different criteria for judging performance. Athletes can give meanings to their performance by choosing to enter an endurance event, completing it and placing well, by running faster than runners in younger age-groups and by competing for a win or a place in their respective age-groups. Although they codify linear physical decline, the age-graded tables can be used to the advantage of older athletes, by allowing the latter to monitor improvements in their times and distances over time despite ageing and by comparing their performance, through a mathematical transformation, with those of younger athletes. In fact,

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as EL (F, 59, T&F) noted, athletics is the only sport where athletes look forward to growing older so they can start beating other athletes in the next age-group. In the pursuit of elite performance, these athletes, as was shown in the previous chapter, subject themselves to forms of training targeted at the body and the achievement of physical characteristics consistent with elite performance. However, this bodily labour takes place in a dialogical relationship with the mind, that is they have developed a tendency to reflexivity, borne out of intimate knowledge of bodily processes and manifested in a dialogue between physical and cognitive processes. This dialogue takes place in different situations: for instance, during physically arduous performances, when the body no longer has the resources to continue and is rescued by the wilful mind, or when the body is injured or ill and an interpretation of the severity of the symptoms is required to decide whether or not to rest and to seek help. A third situation has emerged in which this dialogue takes place: in the encounter between the limitations engendered by biological and biomechanical ageing and the requirements of the athletic body. I have just shown that despite claims that ageing is not felt, running itself yields particular forms of physical sensibilities which give athletes sensations of speed, of pleasurable enjoyment and of tiredness and in which, in effect, they develop a wholly idiosyncratic relationship with their physical environment. Thus ageing, traditionally interpreted as loss of physical control and intentionality (Kontos 2003), stands in apparent contradiction with the will to control and the achievement of embodied competence (Monaghan 2001) upon which athletics derive its meaning. Below I examine how informants manage this apparent contradiction.

Training the ageing body In the previous chapter I described in detail the training regimes to which these informants have variously subjected themselves over time. I have shown that, far from decreasing their training intensity when they became Veterans, most informants in fact went for a greater rationalisation of their training, from ad hoc, largely idiosyncratic and locally based methods to more “scientific’’, routinised and standardised training methods, in some cases supervised by accredited coaches. Furthermore, this disciplining is consistent with an economy of running designed not only to prepare the body for competition but also to utilise its resources parsimoniously to conserve energy and peak at the right time. As BS (M, 58, LD/r) argued, athletes who reached their peak in senior years are less

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likely to achieve as Veterans because they have depleted their reserves of strength. And in many ways, both MH (M, 67, LD/r) and HS (M, 54, T&F/r) embody this model of bodily use. However, what is all this training for? Are informants training to counteract or even reverse ageing processes? This would give substance to understandings of old age as a disease which can be eradicated. Thus athletics could be understood as an anti-ageing strategy. The informants’ accounts do not bear this out. Informants like BMcB (M, 70, LD) and JS (F, 51, LD) train remarkably strenuously and appear to come closest to engaging in anti-ageing pursuits. JS attributes her recent loss of speed as much to losses in biomechanical efficiency as she does to weight gain or inadequate training. BMcB, despite a heart attack 12 years before the interview, resumed full training and a full racing calendar (against medical advice) soon after he left hospital and is currently aiming to match his achievements to those when he was in his fifties. However, BMcB and JS are aware of the limitations placed on their training by bodily ageing. EL (F, 59, T&F) explains the relationship between training and ageing: I don’t know, you can’t forever go on getting faster. You have got to accept that you are getting older therefore you won’t. But I don’t think . . . I don’t know how hard I will have to go, there is a limit obviously. I think you have got to go with what your body is telling you and there is going to be a point when I am going to get slower, I mean that is nature. Hopefully it won’t be this year but over the next few years obviously you are going to get slower, but you can see that from the record times. But having said that, the times are . . . people are moving up, more people are taking an interest in it and the times are getting faster as you get older. But that is from a few years back when people weren’t training as hard possibly, you know. But I think there is a limit as to how hard you can train. [ . . . ] Up until now over the last few years I have got faster but that is because I think I hadn’t done my full potential in training. I have increased the training and I think that is why . . . well I don’t know you can say people have natural speed but I think I have got that there and the training is possibly bring that out but eventually it doesn’t matter how much training you do, the times are not going to get faster. EL is not only showcasing her own training and the results it has yielded. She is also arguing that previous cohorts of Veteran track and field athletes did not get the opportunity to train as hard and as effectively as she is currently doing. We can therefore conclude two things. First, the

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purpose of training, and of taking part in athletics, is less to postpone ageing than it is to explore how strenuously the older body can be exercised and how competent it can become or remain. Secondly, EL and other informants are on the cutting edge of training and performance. The enfeeblement of older bodies therefore relates to the limits imposed by inadequate training or advice informed by cultural beliefs about the age-appropriate use of the older body. In the process, the notion of natural aptitude which featured so prominently among first-wave athletes gets demolished in favour of a discourse of bodily labour. One could therefore argue that, through the pursuit of athletic excellence, older runners are reconstructing their embodiment, especially as it relates to notions of “natural’’ ageing imposed on culture to maintain, and in some cases to achieve, an athletic body. They do this by altering the fleshiness of the older body, by building muscles and controlling its weight and size. They embody physical competence and physical awareness. In this way they can control the way their bodies move, and by the achievement of an intimate knowledge of bodily processes (acquired through years of taking part in athletics), they can manage injuries and illness. To this list I would also add that they are challenging the invisibility of older bodies. Thus for IW (F, 49, UR), and her children, the decrements of old age are not a barrier to the use of public spaces: As I say, there is this lovely old lady that runs called Jenny W from Dundee. [ . . . ] she has stopped doing the marathons now, she does the half and she is in her eighties and OK she shuffles along but just to be there and just doing it is absolutely wonderful. Well I would quite like to think that when I was Jenny W’s age that I could still do that. There is no doubt about it, it keeps her young as well. Because how many women that age do you see walking even? Up and down the road? [my emphasis].

Rewriting the discourse of ageing? This chapter has explored the apparent conflict between athletic and ageing bodies. A complex picture is emerging in the ways in which informants become aware of their own ageing, the strategies they put in place to manage ageing and how they negotiate their embodiment. They have at their disposal a range of narratives within which to make sense of their experiences and, on the surface, they draw upon two traditional narratives. On the one hand, they rely on the narrative of decline by showcasing loss of control and the body at risk of fragility. On the

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other hand, they appear to respond to ageing with the resistance narrative through the maintenance of functionality. Here we could interpret the pursuit of athletic endeavours as a way of resisting and denying ageing, as Marshall and Katz (2002) found in relation to the maintenance of sexual functionality. However, in the case of these athletes this is perhaps too simplistic. Firstly, as was shown in the previous chapter, over a long period of time these informants have endowed themselves with a range of dispositions, habits and affectations consistent with athletic achievement and these have become incorporated in their perception schema. Secondly, they have subjected their bodies, through the discourse of rationality and power, to a wide range of techniques of discipline and routinisation, which has led to the fashioning of an athletic self. This appears to have allowed them to develop a bodily awareness which distinguishes them from non-athletes, by giving them greater confidence in their bodies. Whilst ageing is indeed perceived as a threat to the athletic body, and thereby to the athletic self, the techniques acquired over time to counter what Monaghan (2001), in the context of bodybuilders, referred to as the ephemerality of the athletic body can be used to minimise the hiatus between the ageing and the athletic body. Thus as they age, informants continue subjecting their bodies and themselves to an economy of running, such as strenuous and targeted training and the proper management of bodily resources. They also continue to identify themselves as athletes. In addition, particularly with the development of the Veteran Movement, they are able to reconstruct athletic performance and bodily competence in more complex ways. Winning is no longer simply to beat the field or to achieve the best performance ever, it is now given additional layers. Thus performing well could range simply from finishing an event (for instance JG completing the Marathon des Sables) to winning or achieving a world record in one’s age-group and beating younger runners. There is another interesting layer to this reconstructed performance: when runners look forward to moving up to their new age-group, they are in effect willing themselves to age, and setting new targets to beat. As we can see, the management of ageing is complex and the informants’ experiences, as well as their articulation of their experiences, force us to revisit Featherstone and Hepworth’s (1995) Mask of Ageing approach. The hiatus between bodily ageing and bodily functioning which the informants have articulated, combined with the tendency to seek continuity in identity and to claim youthfulness, would suggest that

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they use running as a way of altering the mask. However, their claim to an athletic identity has a basis in their embodied competence, rather than in their disembodiment. And the reconstruction of performance signals an acceptance of bodily ageing. Thus the notion of athleticism is stretched to encompass a wide variety of ways of measuring competence. All this is carried out in the full realisation that the body is not infinitely malleable however. Ageing, injury (or the fear of injury) and illness attest to the undeniability of bodily finitude. One also has to take into consideration the continued engagement with the lifeworld of running, which is a characteristic of all the informants, and the pursuit of embodied performance, embodied competence and embodied knowledge which it continues to yield, to embrace this complex process. Thus Veteran athletes appear to have found ways of ageing which are not predicated on the rejection of the body, nor simply on its abandonment to biological inevitability, but which point the way to a reconstruction of the discourse of ageing and, just as importantly, to an alteration in the social location of agers.

