Paper short abstract:

Ultrarunning entails self-inflicted pain and suffering that place the runner’s gendered and classed body in an uncertain and vulnerable condition. This paper scrutinises the moral language that runners use to justify this in the example of recreational ultrarunners in Estonia.

Paper long abstract:

Various sports – endurance sports in particular – entail self-inflicted pain and suffering that place one’s body in an uncertain and vulnerable condition. Building on the ethnographic example of recreational ultrarunners in Estonia, this paper scrutinises the moral language that many runners use to justify and make sense of the pain and suffering that running extended distances often results in and how this is reflective of the gendered and classed essence of the runners’ bodies. As I will argue, the moral language that runners use is a technology of the self that, according to Foucault (1985), can be understood as consisting of various practices and techniques that individuals, drawing from available and imagined cultural models, perform on themselves to become moral subjects. Sensations of extreme exhaustion, severe physical pain, sleep deprivation, and other common effects of ultrarunning constitute “bodily affordances” (Gibson 1986) in this self-making process. Occasionally, these bodily experiences are reframed in spiritual or even religious terms and experienced by ultrarunners as emotionally uplifting and as means for living a “more authentic” life. But ultrarunners’ willingness to subject their bodies to long-term physical strain and to put their will power on trial can also be interpreted as corresponding to various middle-class specific ideals of self-discipline, motivation, success, and perseverance. The ultrarunning bodies are usually tracked, monitored, and measured by means of modern technology, and such technologically enhanced and informed “optimisation of the self” constitutes a form of biopolitics that fits with various neoliberal values such as efficiency and productivity.