Training journals and the development of an elite sports identity

Abstract

In this article we investigate whether the practice of writing training journals can shed light on the process whereby young cross-country skiers are transformed from promising talents into serious, committed athletes. By using data from athletes and coaches themselves, we explore how training journals help shape athletes’ outlook on sports, their relationship with their coach, and their personal identity. We focus on the cross-country skiers’ and coaches’ attitudes to planning their training sessions and keeping a journal. Journal writing can be understood as a project of subjectification, whereby the discourses place an athlete in certain positions that then imply particular expectations as to how the athlete will behave. In order to understand the subjectification process, we use what Michael Foucault called the technologies of the self, that is, the discourses and practices that individuals use when working on themselves.

Keywords:

• Training journal
• identity
• Foucault
• technologies of the self
• pleasure
• subjectification

Introduction

Journal writing is a technique that can be used in various social arenas. In psychiatric institutions, hospitals, the military, and schools, for instance, the technique can be used to collect information and accumulate knowledge about the individual. In sports, serious and hard-working athletes will often write a training diary (Neupert, Cotterill, and Jobson 2018; Roos et al. 2016; Saw, Main, and Gastin 2015). In the diary the athletes typically record what type of training they carried out (e.g. endurance, strength, speed, agility, mobility), the mode of movement (e.g. skiing, roller skiing, jogging), and their shape, appetite, health, and weight. For every training day they record how much time they spent on the various training types, also noting which intensity zones they reached when engaged in endurance training (as expressed by, e.g. pulse rates). In the event of strength training, athletes will typically record how much time they spent on each body part.

In sport journal writing is a technique that is used to balance the aspiring athletes’ training, restitution, and decisions with their goal of progress and improved performance, providing them with a “conversation partner” that helps them achieve this. A training journal is a document that records the training schedules, the physical health and condition of athletes, as well as their reflections on how they felt. Training journals are kept by athletes but are normally shared with coaches (Duignan et al. 2019; Saw, Main, and Gastin 2015). That is, the content is not private for the athlete alone. Our question concerns what role such journals play within the sports and training culture and how this technique shapes the individual athlete’s self. How are training journals used to discover, produce, and propagate a certain mentality and way of living among the athletes?

In this article we will investigate how the practice of writing a journal influences athletes as they forge their identity. The aim is thus to uncover the mechanisms that help create, support, and reinforce an elite sports identity. An athlete’s sports identity already begins to take root at a young age, and it is outside the scope of this article to describe and analyze in detail how this identity evolves from childhood to the elite level (Adler and Adler 1987, Burkitt 2008; Maybin 2006). Rather, we will take an empirical deep dive into the practice of writing training journals in cross-country skiing in Norway. We will investigate how the practice of writing a journal influences young skiers as they forge their identity, and how their journals shed light on their transformation from up-and-coming talents to fully dedicated skiers bent on to making it at the elite level. How is a permanent self-awareness and subjective identity as a serious cross-country skier forged? How do the journals shape the skiers’ attitudes to their sport, how does it affect their relationship with their coaches, and what perspective on sport and body does this practice produce?

Empirical context

Participants

The empirical material for this article stems from a mentoring programme for aspiring coaches held under the auspices of Olympiatoppen, Norway’s elite sport development organization. The mentoring programme, known in Norwegian as Trenerløftet, was launched in 2019, with at most 72 coaches a year being admitted. The programme is aimed at young coaches who train up-and-coming athletes and who themselves aim to work professionally at an elite level. In order to survey and analyse the effects of this systematic intervention, the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) was commissioned to conduct a qualitative study in one of the regions. For this study, we interviewed several mentors, coaches, and athletes who were directly encompassed by the mentoring programme (Augestad and Telseth 2021).

This article is based on qualitative interviews with 5 cross-country coaches who participated in Trenerløftet, and 10 athletes (5 boys and 5 girls) for whom these coaches were responsible. All the athletes we interviewed are regarded as dedicated, promising, and talented cross-country skiers. The skiers are 16-19 years old and all attend high school as a growing number of educational programs in Norway allow promising cross-country skiers to combine their training with an upper secondary education. The participants represent three different schools and talent development environments in Norway. In addition to being interviewed, four of the skiers allowed us to review their training journals in order to assess and contextualize their statements.

We also interviewed five of the coaches who trained the young skiers in question.The coaches were men aged 25 to 35, and all had a previous career as cross-country skiers at a relatively high level. All of them envisioned a future career as professional trainers. We took measures to protect the participants confidentiality and that their identities could not be recognized in the study. Participation was voluntary, and the participants were informed that they could withdraw their consent at any point. The project was registered and approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, and all the skiers and coaches were assigned pseudonyms to ensure their anonymity.