8 Mapping an Embodied Sociology of Ageing

This book set out to explore embodiment amongst older social actors via Veteran elite runners. The experiences on which I shed light in the preceding chapters serve as justification that the ageing body must be included in theoretical innovations in sociology. In what follows, I will propose alternative ways of making sense of ageing in which the sociologies of the body, sport and ageing are mutually informed. This cross-fertilisation between the three sociologies has been facilitated by a close scrutiny of the modalities of embodiment adopted by my research informants. The findings reflect the extent of the embeddedness of ageing in broader social and cultural projects. The premium given by Master athletes to bodily competence and, relatedly to bodily appearance, their acceptance of body work and functional competence as an individual responsibility, the unsettling of traditional lifecourse, age-based expectations which they embody, their recourse to well-rehearsed narratives of ageing and the body, all serve to include ageing social actors into the mainstream of sociological theorising. Another key point to make at the outset is that capturing intimate bodily processes among agers has allowed me to bring to life the theoretical connection between embodiment, agency, social location and identity. Before proceeding with the exposition of the theoretical development which the work presented in this book is enabling me to put forward, I will return to the current state of theorising in ageing and identify a range of insights which offer promise but need to be further elaborated. Similarly there are areas of theorising in relation to the body and sport which, whilst useful, nonetheless have been found lacking. 140

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Some missed opportunities in the sociology of ageing Theorising on later life has undergone upheavals in the last ten years. Concerns over the “facts’’ of ageing (Lynott and Lynott 1996), prevalent at the birth of social gerontology in the middle of the 20th century, have made room for a more complex and, I would argue, more sophisticated picture. The role of agers themselves in this process should be acknowledged. An increasing number of research participants have shared with researchers not just their accounts but also their own interpretations of their ageing experiences. This is because, as Gubrium and Wallace (1990) remind us, lay people, too, engage in theorising when they attempt to understand the way they manage their lives or the circumstances in which their lives are led. At the outset, and in echo of Katz (1996) and Biggs et al. (2003: 7), it is worth noting that “the types of theorizing espoused by social gerontologists in part, affect social control of the elderly’’. What this means is that theorising and the knowledge produced in social gerontological endeavours contribute to the constitution of ageing and old age. Thus the theorist has to be careful not to create new forms of alienation, and this applies to the lay theorist too. The critique of agelessness (Andrews 1999) and productive ageing (Katz 2001/02), two prominent “anti-ageing’’ strategies, is useful in this respect. It is forcing us to be reflexive and vigilant in the ways we contribute insights to social gerontology which may in turn impose new normative obligations and forms of regulation on agers themselves. Another important aim of theorising is to interrogate and account for the social location of older people. What is at stake are improvements in the social and cultural position of agers. Class and gender have been identified as key factors structuring the experience of ageing and old age (Vincent 1999), but increasingly age is seen as a key determinant of life chances and the emphasis should be on theorising ageing as change, rather than solely old age (Jamieson and Victor 2002). The concern over the lived experience of the ageing body is relatively recent (Tulle-Winton 2000). Ageing bodies have been described and photographed in popular culture (Blaikie 1999; Hepworth 2000) but their phenomenology is not well known or recorded outside of functional and cognitive decrements. And yet, as has increasingly been emphasised in recent sociological developments, the body is not merely a passive vessel which simply reflects our structural location; rather it can be

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transformed by social change and even initiate social change. Paradoxically, despite the ubiquity of older people and the emphasis placed on the maintenance of active lifestyles in contemporary society, we have few insights into the phenomenological experience of ageing bodies, and the potential they carry for social transformation is even less well investigated. The trick is to find theoretical and conceptual handles which bring out the complexity of the ageing experience. This complexity is already visible in recent social gerontological theorising. The focus has variously been on structures, social and bodily practices and identity. The overarching perspectives from which ageing and later life have recently been explored are located in a critique of the dominant discourse of ageing and later life, fuelled primarily by medicalisation as I explored in Chapter 1. The medicalisation of later life has indeed produced a problematic body. As Vincent (2003b) has argued, the body is constructed both as the curse of ageing and as the key to resisting old age and ageing. This is compounded in culture by the desirability of competent functioning and the premium placed on the body beautiful (Turner 1996). The problem with the ageing body has been approached in several ways. Gullette (1997, 2003) focuses primarily on cultural ageing. She identifies the decline narrative, prevalent in North American society, which, she argues, marginalises and oppresses older people as they face a range of cultural cues which devalue their bodies and their cultural position. The battle lines are placed on resisting and overturning these cultural pressures. The ageing body is held to pose problems for ageing individuals because of its construction as loss – loss of social and cultural status and loss of self. The Mask of Ageing approach (Featherstone and Hepworth 1995) has marked a turning point in social gerontology, as it has theorised a link between bodily and social ageing. According to this perspective, in order to counter processes of marginalisation on the one hand and bodily deterioration on the other, agers would give primacy to an ageless self and downplay bodily ageing (Basting 1998). Bury’s (1982) notion of “biographical disruption’’ constructs a close link between the reduced potential for agency – let’s call it biographical continuity – and bodily disruption such as that brought on by illness, injury or biological ageing. Bodily ageing initiates an inevitable break with a youthful past. Here, paradoxically, the ageing experience is being reduced to its physiological manifestations. Another is to extend the middle years through leisure and consumption (Gilleard and Higgs 2000), from which alternative identities can be fashioned. I have already

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addressed the problematic nature of these strategies in Chapter 1. The phenomenology of bodily ageing cannot be reduced to its effacement in the most optimistic instances, nor, in the most pessimistic ones, to its mediation by medicine. Furthermore, consumption is only one modality of agency which can be undone by physical ageing. Thus there is little attention paid to the notion of embodied agency as we age. Furthermore, all these strategies assume that old age itself can be neatly bounded. In contrast, there are at least three other perspectives which showcase embodiment in ways which may offer a way out of the theoretical impasse. Vertinsky (1998) critically explores the role played by medicine in the enfeeblement of older people, especially older women, thus driving them to fulfil expectations of physical frailty. Lock’s (1998) notion of “local biology’’ is also useful: it draws attention to the contingent nature of bodily ageing, and therefore challenges the universalisation of biological processes which Western medicine promotes. But just as importantly, Lock shows that the social context in which ageing is experienced may have as much salience as sensate manifestations of biological processes, and may even influence the modalities of these manifestations. Lastly, Kontos’ (2003) notion of “embodied intentionality’’ restores some agency to people whose conscious sense of self has been eroded by cognitive impairments brought on by Alzheimer’s disease by pointing to the processes of idiosyncratic bodily inscriptions which take place when we use our bodies. These developments open up opportunities for more ambiguous and complex understandings of ageing and old age. Here the body takes centre stage, partly in a critique of the dominant discourse of ageing and old age, and most particularly of medicalisation, but also to uncover different modalities and loci of embodied agency and identity. The difficulty is to imagine ways of recovering agency as we age and of managing bodily ageing, that is bodily change, which are not predicated on the denial of ageing (see Hurd 1999), and these contributions represent attempts to tackle this dilemma. Conversely, as Gimlin (2007) has shown, an alternative approach to come to terms with the bodily changes some women experience as they get older, such as weight gain, is to resort to the narrative of decline to “excuse’’ these changes in a bid to resist cultural ageing, a strategy not available to younger women in their search for the normative body. Although a risky strategy, the reliance on the narrative of decline nevertheless reveals the time-bound nature of embodied agency. Thus what needs to be emphasised is the salience of ageing, understood as change, as a key factor in the social positioning of agers.

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Lacunae have also been identified in the sociologies of the body and of sport. Bourdieu’s work is held to lack a time dimension and it offers limited ways in which challenges to existing class relations (Alexander 1995; Howson and Inglis 2001; Lahire 2001) can be envisaged. The bodies of the sociology of sport tend to be active bodies at risk of biographical disruption by injury or ageing (see Gearing 1999). However, agency is often viewed in restricted terms, largely focused on the achievement of athletic competence and of a normative bodily aesthetic.

