What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Endurance | Science - Outside

To train athletes to truly push their limits, it helps to draw inspiration from the French social theorist Michel Foucault. Seriously by Alex Hutchinson, Outside Online.

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The late Michel Foucault was among the most influential social theorists and public intellectuals of the 20th century. He had a lot to say about the nature of truth, the exercise of power, and the history of ideas. He also, according to a relatively recent stream of research, has some important lessons to teach us about how we should coach endurance athletes.

I’ll be honest: when I first came across some of these papers a few years ago—“Social Theory for Coaches: A Foucauldian Reading of One Athlete’s Poor Performance,” in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching; “Planning for Distance Running: Coaching with Foucault,” in Sports Coaching Review—I couldn’t help but snicker a bit. And when I tried to read the papers, I struggled to understand the jargon about “Foucault’s analysis of anatomo-political power” and so on...

Many of the ideas that interest Denison and his colleagues are drawn from Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish, which argues that the exercise of discipline—specifically the control of time, space, and movement—imposes a hierarchical burden that ultimately makes people docile. That may be an intentional goal of the prison system (which is what Foucault was originally writing about), but it’s not ideal for creating champion athletes, who need to have initiative and self-determination. And yet many of the characteristics of a typical track workout—running around a constrained loop in a prescribed amount of time over and over—seem to perfectly embody Foucault’s idea of initiative-crushing discipline.
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Source: Outside