aging body and ontology of aging.body & society 2008 tulle 1 19

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DOI: 10.1177/1357034X08093570 2008 14: 1Body & Society

Emmanuelle TulleLife

The Ageing Body and the Ontology of Ageing: Athletic Competence in Later

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The Ageing Body and the Ontology of Ageing: Athletic Competence inLater Life

EMMANUELLE TULLE

This article will propose new understandings of ageing bodies in late modernsocieties, underpinned by a concern to find ways of resisting the erosion of socialand cultural capital which accompanies bodily ageing, not predicated on thedenial of ageing. This analysis is necessary as theorizing older bodies has beenand, I would argue, is still underdeveloped. This is not to deny the existence ofimportant developments in theorizing later life, particularly in the last 20 years,with the emergence of critical gerontology. However, the extent to which they takeaccount of the body on the one hand and, on the other, show the way towardseffective ways of resisting bodily ageing (both as a social and as a phenomeno-logical process) needs to be addressed. At the same time, there are tensions in thesociology of the body, identified by both Turner (1996) and Shilling (2003),between describing embodiment as regulation and as a source of social change.The central question posed by this article is whether the ageing body constitutesthe ontology of ageing (Wainwright and Turner, 2003). While this restores to thesociology of ageing an embodied dimension, it also runs the danger of restrictingunderstandings of ageing to its bodily dimension, leaving aside the social and

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offering little opportunity for alternative articulations of the relationship betweenbodily ageing, identity and agency. I will address these issues by examining thelived experiences of older Veteran elite runners using data collected in lifehistory interviews. I will focus in particular on the labour of maintaining athleticcompetence, a necessary disposition of the athletic habitus (Bourdieu, 1984), andpropose that it contains the potential for a radical rethinking of the relationshipbetween bodily ageing, identity and agency based on a redefined ontology ofageing.

Older Bodies

The centrality of bodily processes in ageing experiences was recently encapsu-lated in Wainwright and Turners (2003) assertion that the ageing, declining bodyconstitutes the ontology of ageing. What lies beneath this particular assertion andwhat is implied in relation to the potential for agency and resistance?

Traditionally, ageing bodies have been constructed as posing a challenge toagency and identity (Gilleard and Higgs, 2000; Shilling, 2003; Turner, 1996). Inthe context of disability, in which he argued for the cross-fertilization of the soci-ology of the body and disability studies, Turner (2001, 2003) made a convincingcase for a better articulation of phenomenology and social constructionism,suggesting that the sensate experience of the body (in this instance impairment)is both embedded in discourses which dictate what is a socially and culturallyacceptable body and intimately linked to selfhood. We become ourselves in theprocess of embodying ourselves, that is of equipping ourselves with the bodytechniques (Mauss, 1973) deemed appropriate for qualifying as fully integratedsocial actors. Embodiment and enselfment are life-long processes, primarilybecause the body is unfinished and their achievement needs a constant labour ofmaintenance. Turner adds that we are embodied and enselfed in specific loci, or,to borrow from Bourdieus theory, in habitus. Thus embodiment and enselfmentare also processes of emplacement (Turner, 2001).

These insights can be applied to ageing issues. The close connection betweenembodiment, identity and habitus can help us theorize ageing from the perspec-tive of cultural change. However, I would like to take issue with some of theimplications of Turners position. One key proposition is that human beings areinherently at risk of frailty (of the body and of the institutions in place to manageour incipient frailty). Frailty is a universal condition of the human speciesbecause pain is a fundamental experience of all organic life (Turner, 2001: 263).This frailty, he argues, provides us with our ontological status. Any manifestationof frailty, from injury, illness or arising out of biological ageing, threatens todisrupt our sense of self.

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This ontological position is developed by Wainwright and Turner (2003, 2006)in their work on ballet dancers, especially injured and retired ones. They bringto light the phenomenological dimension of embodiment. Ballet dancers, likeother elite athletes, are a special case in that they have achieved exceptional levelsof physical competence and bodily awareness. They have subjected themselvesto a highly disciplined, exacting, lengthy training regime to acquire the physicalcapital necessary to fulfil the aesthetic canons of their art form. The exceptionalphysicality of dancers enables Wainwright and Turner to show the pivotal roleplayed by the body as capital and as a productive anchor for identity.

One manifestation of this capital is the achievement of equilibrium betweenbody and mind. This equilibrium can be disturbed by injury and intimations ofageing. Dancers report that these epiphanies will render unnatural or consciousphysical dispositions once performed unthinkingly. During these epiphanies, themind/body integrity is disrupted and the dancers sense of self is compromised.

