“Some People Smoke and Drink, I Run”: Addiction to Running through an Ethnographic Lens

Abstract

Recreational long-distance runners’ exercising levels often considerably exceed those necessary for keeping healthy. As their running careers unfold, many runners become inspired not so much by fitness and health but by other corollaries of running, such as capacity to endure high levels of pain and exhaustion or novel bodily experiences. As I show in the ethnographic example of Estonian runners, a “low-resolution” explanation of such a shift in runners’ motivations allows it to be understood in conventional terms of addiction. Three symptoms commonly highlighted in definitions of exercise addiction – tolerance, continuance, and withdrawal – were particularly salient in the careers of many interviewed runners. However, the reasons for developing these symptoms were not merely psycho-physiological and their implications were not clear-cut which calls for a more nuanced approach to runners’ bodily experiences, the meanings attributed to these, as well as running addiction and its relationship with health and well-being.

Keywords:

• Body
• exercise addiction
• Estonia
• long-distance running

Introduction

Anna, a mother of three, had never been into any sports before Lia, her next-door neighbor, invited her for a jog. Lia, a dedicated marathoner, was running daily and Anna decided to accompany her occasionally. The newly discovered activity was first a mere escape from the domestic routine. It did not take long, however, that Anna found herself running six times a week, and in 2011, at the age of 34, she ran her first marathon. A year later she completed seven marathons. More races also meant more training and for a while Anna even ran twice a day, following the example of Lia’s husband Tom, also a committed runner. In a matter of few years, running had taken over Anna’s life – to the extent that, as she herself claimed, “some people smoke and drink, I run.” It was as if her body forced her to exercise, even when the weather was horrible or when she had bronchitis. “It was impossible to keep myself from running,” Anna recalled, also admitting that she was ready to quit her job if it would interfere with her running.

Anna also stressed that she did not run for health reasons. What appealed to her instead was the “purifying” effect of and the bodily sensations generally associated with running such as “flow” or “runner’s high.”¹ This eventually led her to ultramarathons. However, after completing a particularly rugged 100 K race that she pushed through without a step of walking, Anna felt exhausted for months and suffered from high blood pressure. Doctors diagnosed overtraining syndrome which forced her to take a long break from exercising. Although Anna later resumed running, her training volumes have dropped considerably.

Kevin’s story is both similar and different. He started running primarily to lose weight and like Anna, was 34 when he ran his first marathon. Unlike Anna’s, Kevin’s “conversion” from a jogger to a dedicated marathoner and eventually to a passionate ultrarunner was more gradual – it took him several years to gain confidence in his own body. To date he has run more than 100 marathons and completed numerous ultra races. Despite the differences between how their running careers evolved, Kevin associated his passion for running with physical and emotional sensations similar to Anna’s. In his own words:

After you’ve run 100 kilometers or even just a marathon, it’s a total high. When I run for 24 hours, it lasts for ten days… You don’t become a new person, but you are as if purified.

Kevin conceded that his running volumes were “not quite normal.” Distancing himself from his own body, however, he jokingly suggested: “I guess my body has understood that its crazy owner simply won’t stop.”

These two introductory portraits exemplify well the life-worlds of many committed recreational runners in Estonia, the ethnographic context of this article. The last four decades in the Estonian running scene can be summarized like this: the number of marathon finishers grew slowly throughout the 1980s, the last decade of the Soviet regime, but ebbed considerably in the 1990s. The figure started to increase exponentially after the turn of the millennium and the year-on-year growth rate of marathon finishers until 2015 was almost yearly over ten percent.² The growing popularity of long-distance running has been particularly marked among runners in their 30 s and 40 s.

Not only do more Estonians run, but they run increasingly more. In 2019, 31.4 percent of all Estonian runners completed more than one marathon, 3.8 percent completed more than five. In 2010, the respective figures were 18.1 and 1.1. The growth trend is also manifested in the increasingly popular marathon tourism and the growing number of domestic races.³ Small local events held in provincial towns or villages are mushrooming – these are often catered to runners, who “collect” marathons. One can also run “virtual marathons,” covering a marathon distance on one’s own and sending an electronic proof of this to the organizer. The Estonian ultrarunning community has likewise been burgeoning as many runners gradually move on to longer distances and novel running formats.

All these changes are congruent with an overall improvement of health indicators in Estonia and the popularity of long-distance distance running could thus be considered a manifestation of growing health awareness. But as Anna’s and Kevin’s stories illustrate, many runners exercise at levels that considerably exceed those necessary for keeping fit, well, and healthy. Among endurance sports, distance-running is especially prone to causing exercise addiction (Di Lodovico et al., 2019; Landolfi, 2013).

This article examines, through an ethnographic lens, various embodied dimensions of running addiction. The discussion unfolds as follows: after a brief overview of ethnographic approaches to running, terminology, research methods, I will scrutinize my material in light of three symptoms of exercise addiction building on an approach by Hausenblas and Downs (2002a, 2002b). The symptoms of tolerance, withdrawal, and continuance were prominently present in the running careers of most of my interlocutors. However, the reasons for developing these symptoms and their implications were not necessarily clear-cut. In all three cases I suggest that a “higher resolution” image of running addiction – that I believe an ethnographic approach offers – leads to a more nuanced understanding of the meanings attributed to the activity, revealing the phenomenological dimensions of running and a complex relationship between exercise addiction, health, and well-being.

