1st Edition
Exercise and Well-Being after High-Performance Sport Post-Retirement Perspectives
Exercise and Well-Being after High-Performance Sport explores whether high-performance athletes have healthy and prosperous relationships with exercise and well-being after retirement from elite sports. This edited collection is the first of its kind to bring together sociologically informed accounts from former high-performance athletes about their retirement experiences and post-sporting careers.
The chapters combine creative narrative writing and social theory to frame the experiences of exercise and well-being after retirement from high-performance sport. Written by former high-performance athletes who are now socio-cultural sports scholars, the authors explore how retiring from elite sport impacted their relationship to exercise and physical activity, identity, and long-term mental health.
This book is key reading for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics and researchers interested in sports retirement experiences, sport sociology, mental health, and well-being.
Introduction
LUKE JONES, ZOË AVNER, AND JIM DENISON
1 Professional Sport: An Ill-Fitting Suit?
KITRINA DOUGLAS
2 Aesthetics of Existence Post-elite Sport Performances: Negotiating the Critic and the Complicit Elite Athlete Self
GÖRAN GERDIN
3 Learning to Look Through the Body Rather than At It: An Athlete’s Attempt to Re-configure Their Relationship with Exercise
JOHN TONER
4 A Hard Habit to Break: Epiphanies Stop Coming – If I Ain’t Running!
DAVID HOWE
5 From Disciplined Body to Foucauldian Ethical Thinker: A Transformational Tale of a High-Performance Baseball Player
CLAYTON KUKLICK
6 The Continuation of ‘Slim to Win’: The Sustained Impact of a Dominant Cultural Ideology on One Athlete Post-sport
JENNY MCMAHON AND KERRY R. MCGANNON
7 Finally … for the Joy of It All: A Corporeal Reconciliation Narrative of a Former College Distance Runner
TED BUTRYN
8 Moving in Different Circles
DARRYN STAMP
9 Moving Afresh: A Narrative and Foucauldian Analysis of Transitioning to New Movement Practices
JOSEPH MILLS
Conclusion
ZOË AVNER, LUKE JONES, AND JIM DENISON
Biography
Luke Jones is a lecturer in sport coaching at the University of Bath, UK, and a former youth international and semi-professional footballer. Luke’s doctoral research and subsequent research programme has focused upon exploring retirement from sport using a socio-cultural perspective, including how former athletes relate to their own exercise.
Zoë Avner is a lecturer in sports coaching at Deakin University, Australia, and a former French youth international and semi-professional footballer. Her research draws on post-structuralist and feminist methodologies to explore athlete and coach learning, power and coaching, and coaching ethics.
Jim Denison is a former NCAA Division I middle-distance runner who also competed internationally following his university career. He is a professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta, Canada. A sport sociologist and coach educator, his research examines the formation of coaches’ practices through a post-structuralist lens.
