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Not fat, not skinny, functional enough to finish: interrogating constructions of health in the Ironman Triathlon

Sport has long been popularly promoted as a way to improve one's health through participation. Socio-cultural scholars investigating sport-related pain and injury, however, have called into question this suggested relationship pointing especially to competitive and contact sports as examples that challenge this assumption (Theberge, 2008. “Just a normal bad part of what I do”: Elite athletes’ accounts of the relationship between health and sport. Sociology of Sport Journal, 25, 206–222; Waddington, 2004. Sport, health, and public policy. In K. Young (Ed.), Sporting bodies, damaged selves: Sociological studies in sports-related injury. London: Elsevier; Young, 2004. Sports-related pain and injury: Sociological notes. In K.Young (Ed.), Sporting bodies, damaged selves: Sociological studies of sports-related injury (pp. 1–25). Oxford: Elsevier). In this paper, I use autobiographical and interview materials to explore how people who participate in Ironman triathlons construct health; I reveal the ways that in this non-contact, non-professional sport, ideas that connect health to body image and functionality, emerged most frequently in my analysis. I suggest that these constructions are influenced by neoliberal health discourses, in particular, the notions of individual responsibility, the use of leisure (non-work) time for self-work and (albeit to an extreme end) anti-obesity messages. Insights in this paper serve to further challenge popular assumptions that participation in sport is unquestionably healthy even in non-competitive, individual sport scenarios.