Running into Injury time: Distance running, sports injury and time

What is it about?

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 that takes time as the focus of the analysis. Given the centrality of time as a feature of most sports, this would seem a curious gap. The primary aims of this article are to contribute new perspectives on the subjective experience of sporting injury and to analyze some of the temporal dimensions of sporting “injury time” and subsequent rehabilitation. The article is based on data derived from a 2-year autoethnographic research project on 2 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.

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Photo by Nathalie Désirée Mottet on Unsplash

Photo by Nathalie Désirée Mottet on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In the sociology of sport and physical cultures, very little has been written on the role of 'lived' time, and the subjective experience of time during a period of injury and then rehabilitation. This article seeks to address that gap in the sociological literature. It argues that not only is time a key dimension of lived experience of running (and other sports and physical cultures) it is important to take into account sportspeople's own subjective experiences of time when devising rehabilitation programmes.