Careers in Running Individual Needs and Social Organization

Abstract

The first "Volkslauf" at Bobingen on Oct. 13, 1963 signalled the beginning of a development transforming organized running into a sport for the masses, a popular sport of stimulative nature. The extraordinary increase in what followed that "Volkslauf" was amplified by the "Lauftreffs" (first organized in 1974) and the city marathons which have gained more and more ground since the early eighties. All of this resulted in what today we call the jogging movement: "Laufbewegung". Being more than just another kind of sport, to many people jogging has become part of their everyday culture.

People are said to practise jogging because it is healthy, improves their basic well-being, breakes the monotony of their everyday lives, turning into a veritable inner sensation. All this is supposed to mingle with a variety of further motives, as it serves personal ambition and efficiency, offers new social experiences, adds up to a "process of self-education"; finally it is supposed to serve the certainty of gaining a piece of identity. Then a career in running Would inevitably mean an integral and essential part of one's biography, an important element of the vital activity required each day of one's life and standing in an indissoluble context with other activities, satisfying needs which have gradually sprung up as by-products of jogging over the years. This must be reflected in the terms of social environment, nature, body-consciousness, competitions and sense of life - sense of running. The jogging movement is considered as a proof of the contradictory nature of advanced societies, as a melting-pot of deeply rooted factors of persistence standing in the wax of any social moulding of subjectivity. It exhibits tendencies leading to divergent assessments- depending on one's point or angle of view.

A critical analysis of the jogging movement shows the obvious difficulty of outlining a main direction of social development and biographical evolution.