Sport and eating disorders
Mar. 4th, 2020 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nineveh_ukI'm off from work for the third time this term with the same recurring flu-ey thing. I think the moral of this story is that I ought to have been off for a week properly the first time and got over it properly... Naturally I am therefore planning to go back to work tomorrow if at all possible.
I am trying to avoid using my eyes for anything requiring sustained focus as they and the surrounding muscles really need to rest, which saw me spend 45 minutes this morning listening to an interview with US cross-country skier (and Olympic gold medal winner) Jessica Diggins, talking about her experience of an eating disorder, which I thought might be of interest to some on my flist into sport.
The interview is here on NRK. Scroll down to the bottom video.
I'm cutting the next bit in which I comment on the interview even though there is absolutely nothing detailed or graphic in it.
Eating disorders are something that are increasingly being talked about in sport, and Diggins has been increasingly public about her experience over the past year or so. The timing of this interview reflects that she has a book coming out at the weekend, which I would probably be planning to get anyway given the dearth of material on cross-country skiing in English that isn't about the US recreational market, but the thoughtful openness that she displays in the interview is certainly an incentive. Diggins describes her own experience of having bulimia as not wholly tied to sport, but being also related to more general issues as a talented and ambitious teenager with a drive to succeed, but there's no doubt that as a endurance sport cross-country skiing shares with distance running and cycling an incentive to try to improve performance through thinness, and people who are not quite at the top performance level yet can be even more vulnerable with the pressure to get noticed and less dedicated support. At the top level, the subject has had some prominence this season with two female competitors being taken out of competition earlier in the season for unspecified health reasons, which the media coverage assumed had a good chance of being weight/body fat/nutrition related. Both are now back, successfully, but there has been further discussion about how you set race courses that are thrilling to watch (uphills are good!) but don't over-incentivize light weight. It will be interesting to see how the sport continues to tackle this, hopefully it will.
I am trying to avoid using my eyes for anything requiring sustained focus as they and the surrounding muscles really need to rest, which saw me spend 45 minutes this morning listening to an interview with US cross-country skier (and Olympic gold medal winner) Jessica Diggins, talking about her experience of an eating disorder, which I thought might be of interest to some on my flist into sport.
The interview is here on NRK. Scroll down to the bottom video.
I'm cutting the next bit in which I comment on the interview even though there is absolutely nothing detailed or graphic in it.
Eating disorders are something that are increasingly being talked about in sport, and Diggins has been increasingly public about her experience over the past year or so. The timing of this interview reflects that she has a book coming out at the weekend, which I would probably be planning to get anyway given the dearth of material on cross-country skiing in English that isn't about the US recreational market, but the thoughtful openness that she displays in the interview is certainly an incentive. Diggins describes her own experience of having bulimia as not wholly tied to sport, but being also related to more general issues as a talented and ambitious teenager with a drive to succeed, but there's no doubt that as a endurance sport cross-country skiing shares with distance running and cycling an incentive to try to improve performance through thinness, and people who are not quite at the top performance level yet can be even more vulnerable with the pressure to get noticed and less dedicated support. At the top level, the subject has had some prominence this season with two female competitors being taken out of competition earlier in the season for unspecified health reasons, which the media coverage assumed had a good chance of being weight/body fat/nutrition related. Both are now back, successfully, but there has been further discussion about how you set race courses that are thrilling to watch (uphills are good!) but don't over-incentivize light weight. It will be interesting to see how the sport continues to tackle this, hopefully it will.