Over the Hill and Under the Radar: Participation in Physical Activity Of Older People at the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto
by
Maureen Coyle
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Graduate Department of Exercise Sciences University of Toronto
© Copyright by Maureen Coyle 2013
Over the Hill and Under the Radar: Participation in Physical Activity Of People 59 Years of Age and Older at the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto
Maureen Coyle
Master of Sciences
Exercise Sciences
University of Toronto
2013 Abstract
An examination of data from 21 older members of the University community aged 59 and older, including those who do and those who do not use the campus gyms, and six athletic programming staff from the two facilities to attempt to understand how older adults choose to negotiate their physical activity as they age. The study demonstrates that those respondents most comfortable in the gym spaces in the university setting are those who have occupied those spaces over many years, or those who have been habituated to gym culture through their activities outside the university setting. Using the ’mask of ageing theory’ in combination with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field, this study is an attempt to understand the individual and cultural practices that older adults engage in to manage their physical activities at the University, their other activities outside, as well as the performative aspects of their engagement.
ii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all of those people who gave of their time and their histories for me to be able to conduct the study. The people who shared their stories and experiences with me did so out of the kind desire to help me out, and to advance a discussion in the hopes of acquiring an understanding of the ways that older people can, or want to move their bodies. Some allowed me to waylay them to ask if they might consider participating in this study. Some contacted me after hearing from their friends what my interests are. Some allowed their information to be passed through friends so that I could find them more easily. To all of you, I am grateful. Participation in this study includes the expectation is that this information I have assembled with the assistance of so many helpers will be shared with the wider world. I will do my best to honour those expectations.
As always, it is a pleasure to acknowledge my continuing debt to my teachers and to my teachers’ teachers for the many gifts I receive as I go through my studies. I have already acquired much knowledge that will take me another lifetime to absorb and to truly understand. That will not stop me asking more questions, though. My committee members, Drs. Peter Donnelly,
Michael Atkinson and Markus Schafer, I thank you for your in-put, your feedback and your patience.
Thank you to the many helpers I have had in the athletic facilities at the Athletic Centre and Hart
House, allowing me to pester them for yet one more question, and just another bit of data I’m curious about. Lynsay Henderson, in particular, made my life so much easier.
I would like to acknowledge Josie Valotta, for reminding me of the ‘t’s to be dotted and the ‘i’s to be crossed. iii
Thank you to Esmé, Thom and Kathleen for making believe this stuff I keep going on about is worth sharing. And to my old friend Susan Fischer, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for looking over the math. And to Philip: thank you for the loan of the computer when mine could just not make it over that final hurdle.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ii
Acknowledgments iii
Table of Contents v
List of Table ix
List of Appendices ix
Preface p.1
Chapter 1
Chapter Introduction p.5
1.1 The Background p.7
1.2 Ageing and Exercise p.8
1.3 How Old is Old? p.10
1.4 Social Needs Meets Exercise p.12
1.5 Physical Activity and Sport p.13
1.6 The Prescriptive Discourses of Exercise as Part of Successful Ageing p.14
1.7 Limitations of This Study p.18
Chapter Summary and Thesis Overview p.20
Chapter 2 Review of the Literature: p.22
The theoretical inheritance of Social Gerontology
Chapter Introduction p.22
2.1 Background p.22
2.2 The “Anti-ageing Enterprise” p.23
2.3 Social Gerontology Comes of Age p.25
2.4 The Mask of Ageing Theory: the Older Body Considered? P.26
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Chapter Summary p.30
Chapter 3 Methods p.31
Chapter Introduction p.31
3.1 Study Design p.31
3.2 The Study Participants p.34
3.3 Three interview segments p.35
3.3.1 Older Participants in Regular Physical Activity at the University p.35
3.3.2 Older Participants Not Engaged in Physical Activity at the University p.37
3.3.3 Athletic Program Design and Delivery Staff p.37
3.3.4 A Brief Questionnaire p.37
3.4 The Meaning of Exercise p.39
3.5 Supplemental Data Collection p.40
3.5.1 The Need for Supporting Data p.40
3.5.2 Memberships p.41
3.5.3 Incident and Accident Reports p.41
3.6 Program Evaluations p.43
3.7 Data Collection and Analysis p.44
3.8 Analytical Frameworks p.45
Chapter Summary p.49
Chapter 4 p.50
Chapter Introduction p.50
4.1 Location p.50
4.2 Estimated Participation of Older Adults at p.50
Hart House and the Athletic Centre
4.3 Facility Memberships p.53
4.4 The Institutional Disposition - the View From the Trenches p.54 vi
4.5 Concerns of Older People Over Injury From Exercise p.62
4.8 The People Participating in the Study p.64
Chapter Summary p.64
Chapter 5 The Structuring of Older Exercisers p.66
Chapter Introduction p.66
5.1 The Social Placement p.66
5.2 The Hinge p.67
5.2.1 The Boom p.67
5.2.2 Muscular Christianity p.68
5.2.3 War and the ‘Soldier Mystique’ p.71
5.2.4 Education and the Great Lurch Forward p.74
Chapter Summary p.79
Chapter 6 p.80
Chapter Introduction p.80
6.1 Expressions of Habitus p.81
6.2 Conflicts Within the Narratives of Exercise: The Masquerade p.82
6.3 The Gym and the Commodification of Fitness p.89
6.3.1 Location p.89
6.3.2 The Valourisation of the Body in Place p.90
6.4 The Younger and the Older Adults p.92
6.5 Observations of Social Space p.99
6.6 The Health Narrative p.102
6.7 Illness and Exercise p.108
6.8 The Loneliness of the Ageing p.111
6.8 The Long Goodbye p.116
Chapter Summary p.121 vii
Chapter 7 Summary of Results p.122
Chapter Introduction p.122
7.1 Findings p.122
7.1.1 The Health Imperative and Ageing p.127
7.1.2 The Use of the Gym Spaces and Exercise Persistence p.128
7.1.3 The Privileging of Indoor Activity p.130
7.2 Study Limitations p.130
7.3 Recommendations and Conclusions p.131
7.3.1 The ‘Mask of Ageing’ and Habitus, Field and Capital p.131
7.3.2 Highlighting Ageing and the Ageing Body as a Subject p.132
7.3.3 Activity and the Open Spaces at the University p.133
7.3.4 An Anti-Ageism Policy Review p.133
7.3.5 A Recalibration of the Definition of ‘Student’ p.134
7.3.6 Study of Younger Users of the Spaces p.135
7.3.7 Expand This Study to the Wider Population p.135
7.3.8 Childhood Experience and Physical Activity p.136
7.3.9 The ‘Just World’ Bias Within Health Narratives p.136
References p.137
Additional Bibliography p.140
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List of Tables
Table 1 Hart House Community Membership 60+ p.53
Table 2 The Athletic Centre Memberships 65+ and 80+ p.54
List of Appendices
Appendix A - The interview guides p.144
Group 1 Older Adults Who Use the Gym Spaces at the University p.145
Group 2 Older Adults Who Do Not Use the Gym Spaces at the University p.147
Group 3 Older Adults Who Do Not Use Any Gyms p.149
Group 4 The Athletic Facility Programming Staff p.151
Appendix B - The questionnaire p.154
Appendix C - The World Health Organisation p.159
Recommendations for Physical Activity for Adults Aged 65 and Above
Appendix D - Education in Canada by age p.161
Appendix E - Education in Canada by age and sex p.162
ix 1
Preface
I would like to thank my dad, from whom I learned an awful lot on this journey to understand the range of bodily experiences of ageing and attitudes of older people, aged 59 and older, towards physical activity. One night as I was working with the data from this study, I was struck by the thought that my dad, at 83, would fit into this target group, although he has never been a member of any university community. I became curious about how he might have answered the questions I was asking others of his age. So called him. He graciously agreed to allow me to interview him, and although his experiences are not included in the data contained in this paper, what he shared enriched my appreciation of him and his life, and his contribution challenged the notions of physical activity that are the dominant discourse of this paper. His answers to the same questions asked of the 21 older adults in the study under discussion in this paper put childhood play in greater perspective for me, and it reminded me of the obvious: that not all working class people made it to the universities in those post-war years and that the cultural shifts that made it possible for so many to change the terms of their societal engagement through education were not universally accessible.
Great tectonic plates of personal history fell into place to form a new understanding, a new shape of my own history that went beyond the Irish diaspora and the wartime economies. I was reminded in that phone call of the limited reach of education, which was not - is not - available to many outside the urban areas in this country. My dad’s school only went to Grade 8. The trip to High School in ‘town’ was expensive, at 10 cents a day – that on top of a ten-mile walk to the bus stop from his house. And the toil and expense of the travel was nothing compared to the stigma of being from ‘the sticks’.
