Feeling Hurt, Embodying Injury: Youth Swimmers’ Experiences of Pain

As has been demonstrated in previous studies on pain, training and competing while injured is a normalized practice in many sports (Mayer et al. 2018). I argue that the effects of pain and injury are socio-cultural mediated experiences which are necessarily embodied in their enactment (Brodwin 1992) and perception (Merleau-Ponty 2012) by competitive youth swimmers. For young athletes, this can have lasting effects on their bodies, their perception of their bodies, and their selves. Injury, I argue, is not just physiological, it is also social in the ways that athletes experience the everyday realities of rehabilitation, pain, and being labelled as “injured.” The experiences of pain and injury inform how youth swimmers know and use their bodies and it is literally written on their bodies (Aalten 2005). This “spectrum of pain” is apparent in their embodied techniques (Mauss 1973; Downey 2010), the habits, skills, and dispositions of young athletes in and out of the water.