Wainwright and Turners analysis is a critique of the Cartesian dualism whichviews human bodies as just a shell acting as the repository for the mind, the latterbeing the true site of identity. In line with other developments in the sociologyof the body, these authors position reconstructs the mind/body relationshipgiving the body, its sensations and internal processes, a greater role in the con-struction of identity than the Cartesian position allowed for we may havebodies but we also, literally, are our bodies. Their ontological position is thuspredicated on a close integration of body and mind.

Restoring to the body such a key role is crucial for an understanding of ageingand in particular the devalued position of older people in modern Westerncultures. Historically, as Elias (1978 [1939]) has shown, the ever greater controlof bodily dispositions, which has become the norm since the Middle Ages,gradually became a crucial manifestation of what he termed the civilizing process.Biological ageing places at risk the ability to control the body, and thus deprivesit of its civilized normality.

The ageing body is also deprived of cultural capital. The proliferation ofimages of bodies which valorize youth, beauty, slimness, perfect body shapes andphysical competence in contemporary culture is problematic for older peoplewhose bodies, not conforming to these images, consequently become devalued(Featherstone et al., 1991; Shilling, 2003; Turner, 1996). Ageing bodies, and theirassociation with loss, contravene the cultural obligation and potential to bebeautiful. The sexualization of bodies (berg, 2003; berg and Tornstam, 1999)also plays a part in the devaluation of older bodies and of a range of qualitieswhich, arguably, older people might once have claimed for themselves, such asexperience and maturity. Thus old is opposed to young and any quality associ-ated with youth cannot be attributed to the old.

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At the level of discourse, the centrality of the body in ageing is reinforced bythe medicalization of ageing, that is the reduction of ageing to its biological mani-festations and the association of ageing with wholesale inevitable decline.

At the level of experience and sense of self, bodily ageing is theorized as athreat to both social and self identity (berg, 2003; berg and Tornstam, 1999,2001). Goffmans (1959) spoiled identity and Burys (1982) biographical disrup-tion have been used to articulate the negative impact of bodily ageing on oursense of self and our ability to locate ourselves in the social sphere. In sum, bodilyageing operates a break with our youthful past, and this is presented as detrimen-tal to our sense of self.

How can older people respond to their ontological condition, that is to thethreat to identity and social worth inherent in bodily ageing? The literatureproposes some strategies. One such strategy is the Mask of Ageing approach,symbolized in the claim I dont feel old (Thompson et al., 1990), which has beenelaborated by Featherstone and Wernick (1995). According to this approach,agers identify their ageing bodies as challenging their social and cultural status.Ageing elicits negative attitudes in onlookers and regulates behaviours in olderpeople. Agers do not recognize themselves in the stereotypes which their bodiesappear to elicit and therefore experience their bodies as a mask which concealsand ultimately betrays the real self. One strategy to counter the potential forbetrayal is to conceal or mask inner feelings, motives, attitudes or beliefs(Featherstone and Hepworth, 1995: 378).

A related line of defence is to promote the self as the true site of social value.Here agers seek social and cultural rehabilitation by distancing the self from itsphysical shell. The self itself is ageless; it has stopped ageing at a point muchearlier in the life-course than suggested by the appearance or functioning of thebody.

The experiential separation of the mind from the body which the Mask ofAgeing approach represents has been taken one step further. Featherstone (1995)muses on the potential of modern technological developments, such as theInternet and surgery, to conceal the visible signs of ageing and override the age-structuring of interpersonal relations. Paradoxically, all these strategies return theageing condition to a Cartesian model.

Disembodied Agency and Enfeeblement

These strategies can be problematic however. Hepworth (2004) has recentlypointed out that they amount to the disembodiment of the self and of experience.Katz (2000) argues that they are part of a project of agelessness (Andrews, 1999)


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in which peoples anxieties about ageing are exploited, commodified and evenmedicalized. They serve to privatize the fight against ageing and obsolescence.They may lead, as Biggs (2004) argues, to inauthentic ageing by denying theplurality of experience and sensation. They trap the old into an unattainable andtherefore fruitless search, in which the body would be rendered obsolete, whichwithin a phenomenological perspective cannot be sustainable.

Furthermore, the danger with the search for the universals of ageing is that,by definition, it does not foreground the unequal distribution of resources fordealing with these universal processes, nor does it allow for any possibility forimprovement.

What is not addressed in the disembodiment of the self is the extent to whicha proportion of the loss of physical function which we experience as we get olderis the result, not of biological ageing, but of enfeeblement (Vertinsky, 1998).Cultural expectations of appropriate physicality as we age encourage the morerapid lowering of our fitness threshold, a process which is then confounded withageing. As Monaghan (2001) has shown in a study of (young) bodybuilders, thereis nothing constant or stable about embodiment, nor is this instability confined tothe later years. Without constant training and management, physical competencewill always deteriorate.