Design and methodology

In Norway, a nation of around 5.4 million people, there are 1,020 registered sports clubs that offer cross-country skiing as at least one of their activities, and it is estimated that more than 150,000 of the members of the Norwegian Ski Federation are cross-country skiers (Norwegian Ski Federation 2021). The article is based on a purposive or judgmental sample (Maxwell 2013), that is, we chose respondents who are all regarded ambitious junior athletes, as well as the coaches who are affiliated with these athletes. When we discuss how the training journals helped these particular skiers forge their identity, it is on the basis of the skiers’ and coaches’ own information about their goals, techniques, collaborators, and so forth. These narratives thus form the context of our discussion on the function and importance of training journals (Smith and Sparkes 2009).

When we interviewed the athletes, we are using a semi-structured approach. We asked the skiers about their background, the influence of the school and their teammates, the role of their parents and coaches, their training sessions, and the factors that either helped or hindered their development. In this article we focus on the cross-country skiers’ attitudes to planning their training sessions and keeping a journal. How often do they write in their journal, what do they write about, and who is allowed to read their journal? How accurately, how honestly, and how systematically do they write? And how often do they discuss the content of the journal with their coach? The aim of these questions is to assess how the skiers use the journals to forge their identities.

We believe that theme-based individual in-depth interviews are a fruitful method for getting on track of the athletes’ identity work. By giving the skiers time to reflect on their own project in their own words and expressions, it is possible to discover their values, priorities, and way of thinking. Each interview lasted from 70 to 90 min. In addition, 6 of the skiers were interviewed twice with a time interval of approximately 3 months. Interview number two was used to discuss the findings from the first interview, and to see if there had been any changes in the skiers’ thematization of their practices and choice of action.

We also used a semi-structural approach in the dialog with the coaches. In this article we will above all discuss and analyze the coaches’ viewpoints on the key factors the skiers themselves cited. We will investigate how the coaches work on training plans and whether and how they use the training journals to develop skiers and engage in a dialogue with them. The coaches’ narratives will be related to athletes’ narratives, and the purpose of highlighting their experiences is to strengthen the basis for interpreting the meaning and impact of journal writing.

The present study is positioned within a constructionist approach, - this will be further elaborated in the next section -, which suggest that social reality is a subjective experience. Qualitative data is used to discover which concepts and mental figures the respondents use when they thematize their training and development work, their practice, and their project (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015; Cypress 2017). In order to capture the athletes’ way of thinking and understanding of themselves - their identity work - we have analyzed their themes and statement in the training diary, in conversations with the trainers and in conversations with us. This study’s connection to discourse analysis means that the athletes’ utterances gain their meaning by being connected to other elements in the discourse of elite sport. Our methodological approach means that our ambition is limited to presenting possible interpretations of the collected data, and not to reveal social laws.

The respondents have a few experiences in common, even as they have dissimilar backgrounds and personalities. It is therefore possible that the findings of this article will not be representative of athletes who have participated in other training and development regimes. Athletes who have experienced other programs, results, and institutions will probably have a different story to tell.

Theoretical context: knowledge, technologies of the self, and identity

The present research on training diaries is dominated by physiological and pedagogical issues and analyses. In the physiologically oriented research, the amount of exercise, the type of exercise and the intensity of exercise are recorded in order to reveal effects on various physiological parameters such as the endurance, speed and strength. Furthermore, researchers have been concerned with looking at the connection between training regimes and overtraining, vulnerability to injury, etc. (Halson 2014; Main and Grove 2009; Saw, Main, and Gastin 2015;  Cereda 2023).

In the pedagogical literature, the importance of writing a training log is emphasized to stimulate awareness and reflection on experiences in the athlete’s training project (Fletcher and Wilson 2013; Knowles, Katz, and Gilbourne 2012; McCormick 2023). By writing down experiences from training and competitions, the athletes are challenged to think through their choices and the concrete consequences of these, and in this way also prepare the ground for better methods in similar situations in the future. Writing helps athletes to ‘reflect on action’, and this reflection continues through dialogues with the coach. Through the coach’s feedback and questions, the athlete gets his thoughts and solutions challenged and validated (Powell 1989; Schön 1983; Si Lie Tan, Teck, and Kokkonen 2016).