Perspectives from the sociologies of the body and of sport Historical change was a key process in Elias’ (1978 [1939]) analysis of the development of modern societies. He made linkages between the role of the body and the civilising process. For Elias, civilising processes were characterised by increasing control over bodily dispositions and functions, and a more complex relationship between bodily displays and social location in increasingly complex social situations. The relationship between body and social value was altered, the latter being gauged on the display of bodily control and the effacement of its messiness, these becoming the norm of civilized normality. In this framework those who age and lose control of their bodies stand to become marginalised because their bodies are increasingly viewed as disrupting the civilising process (Elias 1978 [1939]). At an individual level, over time and historically, these bodies lose their capacity for distinction. The struggle for distinction, according to Bourdieu (1979, 1980), is reflected in modalities of dominant bodily dispositions. To these perspectives we need to incorporate change. Elias showed that historical conditions play a dynamic role in the regulation of bodies and their ordering in the social hierarchy. Thus we need to identify the discursive networks in which bodies are understood, and explore how social agents enfold themselves within these discourses and how these processes change over time. Embodiment, according to Crossley (2001b, 2006) and Shilling (2003), is intimately linked with agency and the latter must be envisaged beyond the mere passive compliance with existing structures. Paradoxically, as I showed in Chapter 2, empirical investigations have tended to focus, largely, on problematic bodies, such as sick bodies, which have lost their capacity for control, both individual and social. The sociology of sports has focused attention on “active’’ and young bodies, such as ballet bodies, body builders and boxers (see Aalten 1997; Monaghan 2001; Wacquant 2000). These bodies are of interest inasmuch

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as they are embedded in the social field of sport, in which, according to Bourdieu (1984), the struggle for social distinction is fought out around the attainment of socially valued bodies. They give us some insight into the minutiae of body work and its connection with norms of civilised embodiment. To this end, the focus on the ephemerality of bodily resources which the sociology of sports has recently highlighted can be useful to understand ageing and bodily change. The role of injury in the biographies and identities of athletes is also worth highlighting. The attainment of sporting bodies can also transgress dominant norms of bodily appearance. However, less attention is paid to older athletes or to athletes bearing the potential to change the internal structure of the field of sport. The argument which follows will propose new directions for a sociology of ageing which incorporates embodiment, its role in agency, social location and identity.

Empirical and methodological cross-fertilisation At an empirical and methodological level, one can better capture the role played by the body in social location and identity by focusing on a varied range of bodies. Thus one must expand empirical investigation from problematic bodies, such as women’s, sick, disabled or very old bodies, on the one hand, and young active bodies, on the other, to include a range of other bodies, such as ageing, though not necessarily pathological, bodies, a process already undertaken by Shilling (2005). Furthermore, these bodies have to be accessed in specific settings. It pays to look for bodies in unusual fields, such as Veteran athletics, not to showcase their exceptional nature, although this may also prove useful, but to bring to light different modalities of embodiment and explore what potential for social change they contain. The focus on the lived experience of embodiment, accessed through life history interviews and observation, allowed me to gain access to body work in the present, as it was reported to have changed over time. It also elicited accounts of active agency beyond the management of bodily ephemerality.

Embodying the sociology of ageing The review of the literature and the findings derived from the empirical investigation bring into sharp relief the complexity of the experience of ageing and of the role played by the body. The Veteran athletes’

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experiences do not conform to widely held stereotypes about bodily competence in later life. There are also differences among them. They have followed different pathways to athletics. Their current experiences show not only overlaps – for instance in their regular involvement in their athletic clubs and their embeddedness in a social network composed in large part of runners – but also some key differences, for instance in their current engagement with training and competition, in their health status and in the anticipation of their future as athletes. Furthermore, the findings presented in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 support the argument that this experience is changing in line with changes in broader social and cultural structures. As an example, the informants who became runners or track and field athletes as youngsters on the whole reflected the class structuring of athletics which prevailed until the 1970s, most visibly illustrated by the male runners in their fifties and sixties. Their current commitment to Veteran athletics was variable, ranging from exceptional involvement to voluntary retirement. Those who joined in their late twenties and thirties became committed to Veteran athletics very quickly and in ways focused as much around individual achievement as team success. These runners identified the triggers to their participation: the popularisation of long-distance running and its feminisation, a process which the younger women were very much aware of as they entered the athletic field. The pioneering role played by these athletes as they were ageing is worth bearing in mind. In other words, there is little that is universal or unchanging about participation in athletics and about ageing.

Ageing in context One cannot apprehend ageing outside of the broader structural and cultural context in which people become older. But this is more than taking a lifecourse perspective and looking for continuity (Atchley 1989). As I have already shown, the athletes’ biographies have revealed how they have stepped into recognisable pathways into athletics and long-distance running. These pathways were themselves structured by class, gender and age. Early in the 20th century, class and gender acted as barriers to inclusion but were challenged from the second half of the century, and this enabled middle-class men and, later, middle-class women to aspire to careers as long-distance runners. In turn it also allowed working-class men to take part in body projects oriented towards leisure and the pursuit of fitness.

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What makes these biographies exceptional at first glance is that the athletic pathways which have given them their shape have lasted longer than the dominant discourse of ageing and old age would lead us to anticipate: these people have continued running well into their later years, despite experiencing the physical changes and, in some cases, illnesses understood to be associated with biological ageing. This was achieved by the creation and development of athletic structures which support older runners. Wider social and cultural structures were shown to have an impact on ageing at different levels: at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels (Mouzelis 1995). At the macro-level, ageing was shaped by what I would call structures of regulation, which include the dominant discourse of old age and medicine, the wider cultural landscape of modernity and existing gender and class habitus position. At the meso-level, ageing was shaped by engagement in social fields. Here the field, or lifeworld (Bourdieu 1984; Wacquant 1998), is athletics and, for most informants, long-distance running. The relationship between these two levels is complex. Indeed, how can we account for the processes which have enabled people aged 48–86 years to be engaged in the athletic lifeworld? Next I will recap the structures of regulation in which ageing is embedded and the tensions that they create for people as they age.

Structures of regulation The discourse of decline and the medicalisation of ageing enfeeble people as they age. Vertinsky (1998) argues that women are at particular risk, especially beyond the menopause, of the pressure to “rest’’. Male athletes, however, are not protected from enfeeblement. We will recall the vivid account of the 65-year-old male runner who, aged 55, was refused treatment for an injury by his doctor, who advised him to take up bowling. The other notable example is that of the international athlete who was advised at the age of 29 to retire from athletics and to take up golf. On the whole, informants received support for their running only from other runners, and they received scepticism or bemused admiration from those who did not engage in physical activity. In other ways they relied on biomedicine to justify their high training rate, comparing themselves favourably with their unfit contemporaries, even if they had themselves experienced serious health problems traditionally associated with unhealthy “lifestyles’’, such as heart disease. Here they placed emphasis on looking well, being slim and having the physical

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characteristics of athletic bodies (a line of rationalisation used by those who had restricted their training following severe health problems). The informants’ apparent compliance with the dominant discourse of health is important because it signals their awareness of the importance of bodily appearance as a marker of agedness and, relatedly, as a sign of an ethical orientation to the body. This is consonant with the contemporary emphasis placed on the achievement of normative youthful, fit and beautiful bodies (Turner 1996) through body projects (Shilling 2003). Traditionally, in the sociologies of the body and ageing, ageing is seen as ontologically problematic because it disrupts mind/body unity, is inimical to the civilising process (Elias 1978 [1939]) and, therefore, it increases the risk of social and cultural devaluation of people as they age. In the sociology of sport this is not as visible, perhaps because it signals the end of elite performance and is therefore understood as biographical disruption (Armstrong 1983; Gearing 1999). The positions adopted in the sociologies of ageing and the body do not challenge the narrative of decline however. Whilst they recognise that age is a key structure in social positioning, they do not always identify what modalities of embodied agency (Crossley 2001b) exist in later life or, for that matter, at other points in the lifecourse. The body is at risk throughout the lifecourse, as was demonstrated by MH, the international athlete who had a long history of injury, and by HS, the triple jumper who was already anticipating his own ageing whilst still in his twenties. The engagement with bodily processes cannot be taken for granted, hence my concern with eliciting the lived body from the empirical investigation.

The lived body Bodily ageing has not only cultural significance but, as I have shown, also an experiential dimension. The two constantly interact. When I was listening to informants I always sensed a tension between the management of bodily change (articulated by JI as the “loss of power in my legs’’) or of illness (BS, the female track athlete, has arthritis in her hips) and the awareness of the cultural limitations placed on the body as it ages. The lived body is always actively engaging with discourse and prescriptions of socially – in this instance, age – appropriate behaviour, as much as with biological ageing, whether or not the body itself is used strenuously. What I want to do now is show what modalities of embodied agency I have uncovered in this research, and particularly how the body itself has been recruited in these processes. My findings show that embodied