Ethnography and recreational running

Estonian running boom is not novel and unique, of course. Most countries in the “Global North” and also elsewhere have experienced growing popularity of running since the 1960s. Jogging, according to Latham (2015), was “invented” as a lifestyle-changing practice that helped to bring a new sense of moralism to exercise culture. It quickly transformed into running that became a favored middle-class activity first in the US, later in Western Europe, and then in other countries. In five decades, recreational running has thus evolved into the most popular activity of serious leisure. Shipway et al. (2013, p. 259), building on Unruh’s (1979) notion of “social world,” demonstrate how this complex world is now characterized by different organizations, practices, events and actors, and how belonging to it constitutes a foundation for “development and confirmation of a running identity and, with it, social fulfilment.”

Various books published already in the 1970s demonstrated the contribution of running to the sense of personal well-being (Fixx, 1977; Sheehan, 1978), but it is in the past two decades that research on long-distance running from a variety of disciplinary perspectives has truly proliferated. This also applies to ethnographic accounts that often employ Bourdieuan and Foucauldian perspectives. Another frequent theoretical framework in ethnographies of running – that I will return to in the analysis below – has been Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception (Hockey, 2006; Hockey & Allen-Collinson 2016; Koski 2015; Lev, 2020).

The recurring themes in ethnographic studies, to name a few, include running as a form of self-actualization (Leedy, 2009; Markula, 2000; Reischer, 2001; Smith, 2000), its contribution to mental and physical health (Boudreau & Giorgi, 2010; Nettleton & Hardey, 2006; Shipway & Holloway, 2010), the diversity of “running bodies” (Bridel & Rail, 2007; Chase, 2008; Hanold, 2010), and novel spatial or social experiences through running (Hanold, 2016; Robinson et al., 2014). Yet, most ethnographic research on running has scrutinized its “positive” implications. Less comprehensive attention has been paid to potentially adverse effects, occasional studies of pain (Lev, 2019) and injuries (Allen-Collinson, 2003; Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2007) notwithstanding. It is only recently that excessive running as a possible form of addiction has become an object of ethnographic scrutiny (Lev & Zach, 2020; Thorpe, 2016), even though psychological and medical research on exercise addiction goes back to the 1970s.

Addiction and excessive exercising – an elusive pair

Despite nearly five decades of research on the addictive nature of exercising, the topic is still contested for at least two reasons. Firstly, excessive exercising, although having neurobiological and psycho-social effects similar to those of drug abuse, has been deemed both as “positive” and “negative addiction.” The used research terminology varies and the differences between terms remain unclear (Landolfi, 2013). The respective vocabulary comprises notions such as “exercise dependence,” “exercise addiction,” “morbid exercise,” “fitness fanaticism,” “athletic neurosis,” “obligatory exercising,” “compulsive physical activity,” “activity disorder,” “compulsive athleticism,” and many more.⁴

My own terminological preference in this article is “running addiction,” the first use of which is generally credited to Sachs and Pargman (1979) in an early attempt to differentiate between commitment and addiction in endurance sports. In a further study, Sachs (1981, p. 118) defined it as “addiction of a psychological and/or physiological nature, upon a regular regimen of running, characterized by withdrawal symptoms after 24 to 36 hours without participation.” “Running addiction” captures more accurately than the generalizing terms listed above the ways my interlocutors spoke about their relationship specifically with running, rather than exercising in general. Their accounts were often reminiscent of those by drug users and included phrases like “being on top of the world,” “being high,” “being emphatic,” or “being the master of the universe.” Runners also admitted that they longed for an “endorphin fix,” were “hooked” on running, went running in response to “a craving,” and kept running because of “having stepped on a train one can no longer descend.”

Secondly, despite numerous efforts there exists no unequivocally accepted way of operationalizing addiction to excessive exercising. The suggested measurement tools, most of them psychometric, are multiple. Scales for determining addiction levels such as the commonly used Exercise Addiction Inventory and the Exercise Dependence Scale, have been reported to yield discrepant results on the prevalence of the phenomenon, owing to their different definitions of “problematic exercise” as well as target populations’ different linguistic, socio-demographic, and cultural characteristics (Allegre et al., 2006; Di Lodovico et al., 2019).

This article’s focus is predominantly on what people say and do, which leads me to problematize what I consider “low-resolution” generalizations about addiction to excessive running. The aim is not to refute the often-undisputable symptoms of addiction among runners but to demonstrate an intricate nature of these by highlighting the diversity of meanings attributed to and motivators behind the symptomatic behavior. I will specifically build on the well-known approach to exercise addiction by Hausenblas and Downs (2002a, 2002b), which in turn is modeled after the DSM-IV⁵ criteria for substance dependence. Maladaptive pattern of exercising, according to Hausenblas and Downs, is manifested by the simultaneous presence of at least three of the following seven symptoms: tolerance, withdrawal, intention effects, lack of control, time, reduction in other activities, and continuance. Of these, I will focus in detail on tolerance, withdrawal, and continuance that were most conspicuously present in my ethnographic material.

