Sarah Oliver
I am a former Going the Distance athlete, and over the course of the past year I have been researching and writing my senior thesis at Tufts University. My thesis explores the tension between maintaining one’s athletic identity and negotiating the inevitable changes and challenges that come with both injury and normal life-course changes as a college athlete.
I asked how these experiences intersected with identity and with idealized bodies within what some have termed “diet culture.” I did this by interpreting athletes' own narratives about their injuries as reflected in the interviews I conducted with members of the Tufts Track and Field team in the fall of 2019.
I found that athletes are in pursuit of a contradictory set of goals: we strive for improved performance as the utmost goal, and yet we also wish nothing else would change. Once a runner, many of us hope to always be one, only getting faster, never injured. But as one particularly beat-up athlete I spoke with said, injury is the nature of sport, and it is something we will deal with for the rest of our lives.
Sports are based on strengthening the body in order to improve performance. The way the body becomes stronger is through years of tiny stressors, muscle tears, heart beats and repetitions. It is only logical that some of these stressors can become too much, and injury occurs. We may choose to ignore the injury and carry on with our usual activities of daily life, or the injury may become so painful or limiting that we are forced to recognize the injury and work within its limits.
Some athletes, though I have found it to be rare, are able to recognize the early stages of injury and scale back in time to prevent future pain and limitation. But most continue to listen instead to external and internalized pressures that encourage them to do more in order to be anything at all.
In my research, I reference anthropological works that describe the illness experience, or in this case injury experience, and how narration of the experience brings it fully into existence. When I sought to collect injury narratives on the Track and Field team, I found an overarching desires to discuss the fear of weight gain that resulted from the injury experience.
After completing my thesis and sharing my research with peers and health professionals alike, I have been asked to continue this pursuit of stories. My goal now is to collect sports injury narratives from all Track and Field athletes, high school through college, nationwide, in order to better understand how diet culture messaging has impacted the injury experience.
If anyone has a story they would like to share, I encourage them to email me their story at sarah.oliver4@icloud.com. Stories will always be anonymized, and in turn participants will be contributing to a larger discussion that will allow athletes' voices be heard and lead to lasting change in sports.
[Sarah competed in cross-country and track & field for four years at Marblehead High School and another four years at Tuft University, where she added weight throwing to her events. She coached for three summers in the GTD cross-country program.]