I had known that part, of course, as I remember my dad going to night classes to get his Grade 12 certificate after he left the navy when I was 12. What was new to me was the description of his bodily engagement during his childhood: I had not known that the house in Spryfield that I recall from my childhood – the house where I remember my Grandparents living, was built by my father when he was 12 years old. His uncles would come by when they were off work at the docks in town and not building their own homes for their families: they taught my dad how to frame walls and to plaster and how to
2 shingle a roof, and then he did it, living with his family in a small shack nearby until they could move into the new place.
Grandad was off at the wars from 1941 until he was ‘demobbed’ 1945; in the merchant navy while the house was being built, returning with a burden of terrors earned on the burning oil slicks of the north Atlantic to a job at the docks.
I never knew that the gravel road that went past my grandparent’s house in my childhood did not exist when this boy was building his family home for his mother and four younger sisters. The main road is about 900 meters from the house, and when the half-ton of coal was dropped off, it, like all the lumber and other building supplies, was left at the side of the road. That 12 year old boy had to fetch that coal in the 20 or so big, 50 pound bags it was delivered in, and heave it all the way to the house, to the basement that was a wonder to me when I was little, because it was like a cave: the foundation of the house sat on an enormous rock, and the only usable portion of the basement fit around the contours of this marvelous chunk of the Canadian Shield. That basement was a fearsome place to me, a place we kids would dare each other to venture. But I had never known it was a place of hard toil, or how the house had come to be placed there, sitting, precariously it seemed, on that craggy piece of granite.
This story emerged because I asked my dad about his childhood play. It seems frivolous now to talk of play to a guy who was a kid with calloused hands from hauling lumber for hours everyday when he was not at school. School was his break period. School was his play. When I asked about games he was bemused: he didn’t know what to say. Frustrated, he burst out, “You’ve got to understand: there wasn’t anything there. It was just the school and the woods. It wasn’t paved or anything.” When pressed to recall what he might have done with his friends for play, he eventually said, “Well, there was one thing: we’d throw rocks at something – if we got hold of a coke bottle, or something like that, we’d put it over the road and try and hit it with rocks. We’d do stuff like that. Try and hit things with rocks.”
Finally! There was some small aspect of my father’s life that fit into the childhood experiences of the men and women I was interviewing. Some small bit of play amid the brutal reality of hard, physical labour. The only other respite came in the form of that
3 great working class game: hockey. My dad would walk with his friends to neighbouring villages up to ten miles away to play a game of hockey – boys in his area against the boys from the other places. There was no external, adult intervention or organization. Boys – for hockey was exclusively male in those days – would meet on a piece of ice and play. It didn’t matter how many players were available, what mattered was how long the light would last until they could no longer see the puck.
My father joined the navy when he was still in his teens, shifting his labour from the land to the sea. It was, in so many ways, among the best options available to him at the time. What my father had learned from his childhood is that his body was made to work. The idea of labouring as part of play seemed a little ridiculous from where he stood. He and his friends made fun of people who spent time in gyms: it meant they hadn’t worked sufficiently hard during their workday. Only slackers had the energy to play around in gyms. And athletes were guys with time on their hands. It was nice for some.
It is an irony that the work that was my father’s experience of physical activity will prove not to be a life-prolonging enterprise in the style of the neoliberal doctrine of exercise as the root to a “successful” old age: my father’s physical labours will be the death of him. Asbestosis from rolling and unrolling the heavy fire curtains on the flight decks of the ships will choke him to death, if his heart, put under considerable strain by the under- functioning of his lungs, does not fail first. Until then, his days – and his nights – are spent in torment from the tinnitus resulting from years of working around the planes without ear protection. This is the legacy of my father’s years of toiling with his body. If physical labour can be life-enhancing, and life-extending, then it must be a different kind of labour. Something done inside. Like in a gym, perhaps.
For this acquaintance with my own personal ‘hinge’ as Elias might call it, and I am grateful for the reminder that this study is built upon the information from people whose experience is, while ordinary in one setting, is still, by almost all measures, highly privileged and therefore unrepresentative of the wider Canadian experience in the 20th Century. It is important to remember that the social, educational and economic mobility described in Chapter 5 of this paper was not available to all.
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5
Chapter 1
Introduction
In this study I have sought to understand what allows some older members of the University community, 59 years of age and older, to comfortably use the athletic spaces at the University, when older students in a preliminary study said they would not use the spaces because of the confrontation with their own ageing that the use of the space engendered for them. Having heard such a strong reaction against using the gyms at the University from the older students, aged 45 years and above, who participated in a preliminary study in 2010 (Coyle, unpublished), the question was raised: why, if there is such a strong reaction against using the spaces by these older students, why are there older people using these spaces at all? For it is undeniable that older people do use the gym spaces at this University. So who are these active older people? Is there something unique about them that they are able to navigate these spaces designed around the needs of younger students? What can we learn from the experiences of older people who use the athletic spaces in the university setting that we can understand better the social culture of both the gym spaces and the social requirements of older people who wish to engage, or to remain engaged, in physical activity? Is there something about the gym spaces at the University that makes it possible for these older people to remain active to sixty and beyond? Or do these spaces at Hart House and the Athletic Centre, by their mandate of being focused on student life, by which is meant younger students, in some way inhibit participation by older people in those spaces?
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The First Chapter of this study will encapsulate the rationale for the study that is at the centre of this thesis. Chapter two will examine the literature to provide a background for the theoretical bases of Social Gerontology and some of the theories from Sport Sociology as they apply to ageing, but with particular attention to the Mask of Ageing theory that is applied in the analysis of the data generated in this work. Chapter three will outline the methods applied in the course of this study along with the rationales for specific choices. The fourth chapter outlines the some of the empirical data, which is to say, the numbers that give some of the context for the qualitative data. That chapter also examines the data qualitative data from the study participants who design, administer or deliver recreational athletic programming at the Athletic Centre or
Hart House, or, in some case, at both. In chapter five, I examine the social locations of the older participants, including an examination of some of the dominant socio-political cultures in
Canada, and the socio-economic and educational shifts within the lives of these participants and in the wider culture during the span of their lives to the present. The sixth chapter is where I examine aspects of the social construction of the ageing habitus within the culture of fitness and specifically in the context of the University fitness spaces. Chapter seven summarizes the data presented and offers some suggestions for moving forward, by listing suggested policy changes and opportunity for further investigation.
This first chapter presents the background for this paper, with a brief description of the pilot study, which gave rise to the questions that form the basis of this work. The following sections outline the understandings of the key concepts used in the study: in section two, there is a brief outline of ageing in the context of Exercise Sciences, section three summarizes biological framings of ageing and some of the problems resulting from
7 generalizations of ageing. The significance of social connections in activity participation are covered in section four, while section five explicates the terms ‘physical activity’ and
‘sport’ as used in this paper. Section six briefly outlines some of the dominant discourses within popular culture that frame and potentially limit inclusion of older populations in physical activity discussions. This chapter concludes with a brief overview of the thesis after looking at some of the limitations of this study in section seven.
1.1 The Background
A small study involving nine subjects conducted at the St. George campus at the
University of Toronto in the Spring of 2011 provided valuable data on reported barriers to participation in athletic and physical activities by older students at the University. That work (Coyle, unpublished), revealed a reluctance to engage in physical activity on the university campus by all of the of interviewed subjects - new and returning university students aged 45 and over - for many of the reasons already evident in the wider population as documented in the literature: lack of time; too many responsibilities; fear of injury; fear of exacerbating an old injury; concern for joints; lethargy, and lack of sustained interest (Burman et al. 2010; Manfield et al. 2010; Mathews et al., 2010; Seguin et al., 2010). However, this group of study participants, perhaps because of their unique situation at an institution that is primarily designed around the needs of seventeen to thirty-year olds, reported concerns not previously demonstrated in the literature: feelings of vulnerability and fear of being ostracized that are specifically related to their age, the gap between their age and that of the age of the main University population, and the perceived social dangers that might result from any potential displays of incompetence in front of the younger members of the university population. These feelings were mainly
8 reported by those older students who do not habitually engage in physical activity, and by those who take their exercise off-campus. The initial study found no older students who use the exercise facilities at the University.
The older students who participated in the preliminary study are not simply afraid that their bodies cannot take the activity: they report being fearful of being rejected for being older, and they are ashamed of the messages that time and life have imprinted on their bodies: every pregnancy, every injury, the hours cramped over a computer, or spent standing at work; all of these are tattooed on our bodies with an ink that deepens over time. Our bodies in age are carved by the uses we have made of them through our life’s course in a way that no cunning layers of exercise gear, designed by default for much younger people in a market devoted to the concept of youth, can hope to disguise.
1.2 Ageing and Exercise
We know a great deal about what activities are beneficial from a physiological standpoint, and the literature reflects the impact that physical activity has on positive affect among older exercisers (Burman et al., 2010; Chae et al. 2010). Using only very generalized information about older people, we have a good base of knowledge about how much exercise is normally required to bring about both specific and general health benefits
(Burman et al., 2010; Chae et al. 2010). But we can have no certainty about the specific physical needs of older individuals within a randomized group, because the range of the experience of ageing is simply too great to predict. Add to this, the variable that each of those individuals is entering the exercise space with a lifetime of having used their bodies
9 in various ways: actively or passively, correctly or dangerously, and that they bring with them every scar, every fear they have ever had.