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agency is demonstrated at the meso-level in the choice of social field or lifeworld, and engagement with its own internal logic. Ageing in lifeworlds One could anticipate that ageing would tilt the balance towards bodily incompetence and what Leder (1990) conceptualised as the dysappearance of the body, that is the experience of the sick or old body as problematic for social life and identity. This would force retirement from the running lifeworld, and relatedly older athletes would choose ageappropriate social fields, such as golf, voluntary work and so on, which signify increasing bodily incompetence and social marginalisation. In contrast, albeit with some important variations, my informants have continued engaging with the field or “lifeworld’’ of running/athletics. These variations are significant. Indeed, the triple jumper has, even before his retirement in his early fifties from his discipline, refused to join the Veteran Movement and although still an active club official and regular jogger he has avoided overexerting himself because of his acceptance of the discourse of decline. In contrast, most of the other informants have remained, and consolidated their position, in the running lifeworld in several ways, mostly mediated by the body. All of them, however, have exercised agency through particular modalities of embodiment, consonant with their engagement in the running lifeworld. This operates in several ways. Those who claim to be part of the Veteran Movement continue to engage in the rationalised use of their bodies by training (for instance periodising their training and accumulating high mileage) and in some cases by competing regularly (in some cases, once a month). Over time these routines have endowed them with athletic competence and its attendant physical attributes. The latter was neatly articulated by BMcB (M, 70, LD) as “the number of miles in my legs’’. This means that the appearance of competence and the accumulation of experience are inscribed in the informants’ bodies. This gives runners a physical advantage which persists through injury, illness and, above all, ageing. Athletes have to manage the ephemerality of the (athletic) body. In echo of Monaghan (2001), athletic bodies need constant training because any interruption will impair athletic competence. In other words, bodily resources need to be developed and constantly harnessed to keep at bay the shapelessness to which inaction – that is, not simply ageing – would return the body. Thus the concept of rest which often appears in my informants’ accounts – with the exception of HS (M, 54, T&F/r) – is not inscribed in the enfeebling of older bodies, which reflects the narrative

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of decline prevalent in the mainstream management of ageing bodies, but in practices designed to maximise bodily performance and protect resources. KT (F, 50, UR) and BS (M, 58, LD/r) are good examples of this strategy in which effort is periodised to maximise performance during the racing season. Thus ageing is only one risk factor for the loss of bodily competence. Athletes have a sharp awareness of the physical sensations derived from athletic activity – not only their physical surroundings, weather conditions, the terrain – but also the sense of competence derived from the deployment of the body in very public environments are all part of the phenomenology of running. The management of the mind/body relationship demanded by the will to achieve competence survives either as memory or as accrued physical capital. The former is particularly important for those who are injured and have reduced their participation in their sport. One striking example is MH (M, 67, LD/r), who in retirement has kept the competitive streak he honed during his long career in athletics, from which he still claims an athletic identity. Another important element in this agentic process is the underpinning structure of athletics. Active club membership and, more importantly, the creation and maintenance of a shared culture and “eventful experiences’’ (Nash 1979) have been allowed to emerge from long-standing involvement in athletics and from the creation of the Veteran Movement. This is reflected not only in the development of a wide social network drawn from the athletic community but also in the familiarity with running lore. For instance, every Sunday morning, HW (M, 55, LD) joins a large group of runners for the long weekly run. After a particularly long run, he suffered a “catastrophic’’ (Thing 2002) injury and relied on the knowledge held by the group to make sense of his injury. There are three lessons to draw from an investigation of the fields or lifeworlds in which people conduct their lives. Firstly, it is important to find out how ageing affects the maintenance, take-up of or exclusion from previous lifeworlds. Secondly, the role of social actors in the formation and development of lifeworlds is crucial. In this context, active and pioneering involvement in Veteran athletics has contributed to its flourishing. Thirdly, ageing may disrupt biographies and lead to entry or a return to previously discarded lifeworlds. My informants showed that ageing led to the return to the running lifeworld. In this field, therefore, ageing can be experienced as “positive’’ disruption. Bodily ageing is therefore mediated in the social field, the field acting as a locus in which physical capital is managed. This raises two issues.

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The first concerns the role of age in the social location of agents. The second is a return to the question posed earlier: how have people aged 48–86 years come to be involved in the athletic lifeworld?

The ageing body as capital The asceticism and the rationalisation of training described in Chapter 6 yield particular body types which are attributed value by the informants themselves and are culturally distinctive. I propose that the ageing body can also be understood as physical capital, because it is endowed with a set of characteristics which affect social location. Most of the informants reported that their foremost concern was to maximise their physical capital to enable them to continue performing at an acceptable level. Thus the body accrued capital within the running field itself, the age-structuring of competition ensuring the maintenance of capital over time, in spite of biological ageing. JS (F, 51, LD) is a good example of the orientation to bodily competence. She follows a strict training regime, which includes club and individual sessions, floor exercises and a customised dietary regime. WM (M, 72, LD) also follows a regular regime, which despite being less strenuous than JS’s nevertheless allowed him to improve his performance to win World Events in the 65–69 and later the 70–74 age-groups. Furthermore, although not their primary aim, all the informants mentioned the health and aesthetic capital which they believed they had accrued. Comparing themselves favourably with their unfit agecontemporaries was part of a process of attributing themselves social value. Two of the male athletes who had experienced heart problems and were on a much reduced training schedule mentioned their youthful and fit appearance in comparison with others. One surmised that running had probably postponed, rather than precipitated, the onset of his illness in his early fifties. But he still looked like an athlete, reflecting the cultural premium placed on the achievement of athletic bodies as proxy for the “ideal’’ body. Does this mean that the ageing body, as physical capital, can lead, through a set of practices, to changes in social location? This health and aesthetic capital, I would argue, is indeed sufficient to accrue social capital because of the premium placed on postponing the look of old age and on acting out health prevention. The body is indeed used by runners as physical capital as it serves to distinguish them favourably from others.

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However, it could be argued that in the management of their lives around running, the informants were also wholly embedded in prevailing cultural and economic structures. Thus we need to recast the experience of ageing to encompass class, gender and age. Now I want to explore whether modalities of embodied agency oriented towards the attainment of bodily competence (the increase in physical capital) can broaden opportunities for the construction of identity which such practices offer.

Towards a broader conception of habitus As I indicated in Chapter 2, Bourdieu’s theory of social action opens up opportunities for the development of a carnal sociology of the body in which reflexive embodiment develops (Crossley 1995; Crossley 2006) and also for capturing the contemporary experience of ageing. I have brought to light the phenomenology of running, its sensations, and the remodelling of perception schema which results from the rationalisation of bodily movement. I now argue that particular forms of bodily use can lead to changes in the social and symbolic capital of social actors as they age. This, however, would rely on a broader conception of habitus. As I have shown in Chapter 3, a review of the running literature, particularly that which deals with personal accounts of running and its meaning in the author’s life or its history, reveals long-distance running to be a space in which a range of social struggles have taken place and continue to do so. Class, gender and ethnicity have been key processes in the struggle to give modern athletics, and particularly long-distance running, its current complexion (Cooper 1998). It was brought out of the shadows of its working-class connotations and professionalism to give it the status of a legitimate and socially valued athletic discipline. Thus hard training and the inscription of arduous bodily labour on the body were installed as the official criteria of athletic achievement. It is also a space in which resistance to racial and gender discrimination has been fought out. The experiences of the women and working-class runners in my sample do indeed reflect the processes of exclusion from athletics based on gender and class which prevailed throughout much of the 20th century. The experiences of the female track athletes offer ample illustration of these. Not only were they prevented from running long distances, but the training was also limited and their performances remained largely invisible. The popularisation, gentrification and feminisation of longdistance running which took place throughout the second half of the

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20th century served to enlarge the athletic field and give it a different complexion. At the same time that this enlargement was taking place, the broader cultural context was placing greater value on the individual achievement of health and fitness projects. Long-distance running was therefore well placed to attract large numbers of social actors keen to join in these projects and people who hitherto had been excluded from the sport played the fitness card to lay a claim for inclusion and recognition. Age is another factor which, since the early 1970s, has led to a fundamental reshaping of the running field, with the emergence of the Veteran Movement and the increase in the number of runners whose ages would normally serve to exclude them from the athletic field. Thus this field in transition enabled people to join the sport in their thirties on a fitness ticket, who a few years later had achieved elite status. Gradually their dispositions were reshaped and the urge to achieve and maintain fitness as a health outcome was replaced by the urge to become and remain an athlete. Body work and social location In several ways, athletes reproduced their habitus position in the running field. Whilst the data do not permit me to confirm that running continues to be the site of class struggle, nevertheless a key resource was the ability to negotiate time to run. Informants in full-time occupations had to find time to run and they could only do so by negotiating the timing of shifts, by running during lunch hours or to and from work. This was the experience of the two runners who were manual workers. If none of these strategies was available, then training had to take place after work obligations had been fulfilled – a situation exemplified by a runner in a management post. Retirement freed up time, as did the ability to work part-time, but this had to be funded, and DF (M, 56, LD), a chemist made redundant a few weeks earlier, could nevertheless afford to contemplate a return to work on a part-time basis to keep time for running. The point is that the ability to negotiate time to run with the support of sufficient financial resources is determined in part by socio-economic position and the flexibility of working hours. On the whole, men in full-time employment who were time-poor in the workplace could generally count on the support of their wives to find time to run during leisure or family time. There was evidence in the male runners’ account that their wives had to accept to give this time with minimum negotiation and in some cases with little participation. In contrast, the women runners had to actively harness the support of their husbands and furthermore relied on the latter’s economic capital