Recently Shilling (2005) made the point that the body should be seen as a siteor producer of agency and social transformation. That is, resistance to existingsocial processes and relations can be effected through the body. He proposesengaging in what he terms corporeal realism, a form of sociological analysiswhich takes the bodysociety relationship as [its] core subject matter (2005: 12).In this analysis both society and the body are emergent phenomena they areboth in process, rather than finished stable structures, and are intimately linked.Shilling even proposes that the existence of structures and their longevity [are]connected inescapably to peoples embodied capacities (2005: 14). It is importantto include a temporal element as these processes of interdependency occur and arerevealed over time. Shilling adds a third element here and that is that corporealrealism should have a critical dimension. The latter is important although not easyto define or to evaluate. For this we need to return to the discursive level but alsoto the structures of distinction prevalent in any society, to extend to ageing experi-ences the potential for what Crossley (2001) called embodied agency.

It is doubtful whether current strategies of resistance to ageing, based as theyare either on the disembodiment of the self or on the concealment of bodily ageingor both simultaneously, are effective because they are predicated on the accep-tance of the increase in the mind/body separation as an undesirable, deleteriousand inevitable characteristic of old age. They are also questionable because they

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tend to reduce the experience of ageing and old age to its physical manifestations,naturalizing and universalizing the marginalization of the old. Paradoxically,these strategies are not socially situated, the assumption being that the abilitysuccessfully to separate the mind from the body in an attempt to rescue culturalcapital is available to each individual ager, irrespective of class, gender or culture.I would argue that, far from offering a way out of bodily ageing, enabling agersto forge forms of social engagement which alter the discursive, linguistic andstructural context in which ageing is imagined, these strategies are in fact tech-niques deployed to achieve ethical selves, that is socially and cultural normativesubjectivities.

One needs to imagine a new ontology of ageing which does not trap olderpeople in the dichotomy of bodily decline and frailty or disembodied selves but,on the contrary, makes room for alternative constructions of the mind/bodyrelationship, opening up new modalities of agency which are controlled by olderpeople themselves. What needs to be achieved is, first, to capture the structuralor situated dimension of bodily ageing as the meanings of ageing are not uni-formly distributed across all ageing social actors. Second, we must explore thepotential for alternative understandings and experiences of the mind/bodyrelationship. Because the ability to achieve these understandings is dependent onthe structural location of agers, we must explore whether some people are betterplaced to initiate a reconstruction of the mind/body relationship and what thismight consist of. Third, we must adopt a life-course perspective as it is duringthe process of moving towards old age that people discover and test out newunderstandings which may have resistant properties. In sum, what this articleproposes is that ageing experiences, under certain conditions, may contain thepotential for resistance through situated embodiment.

Situated Embodied Ageing

I will rely on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and the conceptual apparatus he hasdeployed, to engage in this reworking of the ontology of ageing. Concepts suchas habitus, dispositions and capital were deployed to capture the dynamic andclose relationship between structure and agency (Bourdieu, 1979). Postone et al.sown explanation of habitus as the capacity for structured improvisation (1993: 4),which denotes both ones social position and ones capacity for agency, captureswell the situatedness of what we might call self-determination. Transposing this tothe ontology of ageing means positing that the ability to resist bodily ageing withrecourse to agelessness and the disembodiment of the self is an outcome of oneshabitus rather than a universal modality of aged agency. It means paying attention


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to the set of dispositions which are open to us as we age, particularly as theyinvolve particular choices, decisions, strategies and aspirations which coincidewith ones position in the social structure. According to Bourdieu, dispositions,including bodily dispositions, are internalized and make us more prone toparticular types of action and to particular tastes, in accordance with our habitus.Therefore they are not evenly distributed across populations and individuals.

Recently I argued that we could conceive of age itself acting as a structureguiding our social location and our dispositions in other words acting ashabitus (Tulle, 2007). Could certain structural shifts lead to the internalization ofdifferent, resistant, dispositions, thus unsettling the power of the age habitus?One way of examining the potential for such shifts would be to look at the typesof capital possessed by social actors. According to Bourdieus system, capital isthe capacity to exercise control over ones own future and that of others [which]serves to reproduce class distinctions (Postone et al., 1993: 45). I have shownelsewhere that the bodies of older people could be conceived of as capital (Tulle,2003), amenable to particular forms of intervention. It is therefore important tointerrogate the bodily practices in which people engage as they become older inthe pursuit of an acceptable sense of self and the maintenance of the social capitaleroded by ageing.