This study was undertaken to explore the question of why some older adults exercise. And what is it about the older adults who exercise in a location in which other older adults in a pilot study said overwhelmingly (100%) that they would not go into, because of how those locations made them feel about themselves as older adults and how it made them feel about their ageing bodies? What is it about these individuals who exercise in those locations that allows them to set aside the time and work themselves in ways which, strictly speaking, are not comfortable, as much of sporting practice and exercise training is, well, taxing? What are they seeking? How do they see themselves? What can we learn from the people who do exercise that can illuminate why others do not?
Exercise programs, such as ‘zoomer fit’, offer classes specifically crafted around the perceived needs of older people, in which the exercises are slower versions of the same activities currently found in exercise classes for broader populations. The music is played at a lower setting, so that the instructor can be heard by the participants; the harsh lights of the exercise room are lowered, so the room has a softer look. But is this what older people want? Can the needs of older people be generalized such that there needs to be programming developed specifically for older adults? Or might that approach be resented by older people as infantilization? What activities or adaptations to currently existing activities might older people devise if they were free to do so? The simple fact that not all people experience aging the same way should have an impact on how physical activity spaces for use by older adults are developed.
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1.3 How Old is Old?
... ageing people cannot be understood unless we realise that the process of ageing often brings about a fundamental change in a person’s position in society, and so in his or her whole relationships to other people. People’s power and status change, whether quickly or slowly, earlier or later, when they reach the age of sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety.
Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying (1985) (Emphasis in the original.)
Norbert Elias appears to be making two points about ageing that are of vital importance to any work relating to gerontology, or work that includes older people. The first is that the process of ageing itself causes shifts of position for the individual within societal structures, so that most ageing people experience a negative change in the perception of their personal value to society. Or, as Pierre Bourdieu might frame it, the ageing habitus experiences a devaluation of social and symbolic capital. The second point Elias makes, is one that is under-addressed, yet it has a tremendous impact upon every aspect of social gerontology, and that is that ageing, although it is a life-long journey of any organism, is a term that has become used almost exclusively to identify the phase of life after which the production of sex hormones reduce and slow to a point of significant diminishment; and this phase begins the longest developmental stage of the human life-course, potentially equal in length to the combined stages of young adulthood, adulthood and middle-age.
And this period of ageing is, undoubtedly, a stage with one of the widest ranges of manifest change. In infancy, which in humans is taken to describe the period of development from birth to three years of age, there are what are referred to as
11
‘developmental milestones’: the age ranges during which a normally developing child will acquire teeth, for example, or learn to sit up, to smile, or to walk. If there is a remarkable lag in attaining these ‘milestones’, it is cause for concern and is deemed to warrant medical investigation. The same is true in adolescence; like infancy, it is a relatively short, yet explosive period of development. If there is a significant delay in the onset of menarche or in testicular development, it can be a signal of potentially serious medical issues. In the older individual, however, there is no agreement among geriatricians, gerontologists or biologists about how ageing progresses, or what - beyond those functions related to reproduction - triggers which biological event. Although it seems fairly clear that severe drops in levels of sex hormones and related endocrine changes are among the primary significant events in the onset of senescence, and while other biological phenomena do occur, there are no ‘milestones’ of ageing outside of menopause in women, which is itself idiosyncratic, given that the window of ‘normal’ hormonal reduction is so variable from individual to individual, with the phase of active hormonal decrease spanning from a few months in some women, to fifteen or more years among others.
And this is one of the astounding facts of ageing: with the various types of decline that are associated with ageing, in combination with individual experience, there is no timeline.
Someone who is sixty may present with multiple - even terminal - types of age-related decline that someone else may not evince until well into their nineties. There are variations of as many as four decades among individuals within this group. And even when we subdivide this group into ‘third age’, 60 to 80 years of age and ‘fourth age’ categories, 80 years and above, there are still enormous differences in experiences and presentations of ageing, including the physical markers of age-related decline. So when
12 we talk about older people and their needs around healthcare and physical activity, we must stop speaking as if there is a single mode of ageing: there is simply no template for getting old. And this means, of course, that we need to acknowledge this fact in discussing physical activity programming requirements for older adults. That ageing does not occur on a schedule has an obvious and significant impact on the delivery of activity programs for older people: formulas for physical activity participation will not be appropriate for programming targeting older populations.
1.4 Social Needs Meets Exercise
The social benefits of group exercise is echoed in much of the literature on exercise adherence - which emphasizes the need to exercise consistently to achieve the positive benefits of the activity and to help mitigate some of the effects of age-related decline, such as arthritis, or to improve circulation of the blood and the maximization of oxygen use. People who exercise with other individuals create a social environment, that, regardless of whether those connections continue outside the exercise context, are known to alleviate issues of social isolation among older people (Mansfield et al., 2010). And those social connections, in turn, become an important contributing factor in exercise adherence (Mansfield et al., 2010; Mathews et al., 2010 Seguin et al., 2010). But are these concerns recognized among older members of the University community? Is it possible to implement programming strategies to improve this vital link between exercise behaviour and social inclusion? Is it the place of the institution to consciously program for social inclusion on behalf of its older members?
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1.5 Physical Activity and Sport
This study would be remiss if it did not begin by acknowledging that, in many people’s minds, physical activity is negatively conflated with sport. For some, the idea of physical activity is half buried in memories of the humiliations of gym class. For every person who has, vicariously or otherwise, experienced the thrill of a winning goal, there are others who shrink from the idea of watching highly paid goons enacting a dumb show of war.
Many millions of Olympic viewers watch breathlessly as a tiny young woman climbs a high tower only to throw herself off with effortless grace into the pool below; as they expel the air from their lungs in relief they say to themselves ‘I could never do that!’ And they would be quite correct: they could not. But by taking the unfair example of the elite competitor to establish standards, they have effectively closed off avenues for the exploration of their own capabilities.
‘Physical activity’ is used in this study to describe a wider range of physical engagement than is covered in the term ‘sport’. While sport refers to activities that are done within an over-arching structure of externally defined competition, physical activity includes sport but also includes games or types of physical engagement that are not organized, that are not competitive, either because of the spirit in which they are undertaken, or because the nature of the activity prohibits it. Thus the informal, ad hoc group of people which includes some participants in this study who engage in physical activity: such as Jack
(75), who has trained since the early 1950s and who challenges his friends to a weekly contest of running, or those who strive to see who can burn more calories on the rowing machine, as does Edgar (70), or as Gary (62), does when he practices Tai Chi. Further, I
14 include childhood games that involve moving the body, such as skipping, clapping games, games involving hitting a target, or Red Rover or even marbles as physical activity regardless of the age of the participant.
Some people do just fine by seeking out team sports as part of their physical expression while others shrink from the thought of sport precisely because they do not want others to be dependent on their physical prowess, or because they fear the prowess of others. It is necessary to tease apart these two very separate strands of physical expression - sport and physical activity - for the purposes of allowing those older people who wish it to have the opportunity to participate in sport; but there is arguably a greater imperative to encourage and facilitate a less structured approach to physical activity among older people who are not actively inclined, because these are the individuals who are at greatest risk of premature decline due to their inactivity. If we broaden the terms of definition, perhaps more people who want to be more active will feel invited to participate. Certainly by using this more open consideration of physical activity, more people participating in this study were included as active participants.
1.6 The Prescriptive Discourses of Exercise as Part of Successful Ageing
The discussion of what is best for older people frequently goes on over the heads of older people, as if they could not have anything useful to say on their own behalf with regards to their health and their ageing. Particularly germane to this study is the pervasive imperative that we all must exercise as part of basic self-care that takes on an almost frantic urgency when discussing the ageing population. Exercise is promoted as a means
15 of redemption, which in the case of ageing, means that we must work to delay the onset of ageing; we are expected to strive against and thwart our own biology. If we cannot put ageing off indefinitely, we are expected, at minimum, to mitigate the effects of ageing through the judicious use of gym memberships (Tulle, 1999, 2012). The consequences of not taking responsibility for our bodily condition include illness and dependence
(Sassetelli 2010; Smith Maguire 2008): we will become a burden on others through the age-related decline of our bodies. Anything we can do to ameliorate our decay, we must do.