Our study has a sociological approach, which means that we are concerned with how the athletes’ deep immersion in a partial reality shapes their personality and self-concept. We will show how the athletes’ identity is conditioned by a social basis and social processes. Our focus is the connection between writing a training journal and the construction of an identity as an elite athlete. Creating an elite athlete is of course a question of training correctly, eating correctly, and getting enough rest in between the training sessions. But activating all of the physiological processes requires athletes who are willing to put in all the necessary work and who are thereby motivated to dedicate a significant part of their life to elite-level sports. If the aim is to produce athletes who win medals in international competitions, it is not enough with knowledge about how they can push and manipulate their bodies; it also requires athletes who are willing to give their all to reach the top. At its core, this is a project of identity, that is, it is a question of getting athletes to identify with the demands and expectations of elite-level sport.

Many scholars have written about identity and identity development within sports (Abbot and Collins 2002; Christensen and Sørensen 2009; Henriksen and Stambulova 2017; Miller, Cronin, and Baker 2015; Nicola et al. 2018). These works have for example examined the conditions of role identification (Olesen and Treumer Gregersen 2022; Turner 1978), the athletes’ vulnerability should they fail in their sports project (Comeaux and Harrison 2011; Nicola et al. 2018), identity tensions (Kavoura and Ryba 2020), and the link between identity development and power relations (Hatteberg 2018; Johns and Johns 2000).

Using diverse theoretical perspectives and data from dissimilar contexts, these works have analyzed identity formation in different ways and shown how strongly sports can help young people understand and develop themselves. All these studies emphasize that reaching the elite level requires not only a physical transformation but also a social and mental one, and that these dimensions are interdependent (Martindale, Collins, and Abraham 2007; Stambulova, Franck, and Weibull 2012; Wylleman, Alfermann, and Lavallee 2004). The present article also explores this issue from such a perspective, but it does so by taking an analytical deep dive into the athletes’ journal writing. By linking this practice directly to Foucault’s (1978 and 1988b) concept of technologies of the self, we hope to better understand why some Norwegian athletes go all-in on cross-country skiing. Our ambition is to use the skiers’ and coaches’ accounts of training journals to discuss, qualify, and challenge the conventional understandings of the process of evolving from a promising athlete into a serious, dedicated cross-country skier, one who gives their all to succeed. The respondents’ own interpretations will potentially put us on the track of mechanisms and circumstances that previous research has not uncovered (Bowen 2006; Ong 2012; Timmermans and Tavory 2012). We believe that such an analysis of training journals can help complement and shift conventional views of identity development in sport.

In Foucault’s analysis of power, forms of practice and their attendant ‘tools’ merge into what he calls techniques or technologies of power (Foucault 1972, 1974). Technologies have a material aspect, such as stopwatches, measuring tapes, and books, even as they consist of a set of immaterial rules. A technology is both a way of executing a certain action as well as the tools that are used to effectuate this operation. A certain technology (journal writing) is linked to certain concepts, that is, the technology shores up and supports a system of concepts, a discourse. In order to gain insight into this “system,” we must analyze the discourse the technology is linked to.

The sports discourse is all about performance (Heikkala 1993; Heinalä 1984). All of the concepts, aids, institutions, and practices that are part of the sports discourse acquire their significance from their relation to one another and to performance. By extension, the act of journal writing will also acquire its significance from being related to pulse rates, timekeeping, restitution, body weight, nutrition, equipment, training, and oxygen uptake, and ultimately from being interpreted within the perspective of improved performance. Foucault sought to examine those practices that are implemented to generate knowledge. Practices that involve the accumulation of data about people—the systems and procedures for observing, recording, questioning, and formulating—will in themselves represent a form of power. The production of truth and the exercise of power are intrinsically connected.

The significance of journal writing is thus determined by the discourse it is part of. But what does this entail for our discussion of identity? Journal writing can also be understood as a project of subjectification, whereby the discourses place an athlete in certain positions that then imply particular expectations as to how the athlete will behave. In order to understand the subjectification process, Foucault developed an analysis of what he called the technologies of the self, that is, the discourses and practices that individuals use when working on themselves (Foucault 1988a, 1988b; Foucalt and Blasius 1993). The processes that make an individual an object of knowledge (objectification) generate knowledge about that individual, which they in turn can use as a resource as they work on their own identity (subjectification) (Crocket 2017; MacKay and Dallaire 2013; Markula 2004; Pringle and Hickey 2010). Writing a training journal is a confessional technique and a practice where athletes are taught to take care of themselves.

Foucault (1988b) describes subjectification as the simultaneous submission both to a regime and to the individual’s (re)creation of themselves. In the present article we will investigate what role training journals play in transforming young, promising athletes into fully committed cross-country skiers and thus in reshaping their identity. In the analysis of the empirical material we will also draw on Deleuze and Guattari (1987) concept of becoming. This concept focuses on the individual’s continuous construction and reconstruction of their character (Treumer Gregersen 2019). The writing in the training diary can be seen a transformative force, where the athletes shaping the self through their writing.

