The act of running: a practical epistemology analysis of aesthetic experience in sport

Abstract

The aim is to explore aesthetic experiences in sport and how people – in this case a marathon runner – are ‘bodying’ the world aesthetically as part of their participation in sport. Aesthetic experiences in sport are mostly lived through the senses of the body, and even if there is a need to focus on people making sense of bodily movements, there is still the problem of transforming bodily movements and aesthetic experiences into words. In order to try to bridge this gap we suggest that a professional author could have tools for fruitfully articulation of non-linguistic aspects of corporeal existence in words. We therefore use a memoir What I talk about when I talk about running, written by the author and marathon runner Haruki Murakami, as empirical data in order to explore aesthetic experiences in sport through narratives of what we term aesthetic events. Using a practical epistemology analysis, a tool developed for analysing meaning-making, the study shows that aesthetic experiences during the act of running involve different ways of ‘bodying’ the world in transaction. The major theme is moving and the importance of keeping moving and the two minor themes are moving across a race and moving along the continuum of physical capacity. The study shows how aesthetic experiences play a part of meaning-making and in fulfilling the purposes of running. The study accordingly contributes to a discussion about meaning-making in sport in a non-dualistic manner where emotional aspects of experiences can be taken into account.

Keywords:

• meaning-making
• aesthetic events
• bodying
• marathon
• stories

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, Suzanne Lundvall, P-O Wickman and Louise McCuaig, as well as the members of the research group Studies of Meaning-making in Educational Discourses (SMED) for valuable comments.

Notes

1. Time banners are banners worn by official pace leaders who run at a certain pace in order to finish the race within a couple of minutes of a certain time.