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to free themselves from the necessity to work full-time. This reflected the experience of all the women in the sample. In other words, it is difficult to imagine that women with actively uncooperative husbands, or husbands with insufficient economic capital to support their running, would be able to enter the running lifeworld. Thus, women’s position in the domestic sphere and in the labour market appeared remarkably unchanged (Jutel 2003) by their athletic participation. There was a sense that the women runners did indeed reproduce their gender and class habitus in the running field. Furthermore, by acquiring fit bodies, were the women not reinforcing the relationship between femininity and the obligation to achieve normative bodies (Markula 2003)? This would militate against any possibility for social change. However, if we return to age, we find evidence of shifts in social location. In other words, the informants’ experiences and their interpretations of their experiences threw into sharp relief the extent of capital conversion which took place through the engagement with the athletic field. This, however, is only possible if we rethink the nature of bodily ageing. Bodies in flux As we have already seen, the biographical disruption (Armstrong 1983; Bury 1982) that ageing may bring is not necessarily negative. Informants who had an early engagement in the sport left the sport in the middle of their lives as they were experiencing family and other life events, injury, illness or simply loss of momentum. However, as they became older they returned with greater enthusiasm and in some cases, because of strict training regimes, with greater bodily competence. DM (M, 86, LD/r) remembers being introduced to the Veteran Movement after several years’ interruption in his running following the death of his first wife. The movement provided him with a structure within which he could imagine and plan his return to competition, when he was already in his fifties. On the other hand, these variable processes of change took place against the backdrop of irreversible attrition in speed or in strength. DF (M, 56, LD) had become aware of lower speed but also of greater tiredness after a hard training session. Most striking is that any return to form enabled athletes to navigate between adapting their training to counter the ephemerality of their athletic resources and coming to terms with irreversible change. Using the age structuring of athletics, as most of the athletes did, was one way of addressing this tension. Through the engagement in the field of athletics, bodily ageing was experienced as a tension between change and

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performance, rather than as wholesale decline. The body is therefore a body in flux. I would therefore argue that ageing runners have striven to challenge their habitus position by managing this state of flux to their advantage, that is by unsettling the relationship between ageing and inevitable decline, and also between gender and physical frailty and between class and body type. By nurturing physical competence – rather than emulating youthful bodies – they have all acquired social capital. As I also showed, attrition in performance was not an exclusive property of the later years. All informants experienced fluctuations in participation or in fitness, placing their position in the club at risk. For instance, HS (M, 54, T&F/r), the triple jumper, failed to be selected for a top University team when he was a student because of a drop in form. JI (M, 65, LD) did not always get selected for the first team during his senior years and these corresponded to fluctuations in the required physical capital. Thus the body is in flux throughout the lifecourse, although the salience of these fluctuations is only made significant in particular social fields in which physical capital is a determinant of social status. Ageing takes on greater importance at variable points in the lifecourse, depending on the social field. In sport, the salience of ageing is brought to bear throughout. Such an analysis relies on broadening Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, from one principally based on class position and socio-economic capital towards one which includes gender and age. The achievement of the athletic body among all the informants was made possible by the personal subjection to strict training regimes which would have been closed to them only 30 years ago but which, paradoxically, are associated with the dominant techniques of government. Nevertheless, the challenge to the traditional age and gender habitus is encapsulated in the ability to reappropriate to the informants’ advantage, whether male or female, that is to normalise, the paradox between ageing and the achievement of an athletic body. By extension, this raises issues about the legitimacy of the informants’ claim to an athletic identity.

Embodied identity and the pursuit of symbolic capital Ageing athletes have developed a very complex relationship to their bodies. In the process of charting my research informants’ biographies and their pathways into athletics, I came to realise that when they entered the field of athletics, they began shaping their bodies and the rest of

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their lives. These practices provided them with a structure in which they acquired an athletic body. Has this reshaping also led to what Hawee (2001) called the transformation of the self and a legitimate identity? The literature reviewed in Chapter 1 posed the question of identity in later life as characterised by ambiguity and in some cases paradox (Hearn 1995). Ageing social actors are threatened with a spoiled identity (Goffman 1959), arising from bodily deterioration, or alternatively they are promised agelessness. The (negative) role played by the body in the experience of identity appears crucial, constituting the ontology of ageing (Wainwright and Turner 2003) and narrowing the possibilities for the maintenance of desirable identities. Having said that, claims to identity can be made and can be made real through narration and a reflexive stance (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). The claim to an athletic identity was made by all the informants without equivocation. Even the athletes who rejected the Veteran Movement and thus the possibility of bodily competence with increasing age claimed to be athletes. BC (M, 69, LD/r) described himself as a “hasbeen’’ as opposed to a “never-been’’, the latter being interpreted as much worse. For this informant the memory of past achievements was enough to give legitimacy to a persistent athletic identity and this also applied to MH (M, 67, LD/r). Looking like an athlete proved to be important for BS (M, 58, LD/r) in the years which followed the diagnosis of heart disease. For all the others, track and field eventers and those specialising in long distance alike, the claim to being a runner was overwhelmingly made. Thus a complete coherence between mind and body did not prove necessary to lay claim to a socially valued identity. However, in its absence, it needed a structure in which the absence of coherence could be attributed less importance without affecting social status. I would argue that the Veteran Movement, which provides a focus for body work and an archive of achievements by current members (however long in the past these may be), can play such a role. It gives legitimacy to the possibility of an athletic identity until a late age, even for those who do not take part in it. MH (M, 67, LD/r) does not wish to take part in Veteran athletics but he welcomes it, and the club that he runs nurtures Veteran runners. It provides an arena where identity can be rehearsed either through actual training or through exchanges of narratives (see for instance the growing popularity of magazines and newsletters in which these narratives are disseminated). Thus I am proposing to recast the Veteran Movement as a social field in its own right, especially as it is gaining support in the popular athletic literature and in the sports medicine literature (see Tulle 2003b): it is

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supported by a widening discursive base which has attachments in biomedicine. It reproduces the social relations which exist outside the field, especially in relation to gender. The Veteran Movement reproduces relations of power organised around athletic achievement. BS (M, 58, LD/r) drew a very sharp distinction between “runners’’ and “joggers’’, two groups separated by the willingness to submit to the rigours of scientific training and competition, rather than by age. This distinction is itself gender-based, as joggers tend to be women, a point made by BS (M, 58, LD/r). However, in interviews, most of the informants identified well-known women athletes as the current heroes of athletics and role models. It is also a more ambiguous site because of its reliance on (increasing) age as a defining structure and inherent constituent of the movement. On the one hand, age serves to exclude younger athletes. On the other, it structures and gives meaning to performances which would be given no value elsewhere. Thus age enables participation in athletics by athletes deemed too old to take part in senior athletics. I propose therefore that athletic identities are not inimical to ageing. Within the Veteran Movement, normalising the need to manage bodily competence and biological ageing makes it plausible to claim a dual identity. What also emerges from this analysis is the heightened awareness of their social and cultural distinctiveness by the informants themselves and of the ambiguity of their situation. This self-reflexivity was reflected in the informants’ ability to account for their experiences in articulate ways. Language thus is an integral aspect of the management of ageing and I now turn to an examination of the role of language in the social positioning of the research informants.

The language of ageing As I have already shown, ageing is emerging as a process characterised by ambiguity: ambiguity is manifested in the tension which informants identify in the management of their bodily capital. This ambiguity is reflected in the language used to talk about ageing. At first glance, as I will show, the talk of age reflects dominant narratives of age. The way they talk about age also reflects these social actors’ attempts to subvert and even alter these narratives. The athletes often had recourse to the biomedical discourse and the dissociation between the body and the mind to make sense, principally, of bodily processes in difficult situations, such as injury or physically arduous races. They talked eloquently about a number of injuries in

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ways in which the body and affected body parts were objectified and described as the faulty components of the body as machine. For instance, when a hamstring injury sustained after overstretching following a 22-mile run was described by HW as a snapping elastic band, he not only conveyed successfully the palpable and auditory qualities of his injury as it happened, but also tried to make sense of it to undertake his recovery. BS (M, 58, LD/r) described his heart condition as an electrics, rather than a plumbing, problem. The ageing process was often articulated within the discourse of decline. CMcD (M, 52, LD) described the ageing process in terms of cells being slowly turned off, and HW (M, 55, LD) described it as “a downward spiral’’. JBF (M, 50, HR) separated himself from “the body’’, the body sustaining alteration in performance. When DF (M, 56, LD) realised how much time he had lost in 17 years, it came as a surprise to him. BS (M, 58, LD/r) commented that ageing rendered the body fragile. However, in other ways, their narratives eschewed or subverted the medicalising of their lives. They used the machine metaphor precisely to differentiate between injuries and biological ageing (see Table 1 in Chapter 6). Thus in KT’s (F, 50, UR) narrative, her hamstring injury sat on a shifting boundary between normal ageing and overuse. The relationship between the body and the mind could be altered as conditions required and, as HW (M, 55, LD) explained, sometimes the mind could be invoked to make up for the body’s shortcomings during a difficult race, whilst in other races the opposite response would be more appropriate. Informants also used a vocabulary which denotes strength and competence, two attributes not normally associated with ageing. The ambiguity of ageing was reflected in the informants’ shifting identification with youthfulness and agedness. DM (M, 86, LD/r), the oldest informant in the sample, was more direct than the other informants in claiming to be old. He justified it in relation to bodily ageing and to his longevity. Several times in the interview encounter, he displayed bodily evidence of his agedness and of his youthfulness. His agedness was characterised by his loss of balance and his inability to get up from his sofa without first kneeling on the floor and hauling himself up by holding on to the sofa. The unwrinkled skin on his forearms, his ability to act as coach to his grandchildren, his computer literacy, his remaining physical competence and the resulting sense of well-being were given as evidence of his youthfulness. When I asked KT (F, 50, UR) if she was old, she replied that she did not feel old and that she felt young but was getting older. In this respect, together with all the other informants, both DM and KT were caught up in what, elsewhere (Tulle 2003a), I referred

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to as a dialectic between claiming to being old or older and feeling youthful. I am arguing that the bodies of older runners bear the imprint of this dialectic which can be understood as a normal form of embodiment in the Veteran athletic field.