In order to engage in this interrogation, one must identify specific settings orsocial fields (Bourdieu, 1984; Wacquant, 1993) in which ageing is experiencedand the struggle for distinction may be carried out, that is, structures in whichwe might begin to envisage forms of agency from which a challenge to dominantpower structures can be mounted. Both Bourdieu and Wacquant have argued thatsport acts as a social field. Therefore I will focus on the social field of Veteranathletics.

The Study

I conducted life history interviews with 21 (14 male and seven female) Veteranor Masters elite runners, aged 48 to 86, living in the central belt of Scotland. Ialso ran with some of my potential informants and observed training sessions. Acriterion for inclusion in the study was long-standing participation in athletics toexplore with runners how training, performance and other bodily experienceshad changed over time. A life-course dimension was therefore built into thedesign of the study. The sample comprised four track and field athletes, three ofwhom were women, and 17 long-distance or ultra runners.1

The study was designed to explore the embodiment of ageing social actors andto capture the minutiae of bodily experience amongst a group of people whose

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engagement with their physicality was atypical as it appeared to challenge tradi-tional age-appropriate expectations about normative bodily use and dispositions.In particular, the investigation was designed to understand the interrelationshipbetween bodily processes (by which I mean the sensations of the body but alsothe engagement with idiosyncratic physical and physiological structures), sociallocation and identity, within the context of ageing, that is within a context ofchange. I approached these issues from a lived experience perspective and askedparticipants to describe what had led to their involvement in athletics, how theyorganized their lives to make room for training, competing and other activitiesassociated with athletics, what changes they had noted in performance and involve-ment over time and whether/how ageing, such as they defined it, was brought tobear on their sense of self. The participant-observation sessions enabled me tocapture the actual labour of running as well as the social relations that existed inthe clubs.

All the runners in my sample were instrumental in the creation, in the late 1960sand early 1970s, of what is variously called the Veteran or Masters movement, thatis the broadening of the social field of athletics to runners elsewhere consideredto be losing their physical capital. As a result of long-standing engagement withathletics, these people have, over time, acquired sets of dispositions and thepotential to minimize bodily ageing not normally associated with the dominantdiscourse of old age.

Findings

The first thing that is striking about Veteran athletes is the pathways which ledthem to enter the athletic field and build a long athletic career. Becoming arunner, earning the right to call oneself a runner, is a highly structured process,rather than one which should be understood only from the perspective of self-motivation and willpower. The latter and their deployment are in fact sociallylocated. I will show in what follows what the structural forces which enable entryinto the athletic field are, and how the personal qualities essential for the develop-ment of an athletic career and identity self-motivation, willpower, etc. becomeembodied and realized in the process of induction into the athletic life-world. Iwill then show that ageing into the athletic field enables social actors, armed withdistinctive dispositional tools, to refashion the mind/body relationship in such away that an alternative construction of the ontology of old age may emerge.

Situated AgencyEntry into athletics takes place along pathways which are gendered, have albeitfluctuating class dimensions and are of course age-structured.


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Womens involvement in athletics and particularly long-distance running hadbeen characterized by restrictions until the last 20 years. Long-distance runningand hard training were seen as unfeminine and detrimental to womens ability tobear children. Women were therefore excluded from any distance above 400muntil the 1960s. It took dogged determination on the part of female pioneerlong-distance runners and the growing health promotion wave of the 1970s and1980s before these restrictions were lifted and women were allowed to competeon a par with men.

Class was also a key factor influencing entry into athletics. Until the 1960s,long-distance running was perceived as a working-class sport and was marginal-ized by athletics federations, particularly in the US. Those with higher social andcultural capital tended to join track and field athletics. The class identification ofathletics became more complex from the 1970s onwards and this is reflected inthe differential pathways into athletics experienced by the 14 men in the sample.Most of the middle-class athletes in the sample started as track and field athletesat school and continued in their local club or their university team. They shiftedto long-distance running in their 20s. Those who became athletes in their 20sand 30s were mostly working-class participants and they moved straight to long-distance. These working-class participants joined the sport spurred on by theproliferation of new marathon races in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

These captured the enthusiasm for personal achievement and the attainmentof better health and led to what Gregson and Huggins (2001) called the popular-ization and gentrification of long-distance running. This trend reflected the widerparticipation in long-distance running among men but also enabled the greaterfeminization of the sport.

There is a fourth trend: the unsettling of age barriers. These were incarnatedin what was termed by my informants the Veteran Movement, that is, the estab-lishment of new structures catering for athletes who had reached ages at whichit was widely accepted that elite achievement was no longer possible (35 forwomen and 40 for men). These athletes in effect grew older into their sport. Theywere, de facto, founder members of the movement creating a space in which theycould extend their athletic careers. Of note is that the structure of Veteran athlet-ics remained flexible enough to allow entry to anyone willing to train, irrespec-tive of their potential for elite performance and irrespective of age.