Methods and data

The study builds on qualitative data, which included fifty semi-structured interviews with recreational runners, notes on runners’ blogs, and participant observation in running events.

My interviews with runners focused on a wide range of topics: running career histories, motivations for running marathons, training and time-management, the relationship between running, family, and personal life, as well as long-distance running as a bodily experience. Here I asked my interlocutors to describe the sensory and emotional experiences of running, its spatial dimensions, the sensations of “flow”, “runner’s high,” and hitting the “wall,” strategies – both mental and physical – of overcoming pain, as well as recovery tactics and dealing with injuries. The interviews also comprised questions about the use of technology in self-monitoring. Importantly, the interviews did not include questions on running addiction – the topic was addressed by my interlocutors, explicitly or implicitly, without being purposefully led to it.

The length of interview recordings varied from half an hour to two hours. Oral or written informed consent was first obtained from the interviewee to whom the purposes of the study were also thoroughly explained. The interviewees were expected to have completed at least one marathon and be serious recreational but not elite runners. By “serious recreational runners” I mean individuals who purposefully train for and take part in marathons or longer races. Understandably, the concept could be extended to other categories of runners as well but my focus here is specifically on long-distance running and on runners who do participate in competitions. The latter enabled me to situate the interview material into the context of overall running statistics in Estonia that build on race protocols. The selection of interviewees (16 women, 34 men)⁶ was based on purposive maximum variation sampling (Patton, 1990). Only currently active recreational marathoners were interviewed and this particular version of the purposive sampling method allowed me to ensure as wide as possible a variation of the interlocutors’ age (26-64), the length of their running careers (up to several decades), and their best marathon finishing times (2:39-4:13). An overwhelming majority (90 percent) of the interviewees had university education; all but six held executive, managerial, academic, or administrative positions, thus belonging to the so-called “professional middle class.” I have given pseudonyms to the interlocutors whom I mention repeatedly in the text while others remain unnamed.

Besides interviews I followed roughly 30 runners’ blogs on Internet, focusing particularly on how one’s public self is constructed through the posted narratives. Blogs are used as platforms to make available to others race reports and weekly training logs, but also to describe one’s injuries or express frustrations about not being in shape. In other words, blogs constitute sites where runners submit themselves, free-willingly, to their readership’s panoptic gaze.

Participant observation was conducted in numerous running events. Being an avid runner myself, I have to date completed approximately 80 marathons and ultramarathons, in recent years as an observing anthropologist. Yet this study is not autoethnographic. Being myself part of the running community that the article focuses on has simply provided me with the necessary embodied and intuitive sense of the topic.

Interview transcripts and observation notes were analyzed by combining thematic analysis with the mapping of interviewees’ running careers. The former included identifying phrases, expressions, and ideas from interviews or blogs that were categorized under the themes of “tolerance,” “withdrawal,” and “continuance.” These were critically examined against the competition history of the interviewed runner. It is important to note in advance that my data did not reveal significant gender differences in terms of this paper’s primary focus, contrary to the claims by some other studies (Pierce et al., 1997), which is why the gender dimension is not explicitly addressed in the discussion.

Findings

I will now turn to scrutinizing my ethnographic material in light of three symptoms of running addiction. In all cases, I will first present evidence that speaks for the occurrence of the respective symptom, then shifting toward a more nuanced and phenomenologically informed “higher resolution” image that accounts for the diversity of bodily experiences related to the symptomatic behavior and a variety of meanings that runners attribute to it.

Tolerance

Tolerance, according to Hausenblas and Downs (2002a, p. 113), refers to either “a need for increased amounts of exercise to achieve the desired effect” of physical and emotional rewards, or, conversely, “diminished effect of the same amount of exercise” in terms of these rewards. The physiological explanation of this stipulates that with time exercising leads to increased metabolic efficiency and tolerance of the release of catecholamines, and increasingly higher level of activity is required to maintain arousal levels (Adams & Kirkby 1998). In case of runners, it means spending more time on running by running more often, longer distances, or both.

Nearly all my interlocutors had gradually increased their running volumes. Several runners ran 20-30 marathons a year, two runners completed 100 marathons in 2018. Runners often described such expansion in terms of overcoming their lack of confidence about the body’s ability to endure multiple races. Karl, for example, recalled:

In 2012, I wanted to run two marathons that were only four weeks apart. I was afraid since I did not know how my body will take it, whether it endures the second race. But once done, it really didn’t feel anything crazy and I have now boldly squeezed many more marathons into each year.

Liina similarly recounted:

First I thought I must spend a lot of time on recovery or else I will harm myself, that running multiple marathons a year is unhealthy. But nothing bad happened, so, yes, it is doable! They told me I will destroy my body, but my experience was the opposite – I could easily run another marathon a week later. It is not such a big deal!