Resisting ageing? Thus experiences of ageing, such as those brought to light by Veteran elite athletes, are complex and fully embedded in late-modern projects. They give us access to embodied agency in ways which reflect the constant interplay between a range of processes. Is agency also resistance, and if so, what is resisted? A tension emerged between the role played by the dominant discourse of ageing and old age in the enfeebling of older bodies and the cultural tendency to manage the mind/body relationship in ways which isolate bodily processes, on the one hand, and equate identity to the attainment of self-control, on the other. This tension potentially restricts opportunities for embodied agency and identity. Focusing on the minutiae of the lived experience of agers, however, we find that the meso-contexts in which their lives are conducted are key to the search for agency. I found evidence that informants have re-appropriated the ambiguity of the fleshy body in ways which enable the management of bodily competence without relying on the denial of biological ageing. In line with my theoretical framework, I have also found evidence in the claims articulated in the life history interviews of successful attempts to alter social location. The management of the ageing body, or rather its re-articulation as a body in flux rather than as a body in decline, has been shown to be key to this process. However, it is not an isolated but a situated body: informants do not manage their bodies primarily to efface or deny bodily ageing. Rather the body is used in the struggle for distinction and the attainment of social and cultural capital, consonant with the wider cultural landscape. The informants’ pioneering role in the creation of the field of Veteran athletics is a key aspect of this struggle for distinction. The field provides the site in which the relationship to bodily ageing is re-articulated and in which, in the process, the enfeebling tendency of the dominant discourse of ageing can be overturned. When I argue that the dialectic between being old and feeling youthful, as present in my informants’ account, is embodied, I mean that it is at once inscribed inside and on the surface of my informants’ bodies and a successful attempt to manage the tension between

160 Ageing, the Body and Social Change

becoming physically older and the social and cultural context in which this takes place. Resistance as the successful re-articulation of this tension is one way in which agency is manifested among ageing individuals. This, I would argue, can provide a theoretical blueprint within which agency among other agers, such as those whose physical capital is severely depleted, can be re-articulated.

Conclusion

The aim of this book has been to contribute to a continuing debate about the most useful ways – theoretically and methodologically – of capturing the experience of ageing in the late-modern period. This was accomplished through an investigation of embodiment, opening up opportunities to explore issues of structure, agency and identity, in a bid to identify ways in which people may, as they become older, challenge social ageing (Hepworth 2004), affecting their social position. I chose to carry out life history interviews with ageing athletes – long-distance runners and track athletes – because of the ambiguous role of the body in sociological theorising of the ageing experience. Bodily ageing has rightly been identified as a key factor to explain the marginalised structural position of agers since the development of modernity, and theoretically this has been captured by the observation that older bodies and the social actors who inhabit them are understood primarily within the narrative of decline (Gullette 2003). At an experiential level, bodily ageing is less well known but a range of concepts also suggest that it has a disruptive impact on the management of everyday life and on identity. The literature has hitherto identified a range of strategies to counter the threat posed by bodily ageing: one first strategy is to disembody oneself through the Mask of Ageing and the claim to agelessness. A second strategy is to opt for anti-ageing strategies to postpone illness, deal with the visible signs of ageing and essentially postpone death. A third strategy is to stay “busy’’ (Katz 2000) to counter the risk of social and cultural marginality. There are problems with some of these strategies: whilst staying physically active may offer a way out of social marginalisation, there is a danger that in doing so we fall in line with the dominant discourse of ageing and old age, rather than mount a substantial challenge to it. Furthermore, the search for agelessness and the disembodiment of ageing are futile if they negate the sensate dimension of bodily ageing, which will in turn take on different modalities over time. Lastly, these strategies do not address the enfeeblement of ageing bodies which Singh (2002), Vertinsky (1998) and Wearing (1995) identified. What the older athletes’ experiences brought to the debate is a re-positioning of the body in the ageing experience. I have shown its centrality, at three levels: the discursive, the structural and the experiential. Thus social action in later life cannot be apprehended outside of the framework of embodiment.

Experiences of ageing Conducting life history interviews and carrying out some observations allowed me to gain access to the body work undertaken by Veteran elite runners. My 21 informants talked in greater detail than I had hoped for about the minutiae of their training regimes, as it had evolved throughout the lifecourse to the present. 161

162 Conclusion They enthusiastically displayed their achievements by showing me medals, reading from their diaries (if they had kept them) and listing, from memory, some of their most memorable performances. They could describe what they ate and how generally they organised their everyday lives around the imperative to train. They were also articulate about their injuries, any ill-health problems and the various physical sensations they had experienced. Thus the decision to interview people who had developed an intense, self-conscious relationship with their bodies proved profitable in research terms. This is important given the lack of data on body work amongst agers generally, and in this case very active ones.

Pathways into athletics Although the informants were all still physically active and involved in the organisation of athletics, their initial biographical trajectories diverged in significant ways. Class and gender had been key factors affecting their likelihood of becoming athletes. Thus I identified several groups of informants who followed different pathways into athletics. These reflected the class, gender and age location of the informants prior to their encounter with athletics. Nevertheless two key processes made it possible for my informants to become involved in, or to return to, athletics: the Marathon Boom and the Veteran Movement. These acted as biographical disruption but in a way which subverts Bury’s (1982) original coining of the concept. Rather than age signalling retirement from athletics, these processes facilitated a return to athletics or in some cases led to the decision, late in life, to become an athlete. People were borne along the fitness imperative which provided the subtext for the Marathon Boom, and the athletic structure was transformed by participants who, as they were getting older, pioneered the Veteran Movement. The bodies of athletes as they aged thus acquired greater complexity than would otherwise be expected.

Bodies of ageing The data and their analysis revealed the plurality of bodies which the informants inhabited. Their accounts showed that they had actively created these bodies by taking advantage of the fluidity of bodily resources. Thus the malleability of the body, that is its openness to new modes of inscriptions and dispositional schema, enabled the informants, through the rationalisation of their bodily resources in training and competition, to gain the physical attributes of athletes. Informants were also forthcoming on the management of injuries. Here they deployed several strategies to face up to injuries. Many of them had had several years of recurrent problems which in the past would have signalled retirement from the sport, but more recently appeared more amenable to resolution. What helped them in this process was a knowledge of the biomechanics of exercise formally acquired in recent years by taking part in the culture of their sport. In addition, they had accumulated an intimate knowledge of their own idiosyncratic bodily functioning, which allowed them to identify an injury, as it occurred, and negotiate a treatment strategy with various professionals or on their own. Lastly, they relied on various interpretations of popularly available versions of biomedical insights into bodies. This allowed them to draw a distinction between ageing and injury, an important one to make as an ageing athlete, as this could make the difference between retiring or continuing.

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The management of everyday life In the course of describing their training schedules, which for the majority of informants continued to be time-consuming and mirrored the training regimes of junior and senior athletes, my informants gave me a window into the management of their everyday lives. The place occupied by athletics in their lives was striking. Athletic training was for most of them a five- to seven-day-a-week activity and it dictated the timing of meals and weekend activities. In some cases spouses and children were also involved. Competitions structured the athletes’ lives by regulating the intensity of training in preparation for key racing events and by influencing holiday destinations. Athletics gave my informants access to an extensive social network, in which the outwardly exceptional nature of their involvement was normalised.

Ageing identities All informants claimed that they currently were athletes. They had developed an athletic identity in the course of their participation in their sport and this was given substance by their physical prowess or, if they were retired, by the memory of past achievements and their current involvement in athletic administration. They also claimed to be at once older and youthful. This was supported by the structure of Veteran athletics which, like “mainstream’’ athletics, is organised by age. In this instance, however, age-groupings codify notions of linear physical decline through the expectation of reduced performances for each increasing agegroup. Within and across age-groups, informants engaged in intense competition. Performance was therefore reconstructed to denote not just coming first overall in a race – an unlikely achievement with increasing age – but variously coming first in one’s age-group, beating an age-adjusted record or finishing before younger runners.