What the above confirms is that athletics is a social field as it reproduces thestruggle for social distinction. There is, however, an apparent conflict betweenage as habitus and entry into a social field not normally associated with age-appropriate embodiment. A number of processes, however, have led to theenlargement of the field, notably the rise from the late 1960s onwards of a concernwith illness prevention and health maintenance, the achievement of which was

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associated with the pursuit of sports, representing a shift from an institutional toindividual responsibility. Could this enlarged field become a space in which chal-lenges to dominant structures could be mounted?

So far I have focused on endogenous factors the emergence of the health andfitness discourse. It is now useful to explore in greater detail what happens in thesocial field, in particular the labour of apprenticeship involved in forging whatcan be understood as athletic careers. I will show that this apprenticeship isfocused on the body, on the entire life, but also in processes of self-reflection andself-recognition.

Achieving and Maintaining Athletic CompetenceBecoming and being an athlete entails the achievement and maintenance of highlevels of performance. To make this happen athletes have to orientate their livestowards this goal. This is facilitated by joining a club (or failing that, readingspecialized magazines and exchanging information with other athletes in moreinformal settings). The club provides a structure in which to organize trainingand racing, but also in which athletic lore can be transmitted. The labour involvedin these activities is considerable.

The training schedules of my informants were focused exclusively on theachievement and maintenance of athletic competence and therefore consumed asignificantly high proportion of their everyday lives. These athletes trained severaltimes a week, the long-distance runners accumulating between 30 and 80 milesper week, regardless of gender or even age, alternating between different types oftraining such as speed sessions, long steady runs and, in some cases, weight-training sessions. Track and field athletes, particularly the three women, who werestill active in athletics, focused on sprint and strength work. Irrespective of disci-pline, the athletes operated a periodisation (Nash, 1979), that is the disciplining,of their lives. This refers to the lives of athletes being punctuated by athletic mile-stones or events, towards which training is oriented. This is in accordance withtraining orthodoxy to be found in coaching manuals and specialist magazines.Those who had retired also engaged in, albeit reduced, forms of periodization.

What is striking to the outsider or a semi-insider like me is how training, thatis the harnessing and cultivation of bodily resources necessary for athletic achieve-ment, extends to the management of private and professional lives. The timing ofmeals, work shifts, their nutritional regimen were all dependent on training obli-gations and bodily needs. Even holidays were organized according to the racingcalendar! Although my informants did not rely on food supplementation to theextent that current senior athletes might do, nevertheless they had a fair idea ofthe nutritional requirements of such active and intensive involvement in athletics


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and made sure their family meals conformed to them. Thus, there was little leftto chance in the organization of their training.

Running IdentityThe target of intervention was not just the body. The informants accounts revealthat the mind was also a target. This was manifested in two key areas: injuries andracing. Injuries are an occupational hazard in any sporting endeavour. The riskof injury is ever present, irrespective of gender and age. Injury can throw anathletic career and identity into doubt. This was well captured by Thing when shedescribed injuries as catastrophic events which disrupted biographies and identity.All athletes, especially those who are not supported by teams of specialists, needto be particularly resourceful when injured.

They have to assign a cause to the injury and attempt to recover to maintainidentity. But this necessitates engaging in a dialogue with ones body, to establishwhether the pain or discomfort is serious, if it persists or gets worse, and whatthe aetiology of the injury might be. This is essential in part because Veteranathletes are largely unsupported by dedicated injury rehabilitation structuresand also because approaching health professionals may be problematic. JI, a65-year-old male long-distance runner, describes the following situation:

I went with that cartilage I told you. I went there, I went to the National Health and the doctortold me to go and play bowls. I was 55 and he told me to go and play bowls. I said: I dontwant to play bowls, I want to be a runner, I have been a runner all my life [my emphasis] andI am still running well apart from this knee that is hurting me. He said: Well just dont run.I said Thats not the point. If it is hurting me when I run there is something the matter withit, dont you agree? [. . .] So I went private and the guy told me I think its your cartilage. SoI had to pay about 1,700 to get my knee operated on and get my cartilage sorted out and Iwas back running in three weeks . . .

In this example this male informant had to become self-reliant because of theclinicians reliance on the discourse of ageing and his refusal to offer support.This was far from an isolated incident. Therefore, by necessity, the informantshad established an aetiological grid shown in Table 1.

