The essence of sporting embodiment: Phenomenological analyses of the sporting body

Whilst in recent years the sociology of sport has taken to heart vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to analyses of sporting activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ signalled by Kerry and Armour (2000), remains under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Surprisingly, given the focus of study, relatively few accounts are truly grounded in the corporeal realities of the lived, sensuous sporting body. Phenomenology offers us a powerful framework for such analysis and has been adopted and utilised in very different ways by different social science disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to consider how existential phenomenology in particular might be utilised in the study of sport and physical activity, and we draw upon data from a collaborative autoethnographic project on distance running to illustrate this. The use of existential phenomenology and autophenomenography offers, we contend, fresh insights in portraying the ‘essences’, sensuosity, corporeal immediacy and richly-textured experiences of sporting embodiment.