Health Left Unnamed: The Linguistic Trace of Healthism among Amateur Triathletes

Abstract

This study examines amateur triathletes’ relationship with health not through what they say about health, but through the distance between the reasons they give and the practices they describe. The data come from a multi-source qualitative field study conducted with eighteen participants between 2017 and 2019; for this article, the eighteen interview transcripts were recoded around a different research question. In addition to thematic analysis, a repertoire comparison was carried out in line with Mills’s concept of vocabularies of motive. The findings show that participants draw on the terms freedom, discipline, therapy, way of life and identity when making sense of the sport, whereas health is advanced as a reason in only one of the eighteen accounts. By contrast, the everyday practice these same participants describe consists entirely of bodily regulation: the resetting of sleeping hours, the monitoring of diet, the giving up of smoking and alcohol, and the scheduling of training. The article argues that health functions in this field not as a stated reason but as a moral ground that legitimises the practice from the outset and therefore requires no separate justification. Because the ground goes unquestioned, the sleep debt, chronic fatigue and social withdrawal produced by that same practice are not registered by participants as a contradiction. The data suggest that the decisive variable may be not elapsed time alone but embeddedness in the community. Furthermore, the fact that participants differing in occupation, age and triathlon experience describe well-being through a narrow and shared set of terms supports Crawford’s claim regarding the one-dimensionalisation of well-being.