This discourse of self responsibility for the good of the public sphere is not unique to ageing: the entire population is under siege by prohibitions against certain behaviours, - smoking among the more obvious campaigns, whereby what had been a culturally acceptable activity has been successfully undermined through a public health campaign that was bolstered by government intervention through ever higher taxes for consumers of tobacco products, and severe penalties for retailers selling tobacco products to anyone under the age of 18, on top of ever more restrictive advertising conditions for tobacco companies. That multi-directional campaign through the taxation system, public health organs, media regulators and mounting public disapproval has been waged on smokers on the basis that their smoking - something the smokers are doing to themselves – will cost us all through the smoker’s self-inflicted ingestion of toxins, that further poison all of us around them, inflicting additional harms upon us. Thus were social, economic, legal and moral pressures exerted upon smokers in order to make smoking socially unacceptable in the wider public. Of course, while smoking has decreased in the general population in the
G12 countries, there are those who cannot, or will not stop smoking, and there are increasing pockets of younger people who smoke in reaction to the opprobrium and to
16 demonstrate contempt for dominant bourgeois mores that now police smoking and smokers. This anti-smoking campaign did not – and does not - encompass the many places on this planet where tobacco companies have increased their trade unrestrictedly to make up for the short-fall they feel was imposed on them in the developed nations.
There are those who advocate using strategies similar to the anti-smoking campaign to increase levels of physical fitness in all populations in Canada and in other post-industrial countries. It is hard to find a paper on exercise strategies among various populations that do not advocate the vigorous application of physical activity to ameliorate, if not to cure, whatever ailment is under discussion: obesity (Schroeder, J., 2010); Multiple Sclerosis
(Giacobbi et al, 2012); spinal cord injuries (Tasiemski, 2011); arthritis (Cooney, J. et al,
2011); and ageing (Tarnopolsky, 2010). The answer to everything is exercise (Mulligan,
H., Hale, L. A., Whitehead, L., and Baxter, G. D., 2012). If only people would listen.
Activity Theory, a clinical practice that was an outgrowth of social gerontology in the
1970s (although there have been sporadic resuscitations of the practice since then), advocated the enforced social and physical activity in institutional settings. The relatively short life span of Activity Theory is the result of a growing refusal of front-line care workers, led by nursing staff in hospitals and nursing homes, to participate in what the staff felt was the institutionalized harassment of patients by forcing older people to be active against their will. This theory of practice is based on the simple idea that movement has a positive affect in a variety of areas - from joint mobility and improved circulation to social cohesion and mental alertness. And if institutionalized individuals would be better off moving, they must do it, for their own good. And staff must be devoted to making patients and residents move, whether they wish to, or not. Given that it
17 was the front-line care workers, not the physicians who supported the practice who got the push-back from patients reluctant to participate, the practice is most forcefully and consistently resisted by nursing home workers.
That we have an idea how much exercise is good for a body (Appendix C, p. 160), how much to maximize a heart rate, how much to improve or maintain muscular strength, how much and how often to move for optimal health, adjusting for disease or ill luck, and the information is accessible through publicly available sources. We have the technology now to measure an individual’s caloric output while they play games at home on systems such as Microsoft Kinect. There are plans to expand home video fitness games to include professional health monitoring1, but there is no conversation at this point about whether this is a good idea. Indeed, the ethical dimensions of this trajectory of the discourse are woefully under explored.
Not the least of the missing pieces of this punitive, disciplinary approach to population health is that very few studies into disease and exercise account for pain levels among participants, or medications and their effects, or the economics of physical activity, or other psycho-social factors that mitigate against enthusiastic exercise participation.
1 Conversation with Dr. Peter Whitehouse, Director of the Intergenerational School in Cincinnati, Ohio, in Toronto on September 28, 2012. Dr. Whitehouse is currently in development with a local hospital in Cincinnati to monitor his patients while they play on the Microsoft Kinect at his facility. Dr. Whitehouse said that, although he plans to include this new technology piece into the gaming sessions he currently has scheduled at his facility, he expects that not all of his patients will view this monitoring intervention as a positive development.
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1.7 Study Limitations
A study of this type is limited in some ways by the sample size: in this case, 27 people were interviewed, which appears to be a large sample for a qualitative study, but the participants were selected into one of four categories: six people over 59 years of age who are regular users – at least twice per week, for at least six months of the year - of the gym spaces at Hart House; another group of six users of the athletic spaces at the Athletic
Centre who are over 59; a group of seven older people over 59 who are part of the
University community who do not use the athletic facilities at the University, but who may exercise outside the University setting, and finally, there are six participants of this study who are members of athletic programming staff who either administer or deliver facility programming. Within the groups who are regular users of the gyms, I have attempted to include participants who work out in informal groups, that is, groups that formed spontaneously, without the involvement of the programming staff, as well as interviewing those who prefer to work independently or those who regularly participate in drop-in programs. I have tried to find a balance between exercisers who like instructor-led sessions or classes and those who enjoy less structure. Given the gamut of possibilities, the cohort of 27 is limited. However, I believe that the data from these interviews has yielded some strong narrative threads in common among the older participants and among the programming staff, and even across those two groups – the older respondents and the programming staff - to allow for some strong stories to emerge.
Many of the study respondents have conducted studies of their own in their careers, and have supervised many hundreds more among them: my participant base is highly experienced in academia and very comfortable in the university setting – which was
19 certainly not the case among the older students and the administrative staff among the respondents. The majority of older participants in this study are so comfortable because, as one of the administrative staff put it, “they have grown old along with the place”: they may feel less alienated because they have spent decades in these spaces. It does not mean they have not faced their own challenges, however. But the level of education among this group of older gym users is remarkably high and so this study is not analogous to a similar study that might be done at a large chain gym, or at a small neighbourhood gym.
While most members of commercial gyms tend to be representative of the higher ends the socio-economic spectrum, the privilege of the academic respondents among the participants in this study distinguishes them for their levels of academic attainment, their accumulation of economic, cultural and symbolic capital and their relative insulation from issues that may relate to their identities of gender and ethnicity because of their capital accumulations. . And yet, there are findings that come from this study that I believe are applicable to a wider population: specifically the data suggesting that life-long physical activity may be correlated with a childhood experience of moving. The exit and restitution narratives of the study participants who are transitioning, or who have transitioned out of activities from which a strong sense of identity had been derived, as part of their ageing experience may also have wider application,, as may the narratives from the older respondents in this study who describe their sense of confusion at the death or illness of people who had trained with them for many years. Those participants evince a ‘just world’ bias when they express that they thought they had earned some measure of protection through their physical fitness, and yet they are vulnerable to some of the same illnesses and diseases that operate in the wider, that is to say, unfit populations. These
20 findings are universal in their application and may not be diminished by having selected the participants from a narrow social segment in such a privileged environment.
As an older student myself, I believe I had insider status in this study, in which I interviewed 21 older adults about their experiences of physical activity and their uses of the gym spaces at the University from their perspective as older people. Because I am an older student, I believe that the data I collected may be different – and possibly richer.
Chapter Summary
This Chapter has provided the background from which this thesis was developed: the preliminary study with the apparent connection of the ageing of the students to their reluctance to engage in physical activity at the University because the spaces available at the University are seen by them as hostile to them, and because of the individuals’ sense of increased vulnerability in the juxtaposition of their ageing in relation to the younger users of those spaces; the development of the questions about the older users of the gym spaces and how it is that they feel less inhibited in their engagement within those spaces.
The main research questions to be addressed in this thesis are: who are the older people using the gym spaces at the University? Is there something unique about these older people who are able to navigate these spaces designed around the needs of younger students? What can we learn from the experiences of older people who use the athletic spaces in the university setting that we can understand better the social culture of both the gym spaces and the social requirements of older people who wish to engage, or to remain engaged, in physical activity? Is there something about these older exercisers that we can apply to physical activity programming for older adults regardless of the setting? Is there something about the gym
21 spaces at the University that makes it possible for these older people to remain active at age sixty and beyond? Or do these spaces at Hart House and the Athletic Centre, by their mandate of being focused on student life, by which is meant younger students, do they in some way prohibit participation of older people in those spaces?
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Chapter 2
Review of the literature
The theoretical inheritance of Social Gerontology
Introduction
This Chapter explores some of the theoretical structures that come out of the disciplines of Social Gerontology and Sociology of Sport related to ageing and retirement, with brief assessments of their relevance to an examination of a study on the experiences of bodily ageing through participation in physical activity. The Mask of Ageing Theory, is looked at in the context of Social Gerontology. The Mask of Ageing Theory is used, along with the concepts of Capital, Field and Habitus as developed in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which are explored at greater length in the following chapter. The Mask of Ageing and
Bourdieu’s use of Capital, Field and Habitus are the primary frameworks for analysis of the data gathered in the course of this project.
2.1 Background
Social Gerontology grew out of the medical systems and the need to frame social services around the particular medical needs of older people, first, in clinical settings, and later, in the community. The medical tradition has been - and largely continues to be - locked into an empirical methodology which relies upon highly trained professionals engaged in a focused “clinical gaze” trained on elderly people. The result has been a discipline mired in functionalist thinking that has held the field 30 years behind from a position of being able to provide useful insights into the experiences, and thus the needs, of ageing people.