Theoretical innovation The findings have allowed me to propose changes to current sociological theorising in ageing, informed by contributions from the sociologies of the body and of sport. I have also argued that a cross-fertilisation between the three disciplines was possible. My goal was to restore an embodied dimension to the later years and create links between modalities of embodiment with agency, social location and identity, underpinned by a concern for theorising resistance. Investigating the embodiment, through life history interviews, of social actors not usually targeted by sociology has proven fruitful. As I have shown above it has given me access to the lived experience of the body and to the informants’ own interpretations of their circumstances. Embodied agency cannot be conceived of outside the broader structures – cultural and discursive – which map out a space of possibilities for social action. In this instance I identified the narrative of decline which underpins the dominant discourse of ageing and old age and feeds into the reduction of old age to its biological manifestations. The data also revealed the salience of the cultural trends of late modernity, namely the engagement with body projects to attain socially valued norms of physical appearance and the rationalisation of the body required to attain those norms.

164 Conclusion At the outset we can discern the ambiguous and potentially dangerous position in which these contradictory pressures might place older adults: the obligation to conform to unattainable norms of bodily competence and aesthetic, and in the process resist ageing by denying agefulness. However, I have proposed a theoretical interpretation which allows for a more modulated account of embodied agency and distinction, through which the potential for resistance – not predicated on the denial of ageing – is discernible. My work borrows from and extends Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. I do this by drawing out the potential for changes in social location present in experiences anchored in identifiable social fields. In this instance the field is Veteran athletics, in which class, gender and, crucially, age act as key factors giving access to the field and mediating the role of the body, as physical capital, to be an agent of change in social location. In the field of Veteran athletics informants have endeavoured to perpetuate the class convergence which opened long-distance running to a wider range of people. Gender differences in pathways to athletics have also partly disappeared, although not completely. Class and gender interact to bring limitations to the extent to which female athletes are able to subvert their domestic dependence. Nevertheless, once in the field, these women can use the structures, which they have helped construct through their participation in competition and in the organisation of Veteran athletics, to attain levels of bodily competence not normally associated with those of older women. The age-structuring of athletics, which is reproduced in the Veteran Movement, has been used to operate a reconstruction of the notion of athletic performance. Performance now encompasses not only winning outright and breaking world records on the one hand, but also winning within age-groups or maintaining one’s own past achievements, relative to age, on the other. Thus the crucial point about the field is that it allows for the tension between ageing and the maintenance of bodily competence to become normalised. This tension is also reproduced in the ability to negotiate the boundary between biological ageing and external causes to explain and manage injuries or in the favourable comparison with age contemporaries which the informants articulated in interviews. Physical capital is obtained not by aspiring to achieving unattainable physical goals, but by successfully managing this tension. The rationalisation of bodily resources in which informants have all, at some time in their later athletic careers, engaged is geared towards the successful management of this tension and can, therefore, be reinterpreted as the ability to engage in the economy of running in later life. Thus I am proposing an extension of the concept of habitus to include age, in interaction with gender and class. This allows me to envisage the potential for significant changes in habitus position to vary over the lifecourse and also historically. The ability to navigate the tension between ageing and performing, to manage fluctuations in bodily resources and, ultimately, to control the extent to which mind/body convergence is necessary for obtaining social value become less normative and more dependent on the field in which one’s habitus position is rehearsed. This means that the field, as it develops its own internal logic, may unsettle existing power relations or discourses and lead to pressure for change elsewhere. The Veteran athletic field has fostered change in the habitus position of older people and transformed their cultural position. This is displayed in relation

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to identity. It has also found some support in the sports medicine literature which now provides much of the scientific legitimacy for the benefits of Veteran sport. The field can also foster multiple identities which are no longer constructed as conflicting or contradictory with ageing. Thus claiming an athletic identity, anchored as it is in the physical capital obtained by participating in Veteran athletics, is not incompatible with ageing identities. It reflects the embeddedness of agers in, and signals their ability to transform, the late-modern cultural landscape. I suggest we can understand the ability to control identity as symbolic capital. In sum, embodied agency can be focused towards altering the discursive structures which privilege the construction of ageing as inevitable decline, that is as a unitary, universal experience reduced to its biological manifestations. The outcome is a reconstruction of ageing and old age which privileges ambiguity, rather than the denial of ageing. Embodying the sociology of ageing and old age has allowed me to bring into focus the cultural dimension of ageing, its ontological repercussions and its contingent nature. As we age we are at greater risk of losing control over our stories because of the din made by the structures of regulation in which the habitus position of older people is embedded. These structures of regulation, in other words, have a very real impact on our everyday lives and expectations as we grow old, especially in interaction with the socio-economic resources which will accompany our old age and our gender position. Ageing into a favourable class, gender and ethnic position does not protect us from cultural obsolescence. This is partly accounted for by the primacy given to ontology as the search for universal principles of existence and its connection to embodied competence (both physical and intellectual). In this book I have sought to transcend the binary of sociological interpretation of ageing, as either socially constructed or really embodied. These are not mutually exclusive – we saw in Chapters 6 and 7 how the sensate is recognised within linguistic structures which are themselves part of a normative narrative of ageing. The field itself is key in creating this language of age, as well as the bodily and psychological dispositions which constitute it. As we all know, not everyone is embedded in a field such as athletics. Despite the latter’s instability and permeability, most of us are unlikely ever to enter it, let alone grow old into it. In fact for most of us, our greatest fear is that we will end our lives in fields in which control over the re-articulation of our ageing will be denied, devolved to others who will subject us to the medicalising and marginalising discourse of old age. I have already argued that the whole point of this analysis was not to create new norms of embodiment based on individual compulsion. In any case, becoming and remaining fit does not guarantee a healthy old age free of pain and disability. All it does is increase the chances of experiencing it. The embodied competence which I discerned amongst Master athletes is not to be confounded with athletic competence (although it is among these social actors). Embodied competence is the ability to control and broaden our ontological position without feeling culturally obligated to deny our very corporeal existence. Here I am therefore arguing for a reconstruction of ontology as social, open to renegotiation in the search for cultural distinction. The challenge for social gerontologists – academic commentators as well as practitioners – is to find ways of legitimating these re-articulations in social fields which are currently hostile to them.

166 Conclusion

Policy implications Research in ageing has a strong policy tradition (Blaikie 1999). My work, though not directly underpinned by policy concerns, nevertheless raises issues for policy. These issues relate to the relationship between ageing and exercise and also between ageing and bodily control. As I have shown, my informants have retained control over their lives and their bodies and in the process they have challenged a range of enfeebling structures. The theoretical underpinnings of my work have allowed me to bring to the fore the salience of the social fields in which people age. Whilst in Bourdieu’s (1979, 1980) theoretical framework fields are homologous to wider social hierarchies, I have found that they can also subvert them by the very internal logic that they develop. Twigg (2003) showed that the residents of long-stay homes also use their bodies to resist regulation and infantilisation. Thus improving life conditions for people as they age means paying attention to both the broad and the local cultures in which these lives are most likely to be conducted. My work also raises the issue of bodily control. My informants had very competent bodies. However, they derived increased social and cultural capital not from retaining bodily control, but from being able to manage the tension between ageing and bodily competence. These are not the same thing and they have different implications. I would not advocate exercise, let alone the accumulation of weekly mileage in excess of 30 miles, as the key to improvements in the experience of ageing, which the first interpretation would imply. All the more so as it would reinforce the tendency to individualise and privatise the responsibility for care and welfare in the later years (Tulle and Mooney 2002). In contrast, I would recommend that people be offered levels of support to deal with their ageing bodies, in hospitals following accidents, or in care homes, not predicated on a fatalistic reliance on the narrative of decline. This means designing forms of rehabilitation to help people recover from injury or from illness which take into account people’s own low expectations of recovery. They also must deal with the physical barriers to improvement: for instance, the lack of family encouragement, the lack of variety in the range of exercises prescribed and the anticipated lack of competence on people’s part. We must also make the public environment less threatening so that it can be used as a place in which people can recover their mobility.

Notes

1. Entry into Veteran – now Masters – athletics is based on age. Since August 2005 the age of entry is 35 for both men and women (until then it was 40 for men) 2. Open events refer to races open to all comers, irrespective of age. The London Marathon or the Glasgow Women’s 10 km race are open races. In contrast, the World Masters Championship is only open to athletes who are in the Masters age groups. 3. This has since been changed to age 35 for both men and women. 4. The Newspaper of the British Masters Athletic Federation. 5. This relates to the idiosyncracies of the UK car registration system and car market. Brand new cars receive a registration plate bearing the new code for that year. The changeover to new registrations was, until 2001, on 1 August. This encouraged many people – keen to drive around with a new registration – to order a car around this date. This period was therefore the busiest trade period. 6. Proprioception refers to the mechanism involved in the “sense of balance, position, and muscular tension provided by the receptors in our muscles, joints, tendons, and the inner ear’’ (Shilling 2003: 211). 7. This process of enfeeblement, incidentally, is at odds with what Hepworth (1995), Gilleard and Higgs (2000) and Katz (2001/02) identified as a characteristic of late modernity – the encouragement, or in fact, obligation to remain active and quasi-productive. However, as Singh (2002) showed, doctors rarely encourage physical activity in older patients, especially at levels which deviate from “normal’’ levels of activity, despite the evidence which shows that older bodies can sustain strenuous physicality and that it has a beneficial impact on health, mobility and well-being.