Findings

The logic of experimentation

The skiers are supposed to record the facts of every training session as accurately as possible. The type, technique, and duration of the training are the key facts contained in a training journal, allowing the skiers to summarize their training for every week, month, and season. For example, a skier might write: ‘Last week I trained 15 h: 7 h long distance, 2 h interval, 1 h agility, 2 h mobility, 3 h strength. Four of the sessions were low intensity, while two were high intensity. The numbers don’t lie—I have to face the facts here.’ Training systematically can be understood as a way of experimenting with your own body. By accurately documenting their training, skiers can see how their body responds to various regimens:

Yes, I do think it’s exciting to see the changes I’ve made from last year to this year, because at the end of the season you always sit down and take a look at what’s worked and what hasn’t, and what I’ve done differently. And I think it’s cool to pay attention and to see the progress—if there is any, that is—and to examine the reasons. Then I learn more about myself. (Robert 17 years)

The learning circle for skiers has much in common with a scientific experiment. It begins by setting up a training plan, then the training regimen is followed, and then finally the skier receives definite results from various physical tests and from the competitions she is participating in. If the skier and the coach are dissatisfied with the results, the training plan is modified, and this adjustment is followed by a new training regimen and new tests. In order to be able to conclude whether this ‘training experiment’ was successful or not, the training journal must be written correctly. This entails that the skiers must be motivated to not only follow the training plan down to the most minute detail, but to scrupulously record any deviations from this plan. Moreover, the skiers we interviewed noted that the very existence of the journal made them more aware of their training:

The training journal is a pretty good thing, since it forces you to reflect a bit on what didn’t work out. … Because sometimes, when you’re competing in races and you’re just failing miserably, you start thinking to yourself, ‘Can’t we just put this behind us?’ But, of course, it’s all the experiences you make, also from bad results, that you should be thinking about. (Georg, 18 years)

The journal gives the skiers and the coaches a detailed overview of all the work that has been done in training, allowing them to see whether there is a connection between the training regimen, physical tests, and performance levels. The aim is for the skiers to learn from their own training history: What happened? What went wrong, or why did it go so well? The answers to these questions are hidden away in the skier’s training journal.

The experimental approach, the emphasis on documentation, and the search for causes and regularities are all elements that are also typical of scientific research (Jones and Gratton 2010). Not only external nature, but also the human body can be divided, manipulated, and examined. The laws governing the human body can be discovered and exploited, and using scientific concepts and methods provides us with ever more detailed knowledge about the body’s constitution and processes. When we know what affects the body and in what way, we can set up a training regimen and implement a way of living that is as functional as possible to improve performances levels.

The coaches typically give their skiers weekly written feedback in their training journals. Many young skiers are often impatient and do not always manage to wait until their body is ready for a new dose of training. In that case, it is the coach’s responsibility to convince them that restitution is in fact the better part of valor. In the excerpt below, a coach is communicating directly with their skier in the training journal:

This has been a productive week of training. Your technique has improved greatly, and it seems that your training this summer has given results. There are a few things you have be more accurate at. You have to slow down your pace in long-distance sessions when a slow pace is required—it’s easy to get a bit hyped up when you’re working out with many others, so I understand that it’s difficult to curb yourself. But what happens then is that you break your body down a bit more the entire time, and it takes longer to get restituted. (Coach Tom)

Knowledge about common biological mechanisms and functions are used as a basis to challenge training principles, nutritional advice, and a restitution regimen. Uncovering and exploiting the physical and biological laws governing the body is of course a key concern for all coaches and athletes who are striving for improved performance, even as these laws also impose restrictions on this project of winning (Schaanning 1992). If athletes overtax themselves, it may be detrimental to their health. This requires, for example, the avoidance of training and nutrition regimens that put the athlete at risk of mental or physical injury. The generated knowledge is then used to define what is possible to accomplish with the human body, but also to set up a few absolute limits for what is permissible.

At first glance, it may seem that the diary practice is an example of what Foucault called technologies of dominance, i.e. writing is a technique of power that is exercised through the insertion and extraction of knowledge about the athletes (Foucault 1994; Schaanning 2000). The coaches gather extensive knowledge about the athletes by having them to register, note and systematize everything they do. This knowledge can then be used to improve the athletes’ performances. What happens when you change the number of training sessions? What happens when you change the balance between different forms of exercise? The athletes are transformed into knowledge objects by the fact that everything they do is made the subject of the investigating and scrutinizing gaze. In line with Foucault, we will later see that the material in the journal also can be used as a transformative force in the athletes’ project of subjectification (Foucault 2005).

