A moving experience: exploring women runners embodied experience and meanings of body ideals, self-care, and health

Abstract

This research explores how seventeen women recreational runners experience their bodies through movement and how these embodied experiences influence their understanding of gendered body ideals, health, and self-care practices. I also incorporate my body story as a reflexive strategy to stay present through the research process. Drawing from feminist poststructural theory, I utilized a moving methodology of interviewing while walking or running to explore how the runners experience their bodies in motion. I focus on how they draw from their running practice as a potential pathway for questioning dominant narratives of body ideals that foster new ways of thinking about healthy or athletic bodies. I demonstrate how the women draw from dominant notions of body ideals to articulate the “runner’s body” while also resisting these ideals as they draw from their own embodied experience of running and witnessing diverse running bodies in the community. Two distinct running bodies emerged: the High-Performance Running Body and the Serious Recreational Running Body. These distinct discursive constructions of who can be “a runner” resisted conventional notions of the runner’s body, which allowed multiple subject positions to become available to claim the runner’s identity. I also present how health and self-care are understood in the context of their running practice. Finally, I provide a discussion related to the importance of body-inclusive communities within physical activity and sports settings.Through this research, I am contributing to the growing body of literature on the benefits of using a moving methodology to engage the body in motion as methodologically generative that bridges a gap between the discursive body and the material body.