Apollonian and dionysian as the categories of sport experience. The interpretation of written stories from ultramarathons in the light of the theory of Ruth Benedict

Abstract

This article in its empirical part is devoted to the interpretation of the content of blogs about ultramarathons, i.e. runs at a longer distance than a standard marathon (42,195 km). This subdiscipline of long-distance running is now rapidly growing and constantly attracting new participants, which is accompanied by fast development of the blogosphere dedicated to this subject. However, online diaries of runners have not yet been analysed too comprehensively by social researchers. Therefore, this work will be an attempt to fill in this empirical gap, and the content of the examined blogs will be used to understand the practice of participation in ultramarathons. The theoretical basis of this work is Ruth Benedict’s considerations and her concepts of apollonian and dionysian as aspects of culture. These notions were borrowed from F. Nietzsche and used in the description of North American Indian culture. The main research goal set by the author is an attempt to analyse the forms of manifestations of the apollonian and dionysian elements in written stories from ultramarathons. For analysing the textual content of blogs the author will use the personal documents method. The summary contains the conclusions from the whole inquiry and the suggestions for further sociological research.