“I still have that athlete soul”: Storying identity and pain in retired athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sport culture narratives teach athletes that their identities should center around athletic performance, with pain being an accepted part of sport-related success. The transition out of sport can be challenging for athletes as they struggle to redefine their identities, which is further complicated for many former athletes experiencing persistent pain after their sporting careers. This study explored how persistent pain shapes and constrains how retired athletes negotiate their post-athletic career identities. Adopting a narrative constructionist lens, 2 life story interviews were each conducted with 8 retired athletes who have played high-performance sport and are currently experiencing persistent pain (pain lasting >3 months). Through a thematic narrative analysis, two themes were developed: pain as an opportunity for empathy, and the intuitive body connection. Experiencing pain is often described as isolating in sport, but in retirement many participants storied their experience of pain as enabling them to empathize and connect with others. Over half of the participants have decided to pursue a career in clinical care, citing their experience of pain as motivating their desire to help others. Participants also described how pain taught them to listen and develop an intuitive connection with their body – they no longer needed to push themselves to their body’s limits due to being retired from sport, but rather could listen to the needs of their body and adjust their exercise, social, and eating behaviours accordingly. These findings expand our understanding of how athletes make sense of their post-athletic career lives when living with pain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".