The athlete takes ownership of her development

The journal thus provides the skier and their coach with a detailed overview of the training, allowing them to see whether there is a connection between the training regimen, physical tests, and performance levels. For example, if a cross-country skier tends to ‘hit the wall’ a few kilometers before the finish line, the reason might be the lack of long-distance sessions in their pre-season training program. Or perhaps poor sprinting skills are due to the skier training too few interval and agility sessions during the off-season.

Improving performance is the be-all and end-all of sports, and training correctly is absolutely crucial for skiers to realize this goal. Simply writing down the type and amount of training is therefore not enough; skiers must also make detailed recordings of their techniques and state of mind in order to hit on the right approach to achieving progress. An excerpt from the training journal of a junior cross-country skier at the elite national level in Norway helps demonstrate what this is about:

I felt I was doing well today with the dobbeldans [double pole on alternate sides] technique, and I’ve become better at not slacking off when skiing over the hilltops and downhill. I can work on getting my arms forward a bit quicker. With the padling [double pole on the same side] technique I just have to have the guts to increase the frequency. I have to learn where my limit for lactic acid is. I try to focus on a smooth pace when skiing uphill in order to go as fast as possible without increasing my pulse and getting hit by the acid. I felt I could maintain a fairly steady pace without getting hit by the acid or getting a high pulse. (Ebba, 18 years)

Such training journals contain page up and page down detailing the skier’s techniques, body, and training regimen. These are the factors that the skiers and their coaches focus on during every training session and every competition. This is what they talk and write about in an ongoing discussion about the body’s mastery of the skis and the terrain. In part, the training journal is the skier’s way of supervising themselves, as their bodily experiences are converted into words and concepts and to mental post-it notes for tomorrow’s session. And in part, the notes are expectations and messages to the coach, signals about what should be worked on in the future. The coaches we interviewed were keen on their skiers taking ownership of their own training and development, as should also be expressed in the way they write their training journal:

I place great emphasis on training journals, and on the athlete taking ownership of it. And it’s a never-ending struggle to get the athletes to record their activities as often as you want, because you do want to log in all the time and check that it’s being updated…. And it’s very often the ones who actually do that task who end up making progress, almost from one competition to the next throughout the winter. Then they’ll always have a plan when they arrive for training, and then they log in and look at the goals for that session, so that they ask themselves the right questions. ‘Why did I improve this time after skiing for 1 hour and 20 minutes?’ So there’s an aim and a purpose to their training, so they get more out of each session…. Taking ownership in that way helps tremendously with their development because it’s connected to what we’re discussing, and then they have to reflect every day on what we’re talking about during training. (Coach Arnold)

The training journal is thus a document that the coach has access to. The coach is responsible for achieving results and has a right to be kept abreast of the training being done. The coaches we interviewed placed a premium on the journals being both accurate and candid in regard to the actual work being done in training. A good coach can pinpoint tendencies and factors that the skier herself cannot see, restore the athlete’s faith in successful training methods she herself has begun to doubt, and identify new approaches to the training that will renew her optimism.

Through the writing and the subsequent coaching conversations, the athlete will gradually absorb the perspective, concerns, and way of thinking of elite sport. Taking ownership of their own development means that the athletes learn to see their training and their priorities through the lens of elite athletics and develop an understanding of the factors that are germane to success. The practice of writing and dialogue shows how the athletes’ skills and reflections are shaped, and shows what Foucault called the productivity of power, i.e. the social practices imply ‘certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes’ (Foucault 1988b, 18). By penetrating deeply into the athletes’ daily activities, sport influences the symbols through which they see themselves.

The athletes view and examine themselves

The training journal is also a motivator, and the notes are a visible manifestation of all the hard work. Metaphorically speaking, training sessions are the brushstrokes back and forth, while the journal recordings are the actual paint visible on the house wall. The daily grind of training is made concrete not only by means of oxygen uptakes and test results, but also in the guise of written words and numbers. And in the same way that a glance at the freshly painted wall may fill the painter with a sense of joy and pride, the training journal’s ‘hard facts’ can fill the skier with positive emotions:

The training journal is one of the greatest motivators for having the energy to train. I think it’s fun to train a lot and to train the right way, and to see the distribution of my different sessions and stuff like that. It has always been a goal to train extensively and to vary among different skiing techniques and intensity levels. And so then it’s fun to see whether you’ve managed to actually do that when you sum it all up. (John 17 years)

Skiers are forced to reflect on their own practice on the basis of time intervals, intensity zones, and training types. This inner dialogue intensifies their focus on the training and on being a dedicated athlete. And not least, journal writing leads the skiers to view themselves through the lens of physiological knowledge and its premises and concepts. The skiers’ understanding of their own practice is thus forced into categories derived from the scientific discourse.