The same applies to training. Lia used to take a three-week break from running after her first marathons but now one day suffices. Most interviewees trained daily, but some ran twice a day, one runner occasionally trained three times a day, covering 300-400 kilometers a week. Lia’s husband Tom described his shift from three weekly runs to running twice a day accordingly:

I started by modestly adding extra training days to my regular week. When I had reached six, I realized my legs were holding up, even though sometimes I had knee pain […]. Then I thought I could as well do seven, right? At one point, out of interest, I tried to run twice a day for a week. Nothing happened, I wasn’t even too tired. By a year later, I was regularly training twice a day.

As Atkinson (2008, p. 176) argues in the example of Canadian triathletes, when people increasingly experience satisfaction from having a sporting body, “a desire to push the body to the next level generally emerges.” At this point, Atkinson’s interviewees claimed they became habituated and “addicted” to the process of testing their physical and psychological boundaries. Occasionally, my interlocutors also described their expanding running volumes in explicit terms of addiction. Albert’s brief synopsis of his running career is an example:

I have been running for twelve years and can no longer do without it. I used to run four times a week but it was not enough. My body now yearns for daily exercise, I need an endorphin fix. I have even switched to cycling to work, accelerating after every stop behind the street lights to get the pulse up – my body requires it.

Besides increasing the frequency of their runs, nearly half of my interlocutors had experimented with ultrarunning. Trail running was most common, although runners had also added rogaining, 12 and 24-hour races, and events with various novel formats to their “running menus.” For these runners, marathons were often demoted to “mere training-runs.”

What are the motivating factors for moving to the “next level”? Judging by how runners reflected on their choices, such expansion cannot be interpreted only in terms of increased tolerance to psycho-physical arousal. The implied motivators were multiple and many transcended physiological explanations. Sheer curiosity was mentioned most often. A female runner, training for a 100 K run in the Alps, claimed, for example:

I am truly interested in how it is possible – as I have read – that you run so long a distance, feel crap, but then, as if, get more energy. Like being on top of a wave that grows and shrinks.

Many others expressed similar interest in how their bodily sensations changed when they ran more. As Hockey (2006) demonstrates, the sensuous dimensions of distance running are complex – “sensing the run” means simultaneously feeling, smelling, seeing, and listening to the route. Running increasingly longer distances modifies the whole palette of these bodily experiences and can also engender novel mental states. The flow experiences, triggered by longer than usual runs, were frequently mentioned by my interlocutors. As Csikszentmihalyi (1990, p. 67) famously puts it, flow constitutes an autotelic experience, the key element of which is that the triggering activity turns into “an end in itself,” it “consumes us” and becomes “intrinsically rewarding.” Koski (2015, p. 2) usefully adds that such experience “makes [the runner] more and more open to the experiential nature of the world.” Many runners recounted the pleasurable experiences of losing the sense of time and “opening up” to the surroundings when running particularly long distances, describing it in terms of “running on an autopilot” or “with the gear taken out.”

But some runners strove for a more elaborate mix of transcendendal or transpersonal experiences. Rain’s self-reflexive account is particularly revealing here, although being a doctoral student of psychology his reflections and vocabulary are not necessarily representative of other runners:

Sometimes, when you run through pain, you can open a “door of transpersonality.” This offers a possibility for extrasensory experiences even though the probability of this happening is statistically very low. It only occurs when I don’t expect anything, when I let go of everything. I have to run for a very long time to achieve this, a four-hour run is not enough.

According to Abbas (2004), reaching a transcendental state in running is not something one can do in competition with others, but through self-focused development, paying attention to one’s own body. As Rain claimed, the experience of having completed a 1000-km run around Estonia in 2009 had prepared him for running in a way that was focused entirely on himself and his bodily sensations.

Many other runners also claimed to develop a particular awareness of their bodies and through that a novel sense of “being-in-the-world,” as their running volumes increased. In the reflexive reconstruction of these experiences, they talked of running as “simply being,” “being twosome with oneself,” or “being in the center.” Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) core ideas on the phenomenology of perception and embodiment are particularly helpful when theorizing the way runners “(re)create the world” through novel sensations. For Merleau-Ponty, body is a subject of perception, a standpoint from which one perceives everything. In his own words, “the body is our general medium for having a world” (p. 169). Leder (1992, p. 25), building on Merleau-Ponty, puts it even more directly: “The lived body is […] a way in which the world comes to be.” For my interlocutors, the new awareness of their bodies was often coupled with a very particular, embodied perception of the environment they ran in, and hence the curiosity to experience running in novel circumstances.

That running enhances such “(re)creation of the world” is not surprising – in Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, pp. 110–111) understanding, “perception is inextricably linked to movement.” Running could hence be regarded as “a highly intelligent activity,” extrapolating on Ingold’s (2004) claim about walking. This intelligence, Ingold (p. 332) maintains, “is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world.”

All these motivators to run increasingly more highlight a complex relationship between self, body, and running that circumvents the physiological foundations of tolerance.