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Index

accounts of embodiment, see narratives of embodiment achievement, reconstruction of, 138 actuarial approach, 104–5 age and running, 54–6, 57–8, 59–60 and social location, 141, 143, 145, 151 ageing ambiguity of, 157, 158 in context, 146–7 cultural embeddedness of, 140 narratives of, 142, 157–8 resisting, 159–60 ageing bodies and agency, 57–8 and body discipline, 135 as challenge to agency and identity, 1 and training, 135–7 ageing experience, 1, 40–1, 61, 64, 69–70, 141–3 agelessness, 8–10, 39, 40, 57–8, 59, 140 agency and athletics, 53 and embodiment, 10–11, 25, 64 and Enlightenment, 20 in the work of Bourdieu, 28 Alzheimer’s disease, 13 anti-ageing, 136, 141 aspirations, 15, 40, 58, 69 athletic body achieving and maintaining, 106 athletic identity, 92, 139, 155–7 athletics as anti ageing strategy, 136 and body awareness, 138 careers, 55, 85–7, 91–3

gender exclusion, 78–81 hill running, 71, 133 long distance, see long distance running, marathon as rebellion in domestic sphere, 80–1 and social change, 45–9 track and field, 44–5, 48–9 ultra, 71, 133–4 see also long distance running; marathon; running becoming an athlete, 77–8 being old/feeling old dialectic, 7, 12, 115, 116, 159–60 being-in-the-world, 28–9 biographical disruption, 5, 38, 39, 92–3, 142, 150, 154 biographical trajectories, xiii, 76 biographies of ageing, 147 biography, 67, 91–2 biological ageing, 11, 13, 63, 142–3, 147, 158 and decline, 122–7 fight against, 8–10 biomedicine as discourse, 20 running and, 49–50 bodies of ageing, 122–3 bodily intentionality, 13–14 body the athletic body, 131–5 the ethical body, 22–3 in flux, 127, 154–5 the lived body, 26, 148–9 the passive body, 23–4, 26 as resource, 102–3, 103–5 body beautiful, 3, 115 body projects, 24 see also body work body and social order, 20 178

Index body work, 24–5, 42–3, 112 and athletics, 34–6, 94–8 and social location, 153–4 Bourdieu, P., 28–31, 42–4, 58 calculated hedonism, 24 capital, 29–30 ageing body as, 151–2 the body as, 34, 39, 114–15 carnal sociology of the body, 25–7, 38, 40–1 Cartesian dualism, 19–20, 21 civilised embodiment, 3, 32 class, 29–30, 81–3 commodification of age resistance, 8 competence athletic, 35, 59–60, 112, 116 body, 16, 58, 69 consuming bodies, 24 consumption, 24 and age, 4, 152 contingency of embodiment, 27–8 cultural ageing, 115 cultural biologism, 39 cultural stories, 11, 61–2 culture of youth, 3, 4, 148 decline discourse of, 1–3, 147–9, 158 inevitability of, 119–22 narrative of, 115, 116–17, 119–21, 142, 143 sensing of, 123–6 deconstructing the body, 98–9 Descartes, René, 19–20 deviant bodies, 34 dialogue with the body, 110–111 diary keeping, 99–100 diet and weight control, 100–2, 105–6 discipline and the body, 73, 95–7, 105–7 discourse of ageing, 2, 14, 56 resisting the, 115 rewriting the, 137–9, 143 disembodiment, 40 dispositions, 28–9 disrupted body, 38

179

distinction sport and the struggle for, 42–4, 159 docile body, 22 dress codes, 4 Durkheim, 26 dys-appearance, 38, 39 dys-appearing body, 62, 111, 149 Elias, N., 3, 31–2 embodied identities, 155–7 embodied intentionality, 13, 143 embodied mastery, 112–13 embodied research, 63 embodying age, 148 emotion and the body, 25 endurance events, 133–4 and ageing bodies, 134 and female bodies, 134 enfeeblement, 15–17, 24, 78–80, 121, 131–5, 137 and medicalisation, 147–8 resisting, 37–8 and women, 78– 80, 81–3 Enlightenment, 19–20 ephemerality of ageing body, 149 of athletic body, 35, 115, 138 exercise and emancipation, 15 feminisation of long distance running, 44, 45–6, 153 field, 29, 31 athletics as, 39, 43 see also social fields fitness threshold, 14–15 Foucault, M., 21–2 fun run, 84 gentrification of long distance running, 44, 45–6, 152 habitus, 28, 31, 38, 43, 151, 152–3, 155 health concerns, 90–1 heroes, 50, 51 housing and age, 69

180 Index identity and age, 156 and athletics, 36, 53, 155–7 embodied, 155–7 illness, 128–9 injury, 38, 50, 108, 128, 130–1 as biographical disruption, 109 managing injury, 108–9 and narrative of decline, 120 recognising injury, 109–11 as self inflicted, 131 jogging, 84, 129 learned helplessness, 16 life history, 65–9 interpretations, 65–9 life review, 66, 67–9 representation, 66–9 life trajectories, 77–85 lifeworld and ageing, 149–51 and athletics, 35–6, 52 runners, 52 lines of demarcation, 92–3 lived experience of ageing, 10–11 long distance running, see athletics; marathon running; running malleability of body, 16 malleable body, 14–15, 107 managing ageing, 5, 127 managing bodily deterioration, 12 Marathon Boom, 85–7, 88 marathon running, 85 and class, 83 training, 86 marginalisation of ageing embodiment, 62 marginalised bodies, 34 Mask of Ageing, 5–7, 10, 138 Mask and masquerade, 5–7, 12–13 Master Athletics, see veteran athletics medicalisation of ageing, 2–3 medicalisation of bodies, 21–3 menopause, 11, 22 and enfeeblement, 16, 147 Merleau Ponty, M., 27–8

narcissism, 24–5 narratives of ageing, 66, 115 resisting, 137–8 narratives of embodiment, 62–4 natural aptitude, 81–3 nursing homes and regulation, 12 objectification of the body, 107–8 ontological instability, 17 ontology of ageing, 4–5, 62, 156 osteoporosis, 23–4 passivity (of women’s bodies), 23–4 pathways to athletics, 81–3, 146 periodisation, 95–7, 102–4 phenomenological imagination, 40–1, 60 phenomenology, 27–8, 38 phenomenology of ageing, 141–2, 143 popularisation of long distance running, 44–6, 133–4 positive disruption, 161 postmodern ageing, 8, 9 powerlessness, 118–20 Proprioception, 126 rationalisation of training, 85–7, 151 realisation of ageing, 115, 116–19 reconstruction of the athletic body, 131–2 embodiment, 137 reflexive embodiment, 32–4 regulation and embodiment, 3–4 structures of, 147–8 research process, 61–76 capturing the ageing body, 63–4 comparing past with present, 64–5 dilemmas, 74–5 exploitation in research, 75 life history approach, see separate entry participant observation, 72–3 research participants, 70–1 sample recruitment, 71–2 tight knit groups, 74–5

Index resource management, 103–5 risk body at risk, 128–9, 148 runner’s body, 49, 101–2, 105–7 running and age, 54–6 as agency, 53, 58, 59 as biological process, 49–50 as body project, 94–8 and class, 81–3 elite and non elite, 83 and embodiment, 49–50, 94–9 and health promotion, 45 and lifeworld, 52 as sensate experience, 51–2, 53–4, 126 and women, 44, 45–6, 47–9 see also athletics, long distance running, marathon Scottish Veteran Harriers Club, 54 sedentariness, 14–15, 60 sensing bodily ageing, 123–7 Simmel, 26 situated embodiment, 64–5 situated identity, 57 social field, 38, 47–8, 62–3, 69–70, 76, 144–5, 156–7, 158–61 social gerontology, 1, 141 sociality and the body, 26–7 socially constructed body, 25

181

sociology of age embodying the, 145–6 missed opportunities in, 141–4 sociology of the body, x–xi, 18–39, 144 sociology of sport, x, 41, 42–4, 144–5 somatic society, 20 sport and social change, 44 structural constraints, 91–3 structures of regulation, 147–8 ‘Third agers’, 8, 9 trainable bodies, 14, 16 training the body, 50–1 and age, 85–7, 135–7 discipline, 95–8 intensification of, 87 scientific, 86, 87–9 transgressive bodies, 23 athletics as, 36–7, 58–9 Veteran athletics, 54–6, 146as social movement, 55–6 Veteran movement, 87–90, 132, 134, 150, 156–7 rejection of, 89–90 as social field, 157, 158 Veteran runners, xi–xii, 73, 77–8 women’s bodies, 22, 23–4, 37–8, 48