Endurance Running ─ A Socio-Cultural Examination

Running is a fundamental human activity and holds an important place in popular culture. In recent decades it has exploded in popularity as a leisure pursuit, with marathons and endurance challenges exerting a strong fascination.Endurance Running is the first collection of original qualitative research to examine distance running through a socio-cultural lens, with a general objective of understanding the concept and meaning of endurance historically and in contemporary times.

Adopting diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to explore topics such as historical conceptualizations of endurance, lived experiences of endurance running, and the meaning of endurance in individual lives, the book reveals how the biological, historical, psychological, and sociological converge to form contextually specific ideas about endurance running and runners.

The book explores endurance as a wider socio-cultural phenomenon, making it useful reading for anybody researching across the entire spectrum of endurance sports, and is fascinating reading for anybody working in the sociology of sport or the body, cultural studies or behavioural science.

William Bridel is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary, Canada. His teaching and research focus on socio-cultural aspects of the body, sport, physical activity, and health. His research interests include: the emergence of ultra-endurance sports as forms of leisure activities; social and political aspects of health; sport-related pain and injury; and, gender, sexuality, and sport. His work has appeared in various journals includingThe Sociology of Sport Journal and Leisure/Loisir. His current list of projects includes collaborations with national and provincial sport organizations, focused on inclusivity and diversity

Pirkko Markula is a professor of socio-cultural studies of physical activity at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include social analyses of dance, exercise, and sport in which she has employed several theoretical lenses ranging from critical, cultural studies research to Foucault and Deleuze. While her work is based on qualitative research methods (textual analysis, participant-observation, interviewing, ethnography), she is also interested in methodological experimentation including autoethnography and performance ethnography. She is the previous editor of theSociology of Sport Journal. She is the co-author, with Michael Silk, of Qualitative Research for Physical Culture (Routledge, 2011), co-author with Richard Pringle, ofFoucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self (Routledge, 2006), editor ofFeminist Sport Studies: Sharing Joy, Sharing Pain (SUNY Press, 2005) and Olympic women and the media: International perspectives (Palgrave, 2009), co-editor with Eileen Kennedy ofWomen and Exercise: Body, Health and Consumerism (Routledge, 2011), co-editor, with Sarah Riley, Maree Burns, Hannah Frith and Sally Wiggins, ofCritical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management (Palgrave, 2007) and co-editor, with Jim Denison, ofMoving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (Peter Lang, 2003)

Jim Denison is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta, Canada. A sport sociologist and coach educator, his research primarily examines the formation of endurance running coaches’ practices through a Foucauldian lens. Along with numerous book chapters and referred articles, he editedCoaching Knowledges: Understanding the Dynamics of Performance Sport (2007, AC Black) and was co-editor ofThe Routledge Handbook of Sports Coaching (2013, Routledge). In addition, Denison is the author ofThe Greatest (2004, Breakaway Books), the official biography of the Ethiopian running legend Haile Gebrselassie, andBannister and Beyond: The Mystique of the Four-Minute Mile (2003, Breakaway Books), a collection of in-depth interviews with a wide-array of sub four-minute milers