The role of running as a form of identity in women's autobiographies

Abstract

Based on autobiographical volumes, blog posts, and social media profiles, I examine the identity formation strategies of women runners: how middle-aged women become runners, how they build themselves up on the running track, and how their runner-identity fits into their narrative of their own lives. Women who are not runners take up running to regain control over their bodies, to reclaim or even to finally create their own lives. Women run with strollers, hire babysitters in order to have a free hour to run, or wait until the kids can be left alone and then just put on running shoes. Women who are not writers write a book about how running becomes an integral part of their identity. Women build a running profile on social media, while constantly articulating specific female experiences, female existential experiences. They run in female bodies, menstruating, pregnant, post-partum, with breast cancer, or with panic disorder. Szilvia Lubics, Zsuzsanna Sallai, Ildikó Száz and Rita Tamás have all published a volume about their lives in which running plays a central role. The books have been published by small publishers, or even privately, and the characters often speak from the margins, often with a trauma narrative. Who writes these texts and for whom? For what purpose? Who talks who runs, who raises the child meanwhile? I look for the answer to the question of how these women find a voice to speak, whose voice they speak in, what kind of (perceived or real) external expectations the runner-women's texts respond to.