Withdrawal

Withdrawal, according to Hausenblas and Downs (2002a, p. 113), is either manifested in “the characteristic withdrawal symptoms for exercise” when forced to restrain from the activity or, conversely, in engaging in “the same (or closely related) amount of exercise […] to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.” These symptoms – anxiety, restlessness, irritability, frustration, depression, guilt, tension, and discomfort, but also loss of appetite, sleeplessness, headaches, and digestion problems – are similar to those that might follow a sudden discontinuation or decrease of drug intake.

My interlocutors often expressed anxiety about the possible suspension or termination of their running careers. Many admitted that they could no longer fathom their lives without running. Most runners had had pauses in their running careers and associated these, or even occasional days without running, with negative sensory experiences. The words used to describe such sensations included “tingling,” “tenseness,” “feeling itchy,” “drowsy,” “weird,” “awful,” “imprisoned,” “disabled,” “frustrated,” “incapacitated,” and “dysfunctional.” As Albert put it:

If I cannot run my body feels really weird. It could be psychosomatic, but it is still a real physical experience – my legs begin to hurt, mentally it feels like a total surrender.

Injuries produce the most severe withdrawal symptoms and highest levels of frustration. Martin, for example, had struggled for two years with heel pain:

I’ve tried to resume running five times in the past two years but every time the pain has grown so bad […] I tried everything – anti-inflammatory creams, rubbing the heels with ice, stretching, strengthening the muscles, pressure with a tennis ball, cold and warm baths, laser treatment, shockwave therapy, massage. Everything on the menu!

Some runners keep blogs where they describe their injuries and express their frustrations about not being able to run. The blog entries help runners to deal with guilt and anxiety by making their injuries public knowledge and thus legitimizing the disruption of their running careers. Alternatively, runners use strategies to maintain the integrity of their running selves when injured. Martin made every effort to resume running when heel pain receded. Tom kept a meticulous training diary when recovering from a knee operation, took long power walks, and planned his future competitions. Allen-Collinson and Hockey (2007) explores the role of similar “identity work” in sustaining a credible sporting identity during “injury time.” She and her running partner committed, for example, to brisk walking that helped them to retain a distinctive somatic form of a distance runner and imitated various pre-injury activities; they also told each other stories of “happier running past” (p. 390). Lev (2020, p. 7), in turn, describes how runners sometimes speak to their painful body parts, experience the feelings of alienation from their injured bodies, or even consider the body to have “betrayed” them.

My ethnographic material thus contains abundant descriptions of embodied sensations and negative mental states that unambiguously allude to withdrawal symptoms, as well as strategies to avoid them. But my interlocutors’ discourse on withdrawal merits also a scrutiny beyond the focus on addiction to the intrinsic rewards of extensive running. Two recurring extrinsic rewards were commonly mentioned when the fear of withdrawal from running was discussed.

The first comprised eating habits and related bodily hedonism. Many studies have established a link between excessive exercising and eating disorders, such as anorexia athletica and nervosa (Draeger et al., 2005; Klein et al., 2004), although some studies have also questioned it (Axelsen, 2009). My data do not include evidence on this link either – none of my interviewees admitted to having suffered from an eating disorder, although some runners did try to put their eating habits in service of result-oriented running. On the contrary, eating and sometimes also drinking alcohol were described as virtues that excessive running enabled and legitimized. Although running was still perceived as a form of weight control, there is a significant rhetorical difference between claiming to run “to lose weight” and stating that one runs “to eat as much as one wants.” As Kevin eloquently put it, “many people run because they eat a lot, I run in order to eat a lot.” Not only did running warrant such bodily hedonism, it also rendered it more pleasurable. As another runner argued, “[without running] I do not fully enjoy a meal, the food does not taste as good; having a beer is not as nice when I do not feel like a squeezed lemon.”

Another theme that emerged from the accounts of withdrawal fears related to various associations that my interlocutors constructed between running, their bodies, and certain qualities of the so-called “neoliberal self,” such as productivity, efficiency, entrepreneurialism, and creativity. Atkinson (2008, p. 176) similarly shows how for middle-class Canadian triathletes, triathlon and their own fit body symbolized being dedicated, controlled, disciplined, culturally and economically invested in health, and self-responsible. Most of my interviewees did not conceptualize running as a freestanding practice that happened at the expense of other activities. On the contrary, dedicated runners “reflexively mobilized” their running bodies into the service of their selves and nearly everything in their professional and private lives. Giddens’s (1991, p. 75) claim that the self in “late modern age” has become a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible, is useful here. “We are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves,” he writes, building on Rainwater. This involves body because “experiencing the body is a way of cohering the self as an integrated whole, whereby the individual says ‘this is where I live’” (Giddens 1991, p. 78).