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As Vincent et al pointed out, the biological sciences have catalogued much of what we know of the ageing body (2008). However, the discourse on ageing has “focused primarily on decay, deterioration and the resulting dependence of the ageing body” (Tulle,
2008). The terms used in medical discourse to discuss the ageing process include adjectives such as ‘defective’, ‘abnormal’ and, ‘incompetent’. We have made ageing into an illness, where it is openly implied that the aged are responsible for their own decline.
That the dominant discourse is focused on “successful” ageing implies that if the elderly are frail and failing - ageing unsuccessfully - it is the fault of the individual. The very emphasis on ‘positive’ ageing, serves to further marginalize those whose ageing is
‘negative’; for if they had done something different: eaten better, had better genes to protect themselves from inherited disease, exercised within the bounds of reason and abstained from injury, then they would not have become ill/old/in need of care.
The human subject, created by the larger modern technological project as the ongoing design of individual self-creation in the quest to establish security in identity, fearfully excludes the difference that change, decay, and death promise. In this way, the essentially impermanent movement of the body becomes the negative other that needs to be erased by the more stable identity of the physically fit: the technologically physically fit body is one that dominates the movement of life. Pronger (2002, p.169) Body Fascism
2.2 The “Anti-ageing Enterprise”
Courtney Mykytyn defines anti-ageing as a social movement whose mission is “to herald and operationalize ageing itself as treatable” and construct “a world wherein the
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optimal is the goal” (and the natural is, if not irrelevant, a mere beginning point). (Katz and Peters, 2006)
The link between ageing and choice has undoubtedly complicated the experiences of ageing people. And the physical fitness industry has been a gleeful participant in forging that link. Without taking stock of the physical fitness needs and tastes of older people, the industry is happy to promote and exploit the anxiety of the ageing population as part of its business model. ‘Fight the signs of ageing’ is the credo of the industries that have profited most from packaging anti-ageing strategies, from pharmaceuticals to yoga. The cosmetic surgery industry had revenue of over half a billion dollars in Canada in 20032, primarily for procedures to reduce or erase the signs of ageing3. Age-reversing pharmaceuticals, toiletries and sundries were a $50.5 billion4 wholesale market in Canada in 2009. In 2004, $1.6 billion5 was spent on gym memberships across Canada, although it is unclear how much of that represents older members. Private American medical clinics, such as the Cleveland Clinic, catering to wealthy Canadians with what is referred to as
“executive health care”, have opened branches in Canada’s major cities to market a service they sell as “the end of ageing” by providing medical services that by-pass the
Canadian healthcare system, and that promise to stop the body and, crucially the mind,
2 CBC report: In Depth Health, 2004, revised, 2008.http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/health/cosmetic-surgery.html 3 The cosmetic surgery industry has been hard-hit by encroachment in the market of Botox injections, which can be administered by non-medical, non-professional technicians in unmonitored settings: in small offices or in homes in private “Botox parties”. I have not yet found reliable data on the dollar value of that sub- market. 4 Industry Canada http://www.ic.gc.ca/cis-sic/cis-sic.nsf/IDE/cis-sic4145wgpe.html 5 5 CBC report: Resolving to Get Fit, 2007. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/exercise_fitness/fitnessclub-membership.html
25 from becoming any older. This form of restitution narrative promises eternal youth to those willing to pay for it, before the biological sciences can even agree on what mechanisms might be at work in ageing. A friend recently told me he paid $65 to hear
American businessman and popular transhumanist Ray Kurzweil talk about solving all the problems of the world, and in particular, the pressing problem of ageing. Food, housing and work insecurity, redistribution issues and climate change were not on the agenda for this talk, but predicting when we will have computer chips put in our heads – and the important goal of eliminating ageing were discussed. The process of ageing is ignored almost squeamishly. The promise to stop ageing is big business.
2.3 Social Gerontology Comes of Age
Gerontology had its beginnings in the medicine systems of the west, and was primarily contained within institutional settings. The medical sub-discipline was the purview of social work, nursing and most especially of medicine, disciplines in which ageing is viewed as a disease, it is only latterly, since the broader involvement of sociologists in the
1970s that some of the main tools of the social sciences were applied in the study of ageing populations. Critical theory and political economy theory - both used in various forms since the 1920s - began to be employed in social gerontology only in the late 1990s.
Even those who had been part of the field were beginning to complain of the lack of robust theory through which to process the wealth of empirical data that amassed over the decades. As James Birren famously stated, “We are in a phase of being data-rich and theory poor” (quoted in Binstock et al., 2000). This statement is refuted by Bill Bytheway
(2011), a researcher who began his career in statistical analysis, but who found qualitative
26 investigation a more productive sociological tool – he points out that there has never been a significant trove of data in the field of social-gerontology, either. The field of social gerontology is just poor.
2.4 The Mask of Ageing Theory: the Older Body Considered?
Swedish social gerontologist Peter Öberg observed that bodies are strangely absent from social gerontology (1996, and quoted in Tulle, 2008b), and he appears to be right in this: much of the discourse within the discipline has drawn critical attention to the devaluation of ageing people, but it has veered sharply from useful discussions of the phenomenology and social constructions of bodily ageing (Tulle, 2008a). But decrying the devaluation of older people has itself failed to illuminate strategies for ageing people to maximize their active involvement in the discourse of ageing, nor does it offer useful suggestions for the creation of programming and physical activity participation for ageing people within the wider population.
Ageing is pathologised and sliced into constituent parts by the medical side of gerontology, with little time devoted to exploring what ageing bodies are capable of, or what kinds of activities best suit their needs. There is no identified sub-discipline of
‘physical cultural studies of ageing’, or ‘older people’s sport studies’ or a ‘geriatric
Sociology of Sport’. In point of fact, it has only been in the last fifteen years, that there have been a small number of sociologists exploring the issues of the ageing body, and building a repertoire of theoretical approaches. It remains a serious failure in social
27 gerontology that it has focused more on explaining ageing, and discussing ways to stop ageing, rather than “challenging the perceptions, the social positioning, and the limitations of the ageing body” (Tulle, 2008b).
Explanations of the experience of ageing from the disciple of Sociology of Sport have placed a limited emphasis on an understanding of the experience of physical engagement over the life course, nor on how those experiences reflect the activity choices of older adults. There has been work done on the ways in which older people are seen to disengage from athletic activities:
It may be that older adults must, and do, adjust the nature of their sport and physical recreation participation to do what they feel is appropriate and what they are able to do. There may be forced or voluntary disengagement from some roles coupled with greater attachment to others, which are defined as age-appropriate. The selection of fewer activities with greater age may also be a reflection of physical inability to perform some activities well. At the same time, there is perhaps a large majority among each sex who have not had much involvement, for reasons of socialization and such, at any point in their adult lives.
Curtis and White (1984) p. 286
And while this thesis does present some individuals who are forced, by physical limitations of their bodies that have come about largely because of the ways in which they have used their bodies over their life-course, to disengage from some of their preferred physical activities, the activities into which they retire are not chosen so much for the
“age-appropriateness” of the activity, but for being the closest approximation of the activity to what is most familiar to them before their ankles were replaced following six
28 decades of barefoot running, or after severe spinal compression and nerve damage resulting from 35 years of hard break-falls. The hard runners are not retiring to boules.
Previous work in Sociology of Sport has explained how the disengagement from long- term physical activity occurs: the assumptions have been that disengagement from physical activity is experienced in the same ways as retirement from professional or amateur sport, or “sport desocialzation” is experienced (E. Rosenberg in Theberge and
Donnelly, 1984). The “social death” that can be a forceful aspect of the retirement experience in professional and amateur sport is not a dominant feature among the physically active older participants in this study: in fact, there are examples of continued group cohesion well after an individual has left a social group due to a physical inability to pursue the activities of the group. The groups of older adults appear more elastic and less rigid than those of professional or elite amateur athletes.
Retirement can be a choice for very few individuals in professional or amateur sport, - at least it can be presented as a choice for a short amount of time. For most, however, retirement is abruptly and even brutally forced upon the athlete. Ageing, on the other hand, is not abrupt: most of us have many years and many phases to become accustomed to the idea.
Among the most compelling novel theoretical approaches to the issues of ageing and the relationship to bodily ageing, and one that has had a strong affect on my approaches to this study, is the ‘Mask of Ageing’ (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991), which notes that individuals position themselves - their identities - relative to their ageing bodies. The
Mask of Ageing theory examines the ways in which the ageing subject disconnects her/his identity from the body in an effort to deny, to forestall - and sometimes to hasten -
29 admission to the ranks of the ageing. This decoupling from the Cartesian mind/body dyad is possibly a reaction to the cult of youth and beauty that is central to consumerist, capitalist society. The cult of the body worships beauty and youth as commodities and is the focus of reverence. But beauty is ephemeral, and youth momentary; every advertisement, every television show, every clothes rack in a shop, serves to remind the ageing person that they are slipping ever further behind the expectations of the marketplace where youth reigns, and that their share value is diminishing. What is at stake in losing this connection to youth is the right to a place within the culture.