The coaches we interviewed claim that professional coaching sometimes is a matter of empowering skiers to make independent choices. It is a question of creating skiers who are self-reliant, dedicated, patient, and structured. Their polar opposite are skiers who are dependent, unfocused, unstructured, and indeliberate:

I place great stock in the athletes becoming independent and being their own coach. So, they write a training journal, they get up in the morning, they train, they work systematically, they ask questions and are curious, and they are focused out there on the practice field. I think that if it becomes a cool thing to be deliberate, reflective, and goal-oriented in your work, the skiers will make progress and feel a sense of achievement. I want to see reflections in the training journal, not just training hours: What did you work on? What were your goals? Did you get any help? (Coach Mike)

Journal writing is thus a practice where skiers are taught to take care of themselves. Self-care requires self-knowledge, that is, the individual must keep an account of what they do (Foucault 1988b, 2005). Skiers act as a sort of inspector or controller to themselves in order to take note of certain factors and keep them in mind so that they act sensibly in the future. The practice of keeping a journal is a confessional technique, one where skiers discover the truth about themselves by writing almost everything down on a sheet of paper.

Writing a journal becomes a key part of the skiers’ work on their identity, since this activity maintains their focus beyond the training session and creates an awareness of themselves as dedicated athletes. By writing in a journal, skiers convert their jogs and hill sprints into specific training types, which are in turn incorporated as elements in a training plan. The recordings are concrete observations that support and create an understanding of reality. By being transformed to words, the training sessions acquire meaning and are inscribed into a symbolic order. When training is verbalized, it becomes an object of the skier’s self-awareness, and the training journal becomes a basis for their viewing and examining themselves (Si Lie Tan, Teck, and Kokkonen 2016). The practice of writing can be considered an example of what Foucault called ‘technologies of self’. These are techniques ‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so to transform themselves… (Foucault 1988b, 18).’

The athletes shaping of the self always takes place in a context of specific discourses, power relations and practices. There is a complex relationship between technologies of domination and technologies of the self, indeed in Foucault’s works it seems as if they are two possibilities created from the same cultural ‘material’ (Bridel and Rail 2007; Crockett 2016; Hanold 2010). The discourse of elite-sport gives the athletes a subject position, which at the same time gives them a space for speech, for action and for personal development.

Developing the skier’s identity

The journal thus becomes a silent testimony to how the skier has trained. It can help skiers dispel any doubt they may have as to whether they are really training as a dedicated sportsperson should, and whether their level of training is sufficient when compared with their competitors. But it is not always that easy to confide in the paper, especially not in paper that encapsulates the skier’s experiences within certain predetermined categories and a certain logic. It as though these categories preclude certain type of confessions, with the journal being of such a nature that it discourages the skier from commenting on certain circumstances that they themselves perceive as significant:

You can read what I have done, but you don’t really know what I have actually done—it’s only the individual person who knows, particularly in regard to intensity levels…. If you read the comments as well, you will understand a bit more: if it’s been a slog, or if I’ve run fast, or if I’ve just been going through the motions…. But ideally you should talk with me, I think, and listen to what I feel about what I’ve done. (Robert19 years)

Through their training journals and the ongoing feedback from their coaches, skiers are constantly being given fuel for self-reflection, and thus for self-creation. And the constant focal point of this subjectification process is training and performance. Dedicated skiers think of their sport the whole day through, and many of them get a guilty conscience if they do something that may undermine their training or diminish their restitution:

Sure, I think a lot about my sport. I had a rest day on Monday, and then I took a trip to Oslo with some friends to go shopping and enjoy ourselves. And I was walking around the whole day with a bad conscience because, like, I was out on the town instead of sitting at home and getting restituted. And then my coach sends me a text message: ‘Remember to restitute well between the sessions.’ And I just thought to myself, ‘Yeah, and here I am hanging out in Oslo.’ (Theresa 18 years)

The cross-country skiers we interviewed work hard to succeed in their sport. Both their daily lives and their minds are full of training, tests, and results. And many of them admit that it is hard to think about other things, like Theresa: ‘Sure, I probably think about skiing for 23 out of 24 h every day. I ask myself, Am I on track? Am I where I want to be?’ Elite skiers think about performance all the time and everywhere. They think about what can be improved, how they can make their training more efficient, and how their leisure time can help provide the surplus energy they need for the next grueling session. Coaches are also eager to maintaining this focus on performance and progress, and the skiers we interviewed appreciate their involvement:

The coach is good at sending messages [outside of common training sessions] and asking how my session was, how my shape is, and just following things up. The coach follows me up closely all the time, which is motivating and makes you want to train. It’s fun training when you have that close of a dialogue the entire time. The coach is good at commenting on the training journal and at focusing on what works, in addition to pinpointing what we have to work on. The coach sees each individual athlete and notices what each individual athlete must get better at. (Angelica 17 years)