Potential withdrawal from running was thus considered to have an adverse effect much broader and symbolic but also practical and tangible than the emotional and physical states listed above. Running helped my interlocutors to “plan the day,” “get organized,” as well as “energize” their life. One runner described how “injury time” had reduced his capacity to get things done like this:

Being injured affects everything, you achieve less, take on less tasks, work slower. When in good physical shape, I finish my chores that would otherwise take the whole day by early afternoon. The impact of running on my everyday efficiency is massive and that is the main reason why I want to keep in shape. Otherwise I will lose myself.

Although running served to “empty the head,” it was also described as an intellectual activity. As Tom half-jokingly argued, sometimes, when facing a work-related problem, the solution “required a longer run.” One runner described how running sessions enabled him to find a solution to saving his company from bankruptcy. Another explained how the routine of running helped him to plan his future career after being fired. Yet another runner recalled how during his long runs he came up with the design for his greenhouse. Rain, the psychology student, described his long runs as particularly good moments for creativity. “My most exciting ideas are born while running,” he claimed.

Continuance

Continuance, according Hausenblas and Downs (2002a, p. 113), refers to the situations where “exercise is continued despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the exercise.” As numerous studies have shown, exercise-dependent individuals are both more likely to suffer from injuries and to ignore medical advice (Adams & Kirkby, 1998; Thorpe, 2016). Continuance as a symptom also extends to exercising despite its socially or financially negative implications, such as interference with relationships and work obligations.

I will hereunder focus only on the physical aspects of continuance. Although various runners admitted that they had quarreled with their partners because of excessive running, and some were as adamant as Anna about prioritizing running over their job, my interviews, being mainly focused on running as a bodily experience, produced richer data on my interlocutors’ negotiation with their own bodies rather than with their families or colleagues. The accounts of injuries described in the previous section were not exceptional – most runners had experienced injuries at some point of their running careers. As Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2016, p. 235) put it, “if distance runners manage any degree of longevity in their sport, their bodies become actual and symbolic maps, etched with these injury sites.” Nearly every runner I interviewed described in detail his or her injuries, most commonly issues with hamstrings, knees, lower back, Achilles tendons, hips, and ankles. Some runners bluntly admitted that after becoming serious runners, they visited doctors more often than before. Others, interestingly, claimed the opposite. As one runner ironically stated: “I don’t go to doctors as a principle, I know much more about my body than they do.” Although extreme, this claim highlights the fact that through injuries many runners acquire a detailed knowledge of their bodies. As Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2016) also argue, prolonged exposure to running may result in the development of a somatic understanding of the various kinds of “dys-ease” that the panoply of running injuries can force into the athletic consciousness.

Yet injuries do not prevent most runners from running and many actively try to find ways to ignore them. Leder’s (1990) concept of “absent body” is useful when scrutinizing what happens in this process. As Leder (1990, p. 4) argues, “the body tends to disappear [from one’s awareness] when functioning unproblematically [but] it often seizes our attention most strongly at times of dysfunction.” This process entails a shift from “being” one’s body to “having” it. “Absence” is, following Leder, the desired state of the runner’s body. To fight the “dys-appearance” of the body during periods of pain, illness, and injury, my interlocutors claimed to try to “ignore,” “overcome” or “silence” their bodies, even “switch the body off.”⁷ Those who run ultramarathons, are particularly experienced with this. Kevin, for example, argued:

Ignoring is the best strategy when you have pain in your knee, hip, or back. You have to believe that it will pass. It really is a matter of belief.

In a recent study, Lev (2020) takes Leder’s seminal work on the phenomenological notion of “dys-appearing” body further by distinguishing between three dimensions in how runners experience physical pain. While the first-person dys-appearance is about the intrinsic relations between the runner and pain, social dys-appearance accounts for the socially negotiated pain in front of other runners or spectators, and socio-political dys-appearance stems from the reframing of the meanings of pain by physiotherapists. Lev’s second dimension was also evident in my conversations with runners. Many described in detail experiences of struggling with pain in order to avoid, nearly at all cost, “DNF” (“Did Not Finish)” label behind their name in race results, which, as other studies have also stressed, is a major source of shame and stigma (Hanold, 2010; Reischer, 2001).

In the accounts of these struggles, “good” and “bad pain” were portrayed in radically different terms.⁸ While good pain was often glorified and even enjoyed, as I will show further below, sensations of “bad pain” caused by a medical condition or an injury were described as alienating and disempowering – in Leder’s terms as truly “dys-appearing” experiences. Liina, for example, told how recurring heel and ankle pain due to overpronation – rolling the foot inward as one moves – forced her, occasionally, to run the whole marathon on her forefeet. Rain recalled, how he had twisted his ankle a day before a trail marathon in the Alps, could hardly walk, but still ran it. To be able to finish, he massaged his foot with snow during the race. Most runners had used some measures – from taping, orthopedic shoes, and food supplements to painkillers and cortisone injections – to combat pain while running.