It is not just a need for more frequent root touch-ups, the presence of laugh-lines and a thicker waist that forces the ageing individual to have to reconsider her placement in youth culture, but something much more inherent, much more central to her self- perception: the binary of the highly sexualised nature of youth on the one hand, cements the perception of the ageing body as denatured, de-sexed and devalued on the other. The ageing person’s body is “denied sexual attributes” (Öberg, 1996). This, more than any other aspect of ageing is strongest: in the pressure to hold onto the identity of youth - and through that identity, to retain a place within society.
The mask of ageing, then, in its positive form, is the denial of ageing, a reinforcement of sexual identity by illustrating vigour and energy. ‘I’ve never felt better’; ‘ I wish I had this much energy when the kids were little’; or, ‘I don’t feel any different now as compared to when I was 30’, are the types of claims that typify the positive mode. Participation in activities where there is little involvement by older age groups is another way this is expressed, such as in ‘extreme’ forms of sport, for example. In its negative mode, some older people hasten to anticipate an identity of age: this is expressed through giving up
30 activities in advance of there being a strong extrinsic reason for doing so. An older person might feel reluctant to begin participating, because they are afraid of looking foolish, and so they buy into a narrative of premature decline to spare themselves the embarrassment.
In addition to an exploration of the patterns of athletic facilities use by older people among the University population, and the question of how we make the facilities more accessible to older people, this study represents a theoretical test of this self-positioning within the ageing process.
An experience I had in my younger days has taken on a certain significance for me, now that I am older. I attended a lecture by a well- known physicist at Cambridge. He came in shuffling, dragging his feet, a very old man. I caught myself wondering, Why does he drag his feet like that? Why can he not walk like a human being? I at once corrected myself. He can’t help it, I told myself. He is very old. (Elias, 1985. The Loneliness of the Dying)
Chapter Summary
This Chapter outlined a brief historical progression of theoretical tools that illustrate theoretical inheritance of Social Gerontology and of Sport Sociology as related to older people and their sport engagement. This Chapter presented the Mask of Ageing Theory, which is used, along with Habitus, Field and Capital as the analytical tools employed to frame of the data in this thesis.
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Chapter 3
Methods
Introduction
This Chapter outlines the theories, practices and structures employed in the study and in the subsequent interpretation of the data. Section one describes the study design and rationale. Section two gives a breakdown of who the participants in the study are, while
Section three describes the instruments employed in data collection for each of the three interview sections: for those older members of the University community who use the gym spaces; those who do not; and the athletic program staff interviewed: Section four outlines the Questionnaire that was completed by each of the older study participants as part of data collection. The rationale for the supplemental data is also given. Section five presents the reasons for the conclusions surrounding the Program Evaluation data that was not supplied when requested. Section six describes the techniques of data collection and the methods of handling the data, while Section seven outlines the ways the theoretical frameworks that have been applied to the data after collection. Specifically, the concepts of Bourdieu’s Habitus, Field and Capital are outlined, with an explication of how they are harnessed to the Mask of Ageing Theory from the field of Social Gerontology to provide a robust mechanism for interpreting the data that yielded from the study.
3.1 Study Design
This study broadens the scope of the original pilot study by increasing the minimum age of the participants from 45 to men and women 59 years of age and over, and by increasing the number of participants from nine to 21 of the older respondents. The participants were
32 recruited from those members of the University community at the St. George campus, including students, but also inviting participation from faculty, emeritus faculty, staff, administration, alumni and those from the wider community who use the university to explore a wide range of participation experiences.
It seemed appropriate to look at focus groups of men and women separately to encourage open responses such as those gleaned from the preliminary study, because the goal was to investigate the barriers that currently prevent older people in the university community from participating in physical activity in this setting in the ways described in the preliminary study. The approaches to the narratives employed by men and by women in that preliminary study were very different, in that the men tended to employ very direct phrasing, adamantly addressing the issues: “I don’t want them (i.e.; young men who might negatively judge the older person’s body) looking at me!” (Eric), while the women used much more mitigating language, often hidden by humour: “ I’m not sure that I want to go there, to that place, where they are all so... fit!” (Elaine), illustrating the devalued nature of the older body, not just as older, and therefore less worthy, but the less fit body as devalorized when juxtaposed with the fit body, which, most often, particularly in the university setting, happens to be the young body.
The Research Ethics Board raised objections about the ethical propriety of focus groups on the grounds that confidentiality could not be ensured, and so the methodology was changed to one of individual interviews. Further, the University’s REB suggested that the population that is the subject of this study is one that requires special handling due to an heightened vulnerability resulting from their increased age because the study participants are over the age of 59. The presumption of the REB that this population is especially
33 vulnerable to being asked questions is, I believe, ageist in origin and contrary to the reality of these individuals, and was an unnecessary and unsupportable constraint on this study. This view was echoed by almost every one of the older people who participated in this present study; most of the participants over 60 years of age reacted to this requirement with puzzled amusement and, in four cases, with outrage. Two said they would complain to the Research Ethics Board, but both said later that they would not, for fear of repercussions against this researcher. Every one of the older participants, being members of the University community, recognized this process as originating within the
University’s own system, and ten participants expressed doubt that the suggestion that they are any less mentally or emotionally stable than the average that was implied by the distribution of the cards bearing emergency contact numbers for metal health hotlines would be applied to research participants younger than themselves.
I refrained from accepting by the University’s Research Ethics Board’s suggestion that, in addition to mental health emergency services contacts, I distribute pamphlets directing study participants to long-term care facilities at Baycrest and Toronto Seniors’ Services.
These facilities have nothing whatsoever to do with the population in this study, who are all ambulatory, and who, it must be said, are far more lucid, and more intellectually aware than I will ever be.
It is of further interest that interviews with those staff who design, manage or deliver physical activity programs at the two university exercise facilities who are younger than
40 did not react when the card with the emergency mental health numbers was presented at the beginning of the interview: however, the insult that was perceived was clearly experienced by the older study participants, as it was by this investigator, as ageist.
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3.2 The Study Participants
In all, 27 people were interviewed for this study, including 14 women and 13 men, three women and three men aged 59 to 75 who use Hart House on a regular basis for at least six years; three women and three men aged 65 to 93 who use the exercise facilities at the
Athletic Centre; five women and three men who do not exercise at the University facilities, whose ages range from 62 to 90, and three men and three women who design or deliver programming at Hart House and/or the Athletic Centre, whose ages range from mid-twenties to late fifties. The staff and administrators who took part in this study were not asked their ages, as their input has been such that their ages are not relevant. Each of the participants in all sections of the study has been assigned a pseudonym, and, in the case of the athletic facility staff, the sex of the participants may have been randomly jumbled in a way that has served to further disguise the participants to protect anonymity.
Of the 21 older study participants, one also participated in the pilot study. Among the older participants, one is an undergraduate student, two are graduate students, four are alumni, five are administrators, one is a retired administrator, three are faculty, two are emeritus faculty, one is an occasional lecturer, and two are retired faculty.
Regardless of socio-economic location of the older respondents in childhood, and not ignoring the economic reversals endured by of two of the study participants, and the economic precarity of three who need to continue working beyond the age of 65, the majority (16 out of 21) of study participants are economically well-off.
Eight out of 27 respondents are non-white, and nine out of the 27 were born outside of
Canada. Among the older participants in the study, eight out of 21 are not Canadian-born,
35 and five out of the 21 are non-white, with four identifying as black, and one who identifies as mixed heritage Caucasian and First Nations.
All of the study participants signed a letter of consent prior to the commencement of the interviews.
3.3 Three interview segments and the Questionnaire
3.3.1 Segment One -
Older Participants Involved in Regular Physical Activity at the University
The first segment of the study focused on 12 members of the University community over the age of 59, 12 of whom exercise regularly (more than twice per week) at one or the other of the two athletic facilities at the St. George campus of the University of Toronto: the more austere University Athletic Centre, with its “fort jock” persona and status as the
University’s bastion of elite athletics and the home of the Varsity teams, or the early
Edwardian student centre at Hart House, which features an older, more lived-in sort of athletic facility, with its ancient, suspended track that encircles a lower basketball court.
Three men and three women at each of the athletic facilities were interviewed. For the complete Interview Guide, please refer to Appendix A, p.147.
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3.3.2 Segment Two -
Older Participants Not Engaged in Physical Activity at the University
People over 59 years of age, and who do not use either of the athletic facilities at the
University of Toronto: neither the University Athletic Centre, nor Hart House, but who are nonetheless participating in others aspects of University life, as students; faculty; administrators; support staff; physical plant staff or volunteers were recruited to participate in this research project.