The training journal, along with the subsequent conversations the skiers have with themselves and their coach, prompts them to continuously reflect on their performance. The coaches and the training journal encourage the skiers to discover methods and techniques for making progress. All of the hard work and all of the expectations are geared toward athletic performance. In such a situation, it may be difficult to think about other things and to remember that there is more to the world than athletic competition. A transformation—a type of spiritual alchemy, so to speak—gradually takes place that transmutes the athlete’s mentality and way of living. Writing a training journal helps put in place structures that confirm the skier’s identity as an elite athlete.

The act of writing training journals and implementing elite sports practices leads to both a submission to and a mastery of an elite sports position. This subjectification entails that the athlete adapts to an elite sports regimen, even as this transformative process can be described as a form of self-creation (Foucault 1982, 2005). By investing ever more time and effort in their sport through training, journal writing, and conversations, and by detaching themselves from other subject positions, cross-country skiers are transformed into something other than they would have been. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) concept of becoming—that is, the individual’s continuous construction and reconstruction of their character—helps us understand this developmental process (Skrubbeltrang, Nielsen, and Olesen 2016; Treumer Gregersen 2019). When the young skiers inscribe their daily processes, relations, and practices into a performance regimen, they recreate themselves by entering a new subject position. By all appearances, this is something they have chosen themselves, meaning that they maintain a sense of autonomy and ‘take ownership’ of their own development.

The practice of writing a training dairy may also resemble what Foucault called hypomnemata (Foucault 1997, 2005, 2011; Markula and Pringle 2006). Hypomnemata is ‘a form of self writing used by the ancient Greeks who recorded thoughts, experiments and/or curiosities in a notebook or journal for later synthesis and reflections’ (MacKay and Dallaire 2013, 187). Through the dialectic between writing, reflection and exploration, the athletes engage in a form of active self-creation, within the framework of opportunity that exists within an elite sport discourse.

Discussion: on identity, asceticism, and pleasure

In the training process, the skiers use pulse watches, GPS and occasionally lactate tests. These are techniques that provides relevant physiological data that the skiers can type into their training journal. With the help of such objective measures the effect of the training is expressed in types, amount, and intensity zones. This implies that the skiers and their coaches can reflect on their development with methods and concepts from a physiological and biomedical discourse. These concepts will simultaneously shape the athletes’ way of thinking and self-understanding. The athletes’ writing in the training diary, and the subsequent dialogue with the coaches and other dedicated athletes, contribute to the development of an elite sport identity in the skiers.

The athletes we interviewed were 16–19 years old, and they were all trying to complete high school while also trying to develop into elite cross-country skiers. During this time period, many of the young cross-country skiers made the transition from promising talents to fully dedicated elite athletes. During this phase the young skiers find themselves in a kind of exploratory, in-between position, with the training journal playing a key role in encouraging them to implement a new way of living and a new, more professional mentality.

Training journals help skiers better understand their training and motivate them to work hard during the sessions. Without such insight and dedication, the training sessions would soon become perfunctory and substandard, with little experimentation or pushing of boundaries. The skiers approach their development systematically, as aided by their coach’s trained eye on their practice and on what they should and should not do. In other words, the work that is required by the skiers is just as much mental as it is physical. The role of the skier is thus defined as something more than training to develop their physical skills, but is equally a project of acquiring knowledge and becoming more self-aware.

In order to produce cross-country skiers who are willing to do all the hard work that is required to compete in the sport at the highest level, the skiers must themselves want to do this - they must feel a kind of freedom and pleasure in their striving for the top spot. Elite skiers have assumed a position that seems both fascinating and inexplicable: They have almost a passion for all the sacrifices that a skiing career requires. The skiers use much of their physical and mental energy in a relatively separate world that over time has developed a common understanding and way of thinking. This is exactly what Loic Wacquant calls cullusio and illusio, ‘a self-contained web of social relation and cultural meanings that act as a prism refracting outside information according to its own logic’ (Wacquant 1995, 85). And the writing of the training journal means that the athletes learn and embody the common language and conceptual framework of this ‘world’. They break from the pedagogical ideal of pursuing a lifestyle that allows people to explore a variety of talents and opportunities, they disagree that the point of all the toil is to ‘have a good time’, and they defy the social ban against being fascinated by something trivial. Elite-level skiers think of their sport all the time: all of their choices, all of their thoughts, and all of their actions are governed by the desire to improve their performance.