Running while sick was not exceptional either. One runner recalled how he had taken the painkiller ibuprofen before a race to bring down the fever and ran the whole course “with a break on in case it strikes the heart.” Another runner recounted how she started a race being ill and ended up in emergency care after finishing. A year earlier she had run a marathon with recently discovered hernia. A couple of runners had been diagnosed a heart condition, one runner suffered from extrasystoles (premature contractions of the heart), but all of them kept running multiple marathons and ultra races every year despite doctors’ warnings. A runner suffering from severe arthritis ran in shorts in winters and during one particular race he had to take a cold bath in a nearby river to ease the pain in his knees. At least three runners, Anna among them, had developed a chronic fatigue syndrome after completing an ultramarathon.

Despite these experiences, all my interlocutors – without a single exception – denied the potentially hazardous effects of running. Instead, they often described it as “the most natural state of the human body,” sometimes referring to Christopher McDougall’s bestseller Born to Run. Running-related injuries were not explained by running as such but by a wrong running technique, wrong shoes, or “bad” genes. Some even claimed that their pains vanished while running and reappeared when they did not run. As Karl explained it:

My left ankle often feels quite dodgy, but only when walking or sitting. When I run, everything is OK.

Liina similarly claimed that running erased all aches in her body, including soreness in Achilles tendons and knees. “Resting only makes things worse,” she reasoned. Another runner, with a diagnosed heart condition, claimed that when she started regularly running more than ten marathons a year, her health became considerably better.

Though all these examples point to the symptom of continuance, interpreting them merely in terms of addiction fails to account for the intricate dynamics of personhood and agency that is manifest in these decisions and experiences. As Thorpe (2016) shows in her study of female runners diagnosed with amenorrhea who continued running against doctors’ recommendations, through their refusal to accept medical advice, these women exercised agency and negotiated multiple, often conflicting, discourses about the “healthy,” attractive, and performing body. Tulle (2007), focusing on ageing elite runners who tried to keep up their competitiveness levels, similarly suggests that the runners were doing so, at least partly, to challenge their age habitus, have control over the discourse of ageing, and maintain identity supported by competence and involvement in athletics.

For various interviewees cited above, continuance despite pain, injuries, or doctor’s advice was similarly an empowering experience and about asserting their agency.⁹ As the male runner suffering from arthritis stated:

My rheumatologist wanted to declare me disabled for life. But I want to sense the limits of my pain myself, to draw myself a line between good and bad pain.

Lia recalled how she had taken part in the testing of her colleague’s portable echocardiography device which, unexpectedly, put her in a high-risk group for cardiovascular diseases. The colleague started urging her to quit running and sent her numerous follow-up emails about the likely diagnosis. As Lia recounted:

It left me with such a bad feeling. I had a marathon coming up and I wasn’t sure whether to run it. But I did. It was such a relief – I realized how much running meant to me, that the best you can do is continue exercising. I have not let the [colleague’s] opinion bother me anymore.

The relationship between continuance and health is thus not straightforward. Some runners admitted that the medical conditions affecting their running performance would go unnoticed among non-runners, others believed that being habituated to exhaustion, they had developed a particularly high threshold for pain and injuries. Such complexity also suggests that susceptibility and experience of pain varies from person to person, and that “illness” and even “injury” are elusive terms as to how they are “defined, accorded significance, and socially labelled” (Waddington et al., 2006, p. 3). For example, Freund et al. (2013) in their study of pain tolerance and assessed personality traits of ultramarathon athletes argue that low pain perception may predispose a person to become a long-distance runner, although it remains unclear whether this is a cause or a consequence of extreme training.

It is pertinent to briefly return to the distinction between “bad” and “good pain” here. Contrary to the alienating effects of injury-related bad pain, various runners claimed that performance-driven good pain, manifested in exhaustion and muscle soreness, made them “feel alive.” Some even claimed that they got “real satisfaction” from running only if it produced such painful sensations. Similar veneration of good pain has been demonstrated by other authors in diverse athletic contexts. To bring a few examples: Reischer (2001) talks about “purposeful suffering” among US marathoners, Atkinson (2008) uses the term “civilised suffering” among the “pain community” of Canadian triathletes, Green (2011) writes about “the seduction of pain” among the practitioners of mixed martial arts in Minnesota, and Lev (2019) recounts how runners in Tel Aviv derive “pleasure and contentment from pain and bodily distress.” In fact, recent anthropological research on rituals even suggests that voluntarily undergoing short-term extreme suffering may positively affect one’s health and quality of life (Xygalatas et al. 2019).

The pleasurable and positive aspects of pain experiences among runners could be phenomenologically further theorized through Zeiler’s (2010) important addition to Leder’s work. While for Leder (1990, p. 4) body only “seizes our attention” when it dys-appears as “ill” or “bad,” Zeiler emphasizes the existence of bodily modes of being where body appears to the subject as something “good, easy, or well.” Zeiler (p. 333) calls this “eu-appearance” and considers exercising as one of its contexts. Although the potential dys-appearance inducing effect of good pain at the very moment of extreme exhaustion or muscle soreness should not be denied, runners’ retrospective accounts – perhaps reinterpretations – of the sensations of “good pain” nevertheless allow it to be interpreted in Zeiler’s (p. 334) terms as experiences when “the subject can attend to her or his body as something positive and […] this attention need not result in discomfort or alienation.”