What is revealed in Table 1 is that most informants differentiated betweenageing and over-use as the cause of the traditional running injuries. In otherwords these injuries could happen at any age, given time and perhaps a bio-mechanical predisposition (Type III for instance). This enables runners to be re-assured that recovery is perhaps possible and to determine what an appropriatecourse of action to achieve this goal will be. Conversely, the only informant whobelieved strongly that ageing made the body more fragile had recently retiredfrom the triple jump and from competition to concentrate on cycling, jogging

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and taking care of junior athletics. The other informants, from whose accountsthis grid was constructed, would engage in various strategies of recovery, rangingfrom recourse to complementary practitioners to self-care. The knowledge forself-care was acquired over time as part of the culture of running and athletics.Becoming competent at managing injuries also included interrogating ones bodyto decide whether to stop training and when to start training again. Indeed oneof the dispositions of athletes is the urge to train or to resume training. However,this may be counterproductive as stopping too late or returning too early maycompromise the long-term health of the athlete. Thus informants also have todevelop cognitive resources that enable them to control bodily dispositions. Inother words the relationship between bodily capital and internal dispositions isin constant flux.

While, according to the medical discourse, this is seen as a problem of old age,in athletics its presence, recognizing it and knowing how to deal with it areconstituent and necessary aspects of competence. This is shown by IL (M, 60,LD) in racing:

When you are running fast it is not a conscious effort, it is a sort of subconscious effort becauseyou are not actually thinking about anything. You are just running and you are on a plane andthen you get the pain then OK so then you are waking up and say, OK so I am going to pushthat wee bit. But when you are going fast, when you are going good then it is a sort of differentworld. I dont know if that is an easy way to describe it, does that make sense? You are on adifferent plane, and you could call it hallucinating probably and aye you can do that in a race.When you are training . . . but I found when I was training too I could go out and if I had anyproblems I could think them out when I was out running and get a solution for them . . .

This runners account illustrates the complex and rich relationship between thebody and the mind. In the first part of this quote he shows that the two can be


Table 1 Informants typology of injuries

Injury type Aetiology

I Sport-induced: back ache, muscle tears, hamstring pull, Over-use or change in training, Achilles heel, hip problems other sport

II Wear and tear: knee problems (cartilage) Over-use over a long period of time

III Pre-existing biomechanical or physiological weakness: Biomechanical revealed by knee problems (alignment), plantar fasciitis, sciatica training over a long period of time

IV Accident: dog bite, broken leg Not related to running

V Any from Types IIII Over-use + ageing

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in perfect harmony. In the second part of the quote, he reveals that this symbi-otic relationship can be disrupted when the race becomes more difficult or thebody starts tiring. At this point, the mind can be allowed to take over to pushthe body along. In the third part, the athlete can take advantage of the abilityof the body and mind to be handled separately and use the run as a time to solveother problems.

So far I have shown that the achievement of athletic competence involves anapprenticeship enfolding a large proportion of the athletes everyday life, thenurturing of a new set of dispositions of the body and managing of the resourcesof body and mind, and the link to identity, which is crucial. In other words, whatis achieved is the incorporation of a new set of dispositions which provide theframework for agency. This training of the body is underpinned by the instru-mental rationality informing the contemporary tendency to self-regulate in thesearch for appropriate forms of identity. As I will now show, this is a processwhich can continue into the later years.

Resistant Embodied AgeingAthletes, irrespective of age, are constantly reminded of what Monaghan (2001)called the ephemerality of the athletic body. He shows that training consists ofconstantly nurturing bodily resources to counter their fragility and instability.

Ageing is recognized by all runners as one important variable placing physicalcompetence at risk. All the informants described in different ways the losses theyhad incurred over time, such as loss of time in races. They attributed the attritionin time to inherent biological processes (shortening and tightening of tendonsand ligaments, loss of cellular fidelity) causing a reduction in stride and a loss ofpower. They were made aware of their losses by the clock or the sheer inabilityto reproduce high jumps. The extent to which these losses were sensed phenom-enologically was subject to ambiguity as demonstrated by this 56-year-old malelong-distance runner:

DF: This year I did the Glasgow Marathon in 2h48. I have slowed by 24 minutes in 17 years.

ET: Does that seem like quite a lot to you?

DF: Well it has taken me by surprise the way my times have slowed down. I feel I am runningjust as fast as I was but I know I am not [my emphasis]. I keep saying to my daughter and theother people I am training with that I am struggling to do interval training now at the pace Iused to run a marathon [. . .].

Another male runner described the pleasurable sensations brought on by runningoutdoors, where one was acutely aware of weather conditions and able to appreci-ate the scenery. Thus it is inconceivable that the body would be wholly forgotten

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and as I showed above, there are fluctuations in the extent that the body makesitself known to athletes.