The cross-country skiers we interviewed stated that, despite all the sweat and toil, they feel privileged and love their sport. They are allowed to do what they enjoy the most, even as they have many people at their disposal to help them realize their goals. What seems from the outside to be a merciless, grueling regimen is seen by the athletes themselves as living the dream. Training, eating, and resting, day in and day out, and often far away from family and friends: How can the skiers perceive such a life as fabulous? Doesn’t the life of an elite skier consist of repeated acts of asceticism? And if so, what is it that makes this asceticism meaningful? The word ‘asceticism’ itself stems from the Ancient Greek noun asketes, or ‘monk,’ which ultimately derives from the verb askeo, ‘I exercise’ (Valantasis 2008). Moderation in the consumption of food and drink is characteristic of all forms of religious asceticism (Bynum 1987). Ascetics develop a system of behavioral rules in order to control their body through hunger and self-sacrifice. A life founded on moderation and temperance was the philosophical bulwark against one’s judgment being disrupted and impaired by desire. Asceticism is a question of self-denial, abstinence, and self-discipline (Bynum 1987). Does this mean that elite cross-country skiers are akin to monks and nuns, renouncing everything in their quest to become future champions? By pushing their bodies to the limit, abstaining from alcohol, and living highly regulated lives, skiers prepare themselves to compete for medals. They thereby carry out a number of practices aimed at manipulating their body so that they can realize their ambitions.

But the life of an elite skier is not a story of suffering. The skiers have converted toil into passion, denial into choice, discipline into freedom, and asceticism into pleasure. For elite skiers, training is about realizing their body’s possibilities and not about obliterating and suppressing their body. The physical is cultivated, explored, and transformed. Training is a journey into, and not away from, physicality. It is a daily paean to the power of the body. Sport is a socially constructed system of movement that is carried out by and through the body, and through training we experience pain, setbacks, and, ultimately, achievement. And your body and surroundings are experienced in a different way when you for example jog or ski than when you sit and write on a computer, even as the given activity changes your physical makeup. The body is not exclusively a field to be mastered, but is also the basis of how we experience ourselves and the world (Merleau-Ponty 2012).

The conventional discussion of asceticism and pleasure seems to be predicated on a dualistic view of humanity that distinguishes between mind and body, spirit and matter, culture and nature (Valantasis 2008). Within such a dualistic understanding, the body is conceptualized as being subservient to instrumental reason; this reason may for example envision a project of creating a future international champion in skiing. But skiers are not weak-willed victims of ruthless coaches and team leaders who want to win at any price, but are instead self-aware actors who enjoy their way of life. Elite sport is not a series of procedures that suppress pleasure, but consists rather of practices that invest in it.

Foucault is perhaps the thinker who most explicitly has tried to see oppression and pleasure as two intrinsically linked entities, speculating for example that the primary function of power is to link coercion, pleasure, and truth (Foucault 1994). The training sessions, nutritional regimen, and relentless focus on achieving goals do not prevent pleasure, but produce it. We must conceive of power (objectification) and pleasure (subjectification) as a whole if we are to understand the practices of elite sport (Bynum 1987). It is pleasurable for skiers to follow a scheduled session of interval training, and it is pleasurable for them to push their body to its limits. And through the writings in the training journal and the subsequent dialogues with the coach, the experiences in the training work simultaneously become resources in the athletes’ identity development.

Conclusion

Identity formation is a complicated process. It is partly a question of how individuals are woven into relationships and practices that govern their awareness, gaze, and movement, and partly it is about how individuals, through their own reflections and choices, more or less cultivate themselves. In this process of creating such an identity, the practice of writing a training journal plays a vital role for cross-country skiers. The journal creates both an inner dialogue and an athlete–coach dialogue that shape the skier’s mentality and choices. Through these dialogues, skiers are transformed from promising talents to serious, dedicated athletes, and they change their outlook on both themselves and their choices by assuming this position.

We believe that writing a training journal plays a vital role in this process of transformation. The new subject position alters a skier’s understanding and priorities. Participation in an elite sports environment shapes their gaze, compelling the skiers to interpret the effects of the various procedures in a new light. They begin gradually to enjoy the sight and feeling of having a well-trained body. But the configuring of their gaze is not just about the project itself and the aids that are used to achieve this project. The body is also objectified by the discourse and gaze of the sports field, and the power of the social gaze derives from the fact that recipients acknowledge the perception categories to which they themselves are exposed. The practice of journal writing plays an instrumental role here. Seeing their own body and practice from the viewpoint of both their coach and their sport, skiers are motivated to engage in corporeal practices that bridge the gap between ‘is’ and ‘should be.’

Disclosure statement

This manuscript draws on research supported by Olympiatoppen, Norway’s elite sport development organization. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.