Finally, it is also important to note that despite the normalization of injuries, glorification of “purposeful suffering,” and possibly lower susceptibility to pain, runners do stop running, often as a result of rigorous negotiation with their bodies. As Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2016, p. 235) suggest, “[t]he axiomatic question runners ask of themselves when suffering from […] afflictions is ‘what can I get away with?’” They describe a series of self-diagnoses, sensory monitoring, and “body-bargaining” that they engaged in to develop a labeling system of indicators for stopping or continuing the exercise. Many runners I interviewed engaged in similar self-diagnoses. One runner had started keeping a training diary where she recorded perceptions related to her bodily sensations. Feeling nauseated for a month after a race, she decided to take a longer break from running. Another runner recounted her experiences of completing a 100-mile race: “I felt like I was hundred years old, I was moaning with pain.” Reflecting on these sensory experiences of bodily “dys-appearance,” she admitted that her body had given her a wake-up call:

I don’t want to experience this ever again. As if my body told me – why are you treating me so badly, don’t do it again! I was embarrassed, somehow I had insulted my very own existence.

The atemporality of Hausenblas’s and Downs’s approach to continuance thus masks the fact that passionate runners can reach a point of limiting the amount of their running and they do so namely because of “knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem,” to use Hausenblas’s and Downs’s own words.

Conclusions

This study has advocated an ethnographic or what I have also called a “high-resolution” perspective on running addiction, the symptoms of which many dedicated recreational runners develop. My interlocutors’ running careers stereotypically began as a response to seeking certain extrinsic rewards – losing weight, staying healthy, being physically active. With time and success, competitive relationship with other running bodies evolved. As their running careers unfolded, many committed runners became inspired by motivators beyond health and fitness. These more intrinsic rewards included various novel physical and emotional experiences, states, and sensations.

This simplified description of my interlocutors’ running careers roughly coincides with how addiction to running develops. Committed exercisers are generally considered to exercise for extrinsic, addicted exercisers for intrinsic rewards (Landolfi, 2013; Sachs, 1981), which is likely to produce a number of clinical symptoms. I have focused on three of these – tolerance, withdrawal, and continuance were prominently present in the lives of most of my interlocutors. They were addicted to running, if one follows Hausenblas and Downs who define exercise addiction as the simultaneous occurrence of at least three symptoms from their list of seven.

This, however, is but a “low-resolution” image of the runners’ lives as I have tried to demonstrate. True, most runners had gradually expanded their running volumes, many had turned to ultrarunning, because marathons were “not enough.” However, this was not merely a result of developing physiological tolerance but also owed to a search for distinctive physical and emotional experiences, through often extreme bodily efforts and experimentation. It is also true that when injured, runners claimed to develop sensations unequivocally definable as withdrawal symptoms, but the source of these symptoms was not only the restraint from running but also the fear about giving up other practices that running was believed to enable and legitimize, as well as about the dissolution of functional or symbolic links between running and one’s personal or professional life. And finally, continuance despite injuries, doctors’ advice, and socially adverse consequences could also be considered a manifestation of agency, personalized discourse on health, and an attempt to challenge common understandings of pain and injury.

As Sassatelli (2013, p. 219) aptly suggests, with fitness training in mind, “in broad cultural terms, [it] rests on a specific combination of asceticism and hedonism.” When scrutinizing individual running careers through an ethnographic lens, a variety of possible combinations of asceticism and hedonism emerge. Coming back to the introductory portraits of this article – for Kevin, his evolvement into a dedicated ultrarunner was essentially a process of gaining more control over his body. “It has been good to become a master of my own physique,” he concluded. Anna’s conclusion was the opposite – stating that “some people smoke and drink, I run,” she alleged to having lost control over her body while evolving as a runner. These contradictory conclusions by two “running addicts” with otherwise comparable running careers underline the need to account for the multiplicity of meanings, implications, and embodied experiences of excessive exercising and its intricate relationship with health and well-being.

Notes

1 For an integrated discussion of the development of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory and research on “runner’s high” see Stoll (2019).

2 Statistical data on Estonian runners is retrieved from www.marathon100.com, a website that functions both as a news portal and a database.

3 All this applies to the era before the COVID-19 crisis.

4 Adams and Kirkby (1998), Draeger et al. (2005), and Landolfi (2013) provide comprehensive overviews of the terms used in different studies.

5 American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

6 The share of women among Estonian marathon finishers in recent years has fluctuated roughly between 23 and 26 percent. In comparison, women among my interviewees were purposefully slightly overrepresented to secure that my data includes a multitude of female experiences and perspectives on running.

7 Aalten (2005), also drawing on Leder, discusses similar strategies among ballet dancers.

8 The distinction between good and bad pain has been widely explored (Helman 2013; Jackson 2011), also in running (Bale 2006; Kelly 2007; Lev 2019).

9 Lev (2020, pp. 10–12) demonstrates how physiotherapists exercise control over the meanings of runners’ pain and attribute new biomedical explanations to it, often bypassing runners’ lived experiences.