While ageing athletes expect to experience various losses, they have access toresources to manage them. Harnessing their resources is, as we have already seen,part of the logic of athletic training, of the dispositional kitbag acquired over time,and it is facilitated by the existence of the Veteran or Masters movement. Veteranathletics provides a structure which enables runners and other athletes to recon-struct performance and to tailor their training to take account of changes in bodilyability. Reconstructing performance means challenging our notion of competi-tiveness and success, away from the first-past-the-post criterion or the use of rawtimes to determine record-breaking. The Veteran scene allows for greater diver-sity in the assessment and evaluation of performance. Veteran athletes competein five-year age-groups. They can also adjust or calibrate their times or othernumerical markers of performance to take account of age-expected decrements.Performance can be judged against ones age contemporaries within ones age-group or against a much wider field if using age-adjusted tables. For instance thistrack and field, 56-year-old female athlete achieved 4m62 in a long jump compe-tition when she was aged 51, which was a world record in her age category. IL,the 61-year-old male long-distance runner quoted earlier, ran a race in which hewas third in his age category and in the top third overall. This means he beatother competitors not only in his own age-group but in younger age-groups too.While track and field athletics remains strictly gender segregated, long-distancerunning is less so, especially in the ultra events. Here women often compete with,and beat, men. For instance IW, a 50-year-old female ultra runner, remembersbeing 14th out of a field of 50 starters, of whom only 22 finished, in the WestHighland Way race.2

Training is also adapted to the changing capacities of the ageing body. Forinstance EL, a 59-year-old female sprinter, has incorporated more strength andinterval training into her weekly routine to maintain her fitness and to countersome of the losses in muscle strength which accompany ageing. Long-distancerunners also build in more rest sessions, so as not to overtire themselves near acompetition and peak too early.

However, it would be erroneous to infer that these athletes are subjectingthemselves to such arduous training to postpone or even overturn ageing. ELargues that she is training harder now than in the past because this type of trainingwas not available to her then and to bring herself to the upper limits of what shedescribes as her natural ability:

Up until now, over the last few years I have got faster but that is because I think I hadnt donemy full potential in training. I have increased the training and I think that is why . . . well, I


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dont know you can say people have natural speed but I think I have got that there and thetraining is possibly bring that out but eventually it doesnt matter how much training you do,the times are not going to get faster.

EL goes on to note that athletics is the only sport where athletes look forwardto growing older. When they approach the age boundary into the next age-group,they know that they stand a good chance of beating athletes already in that age-group.

The bodies of veteran elite athletes are therefore both strong and at risk. Ageingundermines the achievement of athletic competence only if the latter is measuredexclusively in terms of raw performance. In contrast, athletic competence can berecast as multi-dimensional, pertaining to the achievement of mastery, bothphysical and cognitive, and able to recognize and work with the ambiguity of theageing athletic body. Ageing athletes are aware that they have endowed them-selves with bodies that are both ageful and competent. Thus the field of Mastersathletics provides the athletes with a structure which legitimizes and normalizesage-based attrition in performance, enabling them to retain their athletic identity.

Towards a New Ontology of Ageing?

According to Wainwright and Turner, decline in bodily capital constitutes theontology of ageing. If this holds true and the ageing body is the primary sourceof identity in later life, then agency can only consist of rejecting the ageing bodyto maintain a desirable sense of identity. Disembodying the self, which such acourse of action would amount to, is not reflected in the material presentedabove. A more complex and ultimately more hopeful situation can be discerned.

It is worth remembering that ageing itself is not the only threat to bodilycompetence and cultural capital. As Monaghan (2001) notes, bodily competenceis inherently unstable and has constantly to be monitored and kept in check.Injury can compromise this bodily competence at any time. Thus the focus ofsociology should turn to the conditions in which this instability is apprehendedand managed.

The experiences of Veteran elite runners are instructive at several levels. Theability to enter the athletic field and acquire life-long physical competence isstructured by gender and class (and ethnicity). Age is also a key source of habitus,operating in its own right and in interaction with any combination of the otherthree variables as sports participation tends to decrease with increasing age(Nicolson, 2004). Becoming an athlete, irrespective of level of competence, entailsthe ability to control forms of capital, such as time, which are themselves heavilystructured. The issue of control is crucial. Master athletes have created and run

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Master athletics. The latter operates as a social field inasmuch as it reflects thesystem of distinction present in the wider society. The apparent lack of homologybetween age habitus and the field can be overturned when the conditions for theunsettling of its system of distinction are met in this instance the pull of externalfactors such as the rise of the discourse of health and fitness which enabled otherpressures, such as the battle for gender equality, to be played out. In relation toage, the pressure came from those with a life-long engagement in the field whofelt fit enough to continue.

