Distance Running

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the coaching philosophy of a highly successful men's United States National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) division II cross country coach and determine to what extent his stated philosophy and actual coaching methods were humanistic. For the past 13 seasons , the participant coach's men's cross country team has finished either first or second at the NCAA division II national championships. In-depth semistructured qualitative interviews of the participant coach and three of his athletes were conducted in addition to eight overt naturalistic training session observations. All data were triangulated to generate themes to determine if the stated coaching philosophy and actual methods were congruent with the humanistic philosophy. The findings indicated that the coach was for the most part humanistic in regards to individualization, but was not humanistic in relation to open communication and collaborative decision-making with athletes, or a process-orientated definition of success. Implications of these findings include what may be the most effective coaching philosophy for men's NCAA division II cross country running through examining a highly successful coach in the discipline.

Based on a collaborative autoethnographic research project, this article explores the emotional dimension of the injured sporting body. It takes as its analytic focus the journey, rehabilitative, emotional and narrative, of two middle-aged, non-elite, middle/long-distance runners who experienced serious, long-term knee injuries. The study examines the interactional and narrative elements of the rehabilitative journey, focusing on dimensions of the emotion management, emotion work, and emotional intersubjectivity of the researcher/author and her training partner as they struggled to contend with the liminality of the injured athletic role, and to maintain positive identities in the face of serious threat to their running selves.


Key Words: autoethnography • emotions • sports injury

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively under-used within sports studies.  A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer standing literature in feminist phenomenology.  These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure.  After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist phenomenology, might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach

In the United States, running as a leisure activity continues to grow in popularity. Healthism can explain some of this popularity, but it does not explain ultra-distance running. Motivations for running can be seen through the framework of the Kantian beautiful and the sublime. Beauty arises through extrinsic motivation (e.g., products, physique, competition) and relates to an economy of form, while the sublime arises through intrinsic motivation (e.g., life meaning) and relates to confronting the challenge of infinity. The commercial, casual and competitive aspects of distance running correspond to the beautiful, while its wilderness, serious, ultra-distance aspects correspond to the sublime. This framework is used to explain the resistance of ultrarunning to the would-be detrimental effects of commodification, as well as ultrarunning's " wild turn. " This is a pre-publication copy of a paper published in volume 43, issue 3, of the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport in 2016. It is available to download at

A coaching philosophy is a set of values that guide a coach’s behavior in practical instructional situations, and in overall human relationships. The humanistic coaching philosophy is an athlete-centered, collaborative, and non-manipulative process between athlete and coach, taking into account individual athlete differences and abilities, with the hopes of eventually developing a self-confident and self-regulated athlete. The aim of this case study was to investigate the coaching philosophy and methods of a successful men’s NCAA distance running coach and explore to what extent the stated coaching philosophy and coaching methods of the coach are humanistic. After data collection of coach and athlete interviews, training session observations, and artifact collection, the primary theme of coach/athlete decision-making emerged. Findings indicated that the coach’s stated philosophy and methods were humanistic in regards to having open collaborative decision-making with athletes in most areas of the program (e.g., weekly running mileage, warm-up and cool-down routines, etc.), but dictatorial methods were employed in planning interval and tempo workouts independent from athletes. This corresponded to perceptions of dependency in which the majority of athletes felt dependent on the coach for planning training schedules and effectively implementing interval and tempo workouts into a training plan. A major implication from these findings include that in areas where coaches are authoritative, athletes may not develop feelings of competence which could impact athletes’ abilities to self-regulate independently from the coach.

Despite a growing body of research on the sociology of time, and analogously on the sociology of sport, to-date there has been relatively little sports literature which takes time as the focus of the analysis. Given the centrality of time as a feature of most sports, this would seem a curious lacuna. The primary aims of this paper are to contribute new perspectives on the subjective experience of sporting injury, and to analyse some of the temporal dimensions of sporting “injury time” and subsequent rehabilitation. The paper is based upon data derived from a two-year autoethnographic research project on two middle/long-distance runners, and concludes with some indicative comments regarding the need for sports physiotherapists and other health-care practitioners to take into account the subjective temporal dimension of injury and rehabilitative processes.