From this group, it was hoped to determine if the concerns and vulnerabilities about the exposure of their ageing bodies in an environment built for youth that emerged through the pilot study - and the implicit worries about the confrontation of their own ageing that arose in such force in that initial study – could be duplicated in a more formal study situation with a wider selection of respondents that looked beyond the coterie of older students who made up the population of that study. Secondly, it became important to understand what the range of perceived barriers to participation are, so that ameliorating strategies can be explored, if indeed, they are deemed necessary at all. Semi-structured interview questions were employed, in addition to the survey questionnaire on earlier life experiences of physical activity, to allow the participants to contribute to the discourse.
For the complete guide, please refer to Appendix A, p.149.
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3.3.3 Segment Three -
Athletic Program Design and Delivery Staff
In addition to older adults of the University community who are 59 years of age or older, key staff involved in program development and delivery at both the Athletic Centre (3 individuals) and at Hart House (3 individuals) were interviewed, in order to better understand what exercise needs they perceive or anticipate within their ‘client base’, and to understand the types of modifications they might expect from the facilities in envisioning any proposed changes to the spaces where they work to accommodate older people. In this case, as in the two other groups under investigation, semi-structured interview questions were employed to guide the discussion and to allow the participants to freely contribute to the discussion. This group, however, unlike the two groups of older participants, did not take part in the questionnaire on earlier life experiences in physical activity. Please refer to Appendix A, p.151 for the interview guide.
3.3.4 Segment Four-
A Brief Questionnaire
Each participant of the first two sections – i.e., the older participants whose physical activity experiences and choices were the primary focus of inquiry - were asked to respond to a set of brief survey questions about their physical activity in early, mid and late childhood, and early adulthood. (For the full text of the questionnaire, please refer to
Appendix B, p. 155) The purpose of this questionnaire was twofold: first, it was to have framed the thinking for the discussion that was to have followed in the focus group.
However, after adopting one-on-one interviews instead of focus groups, the decision was
38 made to retain the questionnaire, which, in hindsight, was fortuitous, as the questionnaire provided the source of one of the most significant discoveries of the study by directing the participants’ attentions towards the issues at the heart of the study. It served to get study participants thinking in terms of a wider scope of physical activities beyond the realm of sports, and, in particular, to move the discussion to physical activities of the broadest nature without being constrained solely by notions of adult organized sporting activities and events. Secondly, it enabled the capture of vital information of a general nature about each participant’s history of physical activity and their attitudes towards exercise since early childhood without those questions becoming the focus of the subsequent discussion.
The questionnaire asked, for example, if the participants could recall the kinds of games and activities they engaged in during school recess when they were in elementary school, including prompts to focus the memory, such as “Do you remember skipping or playing any hand dexterity games, or ball dexterity games?”
In addition to the questionnaire providing an opportunity to rekindle lost memories and to broaden the definition of the term ‘physical activity’ to include more than high school football, the questionnaire has proved a useful instrument to examine levels of physical activity of the study participants across the life course and to look at how those activity levels have been maintained - or not – into older adulthood. It was the semi-structured portion of the interviews, however, that provided the best insights into some of the ways that the older adults who use the gyms and who exercise regularly actively seek out exercise, and, particularly, the reasons the regular exercisers continue to do so.
One of the questions in the survey was added on the recommendation of a member of the teaching staff at the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education; I had sought out his
39 input for a question I had about potential approaches to exercise for older adults who have had a life-long pattern of inactivity, because I have come to doubt the wisdom of telling older people who have not done so for 50 years or more to suddenly get up and be active without some intermediary support. I was told that the work of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education should not include such inquiries as mine on ageing - a population, it must be said, that in a very few years I will belong to myself – and that the focus of inquiry for the Faculty should be limited to concerns of getting better performances from elite athletes. I asked this lecturer, in light of his views, what question he might like to ask of my study population that might possibly benefit him in his enterprise to understand his population interests. He said that he would like to know if my study participants see a distinction between their childhood selves and their engagement in physical activities as separate from themselves. None (0%), of those interviewed identified themselves as separate from themselves as children and all (100%) could recall today playing their favourite games fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years or more ago.
3.4 The Meaning of Exercise
This study includes those individuals who are physically active in the gym environments that the participants of the earlier study identified as intimidating, to learn more about the reasons these individuals’ use the facilities: is there something about these individuals that allows them to persist in using a space that others perceive as unwelcoming? Does a negative perception of the space, or does the ambience of the space, have an inverse relationship to one’s athletic prowess: the tougher the conditions, the better the exerciser feels about herself? Or, does the primacy of the object in seeking the activity perhaps make it easier for some individuals to simply ignore the social barriers that might inhibit
40 another? If we can understand what makes some people ignore or override discomfort stemming from the environment or from the practice of physical exercise activity, we can potentially gain significant insight into how space operates on actors. We might potentially learn to include those whose reported vulnerability excludes them from getting the physical activity they are told they require to maximize their health as they age.
Semi-structured interview questions were employed, in addition to the survey questionnaire on earlier life experiences of physical activity, which was itself conducted in an open style, which is to say, to suit the narrative style of the participants the questions are not rigidly fixed to the specific questions to best allow the respondents to contribute to the discourse.
3.5 Supplemental Data Collection
3.5.1 The Need for Supporting Data
Near the end of the gathering of the qualitative data for this study, it became imperative to corroborate some of the information provided through the interviews as part of due diligence. A supplemental application was made to the Research Ethics Board for approval for the additional data, which approval was duly received. Despite the approval of the revised protocols, not all the data was supplied by the institutions as requested. The memberships for older participants were received from both Hart House and the Athletic
Centre. The incident and accident reports were a little more difficult to obtain from the
Athletic Centre than from Hart House, where all the data requested was made freely available. The anonymous program evaluations for the drop-in and the registered programming, however, have been somewhat contentious. These data were requested in
41 order to substantiate information supplied through the interviews, where there were reports made by administration and staff and older participants in the study who use the athletic spaces of inappropriate, ageist remarks by facility members that are included in comments about classes that include older participants and/or instructors.
3.5.2 Memberships -
This data are presented to illustrate the potential group who are entitled, through community and special memberships, to use the Athletic Centre and the athletic facilities at Hart House. These data unfortunately do not include students or faculty over the age of
59 who are the primary users of the facilities under examination in this study.
3.5.3 Incident and Accident Reports –
These data were collected to corroborate the unanimous reports by staff that older people are at less risk than other gym users for exercise related injury. This was seen as a significant area to investigate because of the discourse of injury – and most particularly, the fear of injury – that emerges in the literature as a reason given by older adults not to exercise. (Burman, et al, 2010, Chae, et al, 2010) Very few study participants spoke of exercise-related injury, although some have had some serious health conditions, some of which may indeed have stemmed from their activities and which seem to have gone undetected within the incident and accident reports for the simple reason that many of these conditions were never reported in the first place.
The incident and accident reports from both facilities appear to support the reports of
100% of the staff interviewed, that older people are not more likely to be injured through
42 their exercise practice than other gym users. The Injury and Accident reports supplied by
Hart House show only four documented injuries of people aged 59 and over in the athletics wing between the first of January, 2008 and the end of August, 2012. Two of those injuries resulted from a slip on the pool deck, while the other two were medical events that occurred in the locker room, one before and one after exercise. The Injury and
Accident reports from the Athletic Centre for the same period show a total of 21 injuries,
33% of which occurred in the locker rooms as a result of heat exposure in the sauna; a further 33% occurred as a result of injuries from improper functioning of exercise equipment, while 14% resulted from slipping or collisions with other swimmers in the pool.
In fact, while the absolute numbers of people over 59 years of age who use Hart House or the Athletic Centre are not currently known, because the swipe data are not retained, and because students and faculty are tracked only to ensure current membership status, not supplying accurate use by age data. We can estimate participation of older people in the gym spaces from observation, however flawed that method may be of estimating age. The records from both of these institutions clearly and conclusively demonstrate that older people are, in fact less likely than other users of the athletic facilities to be injured while at the gym. We know from participation in this study alone, for example, that there were at very least twelve people over 59, as six people over 59 who use the athletic facilities at
Hart House, and six who use the athletic centre participated in this study. The data from the incident and accident reports show that there were four people injured in the athletics wing of Hart House between 2008 and August of 2012. This is unlikely to be a tally of all injuries, but rather, a list of injuries reported to facility staff for intervention: in either case, the numbers are low enough to demonstrate that there is not a significant risk of
43 injury by older people through exercise, despite the prevalence of that fear expressed in the literature which reports fear of injury as a major reason given by older people for not exercising, (Chae et al., 2010, Burman et al, 2010).
3.6 Program Evaluations –
Getting the anonymous program evaluations for the drop-in and the registered programming, however, has proved to be somewhat contentious. These data were requested in order to substantiate information supplied through the interviews, in which there were reports of inappropriate, ageist remarks in the comments sections of anonymous program evaluations about classes that include older participants and/or instructors. These comments – that study participants witnessed and reported during interviews for this present investigation - would be an indication of not only a level of freedom taken by facility members to make such negative remarks about a fellow student, or about an instructor, but can also be an indication of institutional tolerance for such remarks and the sentiments expressed through the remarks.