The subjection of the body and entire life to the system of regulation which isa constituent part of the athletic field allows athletes to normalize the constantlyshifting relationship between body and mind, as was illustrated by the athlete forwhom the relationship could vary in the course of one race. Ageing athletes areable to appropriate this unstable relationship to their advantage.

Wainwright and Turner (2003) had noted that ballet dancers managed bodilyageing either by ignoring its presence or by retiring from performance. I wouldargue that the field of ballet is very much imbued with a construction of the bodyas the only source of social and cultural capital. This chimes with the dominantdiscourse of old age, according to which ageing deprives the body of its capital,agency being restricted to retirement or what are perceived as unrealistic andalmost pathetic attempts to hold back inevitable processes of decline. This systemof meanings makes it difficult for ageing ballet dancers to be reconciled with theirageing bodies. Ageing runners who reject the Veteran movement have similarexperiences and are less likely to strive for athletic competence.

However, those who are fully embedded in the field appear to have forgedmodalities of embodied agency which challenge the meaning of athletic compet-ence and the mind/body relationship. The construction of a modified aetiologyof injuries and the reconstruction of performance are such manifestations of newmeanings.

In conclusion, these athletes teach us two lessons. First, they show us that theontology of old age is not the ageing body on its own. Biological ageing doesundoubtedly throw up challenges for the management of everyday life and foridentity, as it did for these athletes. However, the ability to meet these challengesis not evenly distributed in the population. When they joined the VeteranMovement, the women I interviewed successfully resisted their enfeeblement andconfinement to reduced physicality. All the informants, even those who hadretired from athletics and subscribed to the dominant discourse of ageing, hadachieved levels of competency normally not associated with ageing physicality.They certainly all claimed an athletic identity. However, they were only able todo this by integrating themselves in a field in which they acquired new disposi-tions and aspirations which were rendered normal, irrespective of age.


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Thus the second lesson that these athletes can teach us is that agency in laterlife need not be confined to the privatized fight against ones ageing body. Thefield itself can become a site in which resistant embodied agency can be collec-tively worked out. The distinctive feature of Veteran athletes is that they do notdeny bodily ageing. The field allows for an alternative ontological position witha reconfigured mind/body relationship. Two options are available. The first one the mind and the body should act as one, but with increasing age or injury theybegin to act against each other is that which we encounter in most narrativesof ageing. The second position the mind and the body sometimes act as one butat other times, for instance during a race, when the body tires out, the mind cantake over reminds us that there is an instability, or fluctuations, in the mind/body relationship which is considered normal, not pathological. The ability tomanage these fluctuations becomes part of the capital acquired in the process ofbecoming and being an accomplished athlete, albeit an ageing one. From this, wehave a socially rooted ontology.

Therefore there are two very pressing questions. First, how can we ensure thatthe constraints to physical competence which inhibit many women and olderadults be further unsettled? Second, how can the traditional fields in which manypeople grow old be restructured to enable modalities of agency based on gainingcontrol of the ways in which bodily ageing is given meaning?

These concerns reinforce the urge for the sociology of the body and the soci-ology of ageing constantly to engage with the social and the cultural to makesense of the ontological dimension of ageing. Doing otherwise would confirm thesurrender of ageing to biology.

Notes1. Ultra running designates participation in an event of least marathon length (26 miles) and over,

or in inhospitable or arduous terrain, such as mountains, sand or ice deserts. One male informant tookpart in the Marathon des Sables a five-day event in the Moroccan desert. A female informanttook part in a 24-hour race, consisting of completing the greatest number of laps on a track in a24-hour period.

2. The West Highland Way is 95 miles (152 km) long. It starts in a suburb of Glasgow and ends atthe foot of Ben Nevis, Scotlands and Britains tallest mountain, over undulating terrain with over3000m of ascent. A race is held annually at the end of June, starting at 1 a.m. and finishing 35 hourslater.

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Emmanuelle Tulle is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Law and Social Sciences atGlasgow Caledonian University. Over the last 15 years, she has developed a body of work on ageingand old age, specializing in theorizing and cultural gerontology. She has contributed to the develop-ment of the sociology of ageing and older bodies; conducted research on housing decisions, art photog-raphy, and sport and exercise among older people; and, more recently, she has contributed to debatessurrounding anti-ageing science, with a particular focus on sport science. She is the author of articlesin Ageing & Society, Sociology and Body & Society. She has authored chapters in edited collections,most notably in Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience (AltaMira Press) and The Need forTheory: Critical Approaches to Social Gerontology (Baywood). Her first monograph, Ageing, the Bodyand Social Change, will be published by Palgrave in 2008.

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aging body and ontology of aging.body & society 2008 tulle 1 19

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