ABSTRACT
Sport and exercise are particularly embodied activities, and as a consequence perhaps, have generated a great deal of research on their physiological aspects. In common with large amounts of the psychological research on sport and exercise, physiological studies primarily employ a positivistic framework, which constructs as ‘objective’ the observation, recording and measurement of phenomena (whether physiological, psychological or social) using quantitatively based research techniques or tools such as surveys, scales and structured interviews. This chapter will consider an alternative and very different mode of examining sporting and other activity, namely, autoethnography, where the focus centres upon the meaning of the activity to the researcher/participant herself or himself, and upon the cultural and social context. At this juncture, in congruence with the spirit of the autoethnographic enterprise, it is necessary to make visible some relevant ‘accountable knowledge’ (Stanley 1990), in order to explain our interest and involvement in the autoethnographic approach. In brief, collectively we have an athletic background of distance running and racing which has required a commitment to training 6 or 7 days a week, sometimes twice a day, for 18 years and 37 years respectively. In addition, we have trained together on a regular basis for 17 years. By a strange coincidence, we both suffered severe running injuries almost simultaneously, and decided to undertake a collective autoethnographic study of the subsequent rehabilitative process. In this sense, it was one of those unhappy accidents of current biography which provided access, physical and psychological, to the research setting (Lofland and Lofland 1985:11) and stimulated our interest in autoethnography.
