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Paper short abstract

Ultrarunners often report self-transcendent moments that blur mind/body and self/world divides. This paper proposes thick participation and experience-near interviewing as methodological devices for studying and interpreting such extraordinary experiences.

Paper long abstract

Ultra-endurance running sometimes gives rise to experiences that might be described as “extraordinary” or “not quite real”: sensations of communion with landscapes, temporal distortions, sensed presences of “others,” visions or voices, hallucinations, and moments of self-transcendence. Drawing on ethnographic research among Estonian ultrarunners (including semi-structured interviews, runners’ blogs and social media texts, and participant observation at ultrarunning events conducted both as a runner and as a volunteer) this paper examines how such episodes are described, evaluated, and rendered meaningful within a largely secular running milieu. I approach these episodes as extraordinary experiences that unsettle familiar polarities (mind/body, human/more-than-human, visible/invisible, self/world, natural/supernatural) without presuming any single ontological resolution.

Methodologically, the paper argues for “thick participation” as an alternative to both distanced observation and full-fledged autoethnography. I suggest that the ethnographer’s sustained, embodied involvement in endurance running enables experience-near phenomenological interviewing and enhances the capacity to pose plausible and resonant questions. At the same time, it foregrounds the epistemic limits of accessing others’ first-person experience, turning the gap between experience and expression into an analytically productive site. This is particularly evident in moments when runners struggle to make the ineffable communicable and explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of available vocabularies for articulating such extraordinary experiences.