Representatives at Hart House have said that they have yet to undertake that method of program analysis through participant evaluations.
The Athletic Centre, where the reports of the ageist remarks in the evaluations originated, has not complied with requests to allow access to the evaluations. Even after Research
Ethics approved the access and use of the data for this study, only one department at the
Athletic Centre supplied the data requested, but only when lower level employees were approached directly. But none of the other areas collecting those data has given me access to it. On one occasion, when I wanted to ask another employee for the evaluations for
44 some of the other programs, that employee told me very nervously – as another employee moved over to where we were standing and stood waiting – that she couldn’t talk to me and she can’t get me what I wanted – although I had not yet indicated to her what I wanted to ask. I am left, after this puzzling response, to make a negative inference on the reports that there have been overtly ageist remarks written by users of the facility and its programs, and I am forced to conclude that some evaluations that were collected contain some derogatory remarks as reported. Further, this failure to comply with a reasonable request for information can be construed as organizational complicity in the ageist sentiments. For, as with any other type of discrimination, allowing the moment of bigotry to go unchecked is tantamount to agreement with the expressed sentiments. The institution has an obligation to all of its members to protect against this type of open disrespect of an individual or group. In fact, the duty to do so is enshrined in the
Constitution Act 1982, Part 1, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, article 15.6 This appears to be a critical oversight in a Faculty that prides itself on its equity consciousness.
3.7 Data Collection and Analysis
The data gleaned from both the interviews and the questionnaire were recorded using a digital recorder and from notes made during the interviews. Immediately following the
6 15. (1) Every individual is equal before the and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability. (2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability.6
45 interviews, ethnographic field notes were made to attempt to capture impressions that might inform the recorded data; impressions such as the body language noticed during a certain parts of the interview, for example, or notes on what a particular description seemed to me, at the time of telling, to be of special merit relevant to the discussion of this thesis. The taped interviews were each given repeated hearings and coded by content.
The interviews were transcribed as part of this review and coding process.
Pseudonyms have been ascribed to all participants, in adherence to the protocols, in order to preserve anonymity. In the case of staff at the two facilities under examination, the additional step of randomly reassigning gender identification through name choice and other pronouns has been employed to further protect the identities of the participants in potentially vulnerable employment situations.
3.8 Analytical Frameworks
The analytical frameworks that have been employed to process the data and their meanings, and to help interpret the dozens of threads that are woven into the stories shared through the interview process, are the ‘mask of ageing’ theory (Featherstone and
Hepworth, 1991), and habitus, field and capital as influenced by Pierre Bourdieu.
The ‘mask of ageing’ theory has its limitations in that it is framed so exclusively around the phenomenological processes of ageing, but that, equally, is its great strength as an analytic tool. It is my contention that habitus, field and capital can sometimes be applied in ways that can come perilously close to the “theoretical theorizing” that Bourdieu complained of in other frameworks (Calhoun, LiPuma, Posterone, 1993), yet it can allow the examination of complex data in a structure that includes the historical, the
46 aspirational, the values and the locus, in both the sense of social space and physical space and, significantly, an assessment of agency becomes possible. The ‘mask of ageing’, and its perception and action focus, misses the elements that allow for the consideration of social structures and – at best - sidesteps entirely the very important question of agency, or – at worst – can suggest there is no agency possible because the ‘mask’ is employed as a reactionary reflex, or that any agency is reflected in the outcome for the individual.
Nonetheless, the ‘mask of ageing’ supplies the dimension of locating the discussion firmly in the experience and expression of ageing, and more significantly, this experience and expression is placed in relation to the ageing body, which is central to the data offered by the older study participants through their discussions of how and where and why they exercise. In the end, the choice of where to apply which framework, or in what combination, came down to a simple need to tell the stories shared with me with a methodology that, I believe, elucidates the underlying set of symbols and constructs embedded in the data while showing the respect that is due to the stories and the study participants who shared their time and their experiences with such open generosity.
The habitus produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent
in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while
adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as
defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.
P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977)
The habitus, or “history turned into nature” (Bourdieu, 1977), is the individual in relation to all that is relative: past, family structures, assumptions and aspirations, both of the individual and of the collective, and they create a history that is itself a product of its
47 history without the individual’s “conscious mastery”. The habitus operates as much more than a type of social DNA, however; the individual is guided by intentions and pressures and dispositions, which are “so many marks of social position, and hence of the social distance between objective positions, that is, between social persons conjunctionally brought together (in physical space, which is not the same thing as social space)…”
(Bourdieu, 1977).
The habitus disposes actors to do certain things; it provides a basis for the
generation of practices. Practices are produced between the habitus and its
dispositions, on one hand, and the constraints, demands and opportunities of the
social field or market, to which the habitus is appropriate or within which the actor
is moving, on the other.
(Jenkins, 1992:76 as quoted in Holt, 2008)
In his theory of capital, Bourdieu suggests a “co-construction of a variety of ‘capitals’
(social, cultural, symbolic and economic) through which privilege and disadvantage are covertly reproduced” (Butler and Robson (2001), as quoted in Holt (2008). As with economic capital, the acquisition, or the loss, of symbolic, cultural, or social capital, increases, or decreases the individual’s place within a given field. Individuals can occupy multiple fields at any time. In the same way that education can be a means of increasing social and economic capital, an older person’s symbolic capital can be said to be diminishing because his capital as a sexual being is reduced as he ages, thereby rendering him less attractive to others in certain social fields. An individual’s age will likely contribute to a loss of social, cultural and symbolic capital as to negatively affect prospects within job markets; the ageing person is rendered by her age as undesirable
48 sexually and unwanted as an employee. On the other hand, a person may find her social capital increase within her social set if she appears to be athletic and in robust health, especially in a context in which others in the group may be experiencing poor health.
Capital, then, is value calculated within a social context, which is a field.
The ageing habitus, includes one’s personal histories and experiences of one’s own ageing including triumphs and defeats in life, in addition to the perceptions of other ageing individuals one has known, on top of the cultural interpretations and expressions of ageing from dominant and micro cultures within subcultures and family groupings that contribute to how the older person interprets and experiences his own age (Phoenix,
Smith, 2011). The habitus of the older person is all of the accumulated histories of the individual; where they have lived, the tensions that may be reflected within the culture in which they reside: the whole package relates to how they feel about their ageing and how they experience their ageing.
The understanding of the habitus of the older person is a variable among the facility staff who participated in this study as well: those who are starting to deal with their own ageing, or who are managing care for older relatives, have a more nuanced interpretation of the ageing habitus as represented in their client and student bases, as do those younger staff whose family situations allow them closer daily access to older people. Among these individuals with greater personal contact with older adults, there is not only a stronger empathy for the older exercisers, but their dispositions allow them to see the older individual as individuals, rather than as an a type, which means they are able to extend to the older adult higher social and symbolic capital than their younger counterparts who do
49 not report close, regular contact with older people within their family setting (Phoenix,
Smith, 2011).
Chapter Summary
This Chapter outlined the rationale for the choices of methods, practices and analytic structures applied to the data that emerged from this study. The interviews with older members of the University community who use the athletic facilities, one group at Hart
House, and the other at the Athletic Centre; the older University community members who do not use either of the gym spaces, and the interviews with the athletic facility staff are outlined, as are the reasons for the requests for supplemental data to support or refute claims made in the interviews. A description is given as well for the modes and methods of data collection and handling, and finally, there is an outline of understandings of the analytical frameworks employed in the data interpretation, namely, Mask of Ageing theory and the concepts of Habitus, Field and Capital as presented by Bourdieu.
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Chapter 4
Background Data
Introduction
This Chapter examines the empirical data resulting from this study on the numbers of older people using the athletic spaces. Specifically in sections one and two, I examine the available data on the populations of older people in the University and what we can know of their use of the athletic facilities from available sources and staff estimates of older people’s participation.
Section three provides the statistical data on older participants’ membership sales from the athletic facilities. Section four offers an analysis of how the program providers experience the athletic participation of the older users of the gym spaces, and it examines some of the qualitative data from the interviews with athletic facility staff. Sections five and six explore the literature-based reports of older people’s stated fears of injury resulting from exercise participation and matches that with the data from both Hart House and the Athletic Centre, which would suggest that, contrary to the fears of injury reported in the literature, older adults are statistically less likely to be injured as a result of activity engagement. And finally, in section seven, there is a brief analysis of the social positioning of the older participants in the study by employment and by ethnicity.
4.1 Location
The true object of analysis, which must be constructed against appearances and against all those who do no more than endorse those appearances, is the social (or more precisely, political) construction of reality as it appears to intuition, and of its journalistic, bureaucratic and political representations, which help to produce effects that are indeed real, beginning with the political world, where they structure discussion, and extending into the world of science. P.Bourdieu (1999)
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The determination of a pattern of use is dependent on an understanding of the size of the population under discussion. Establishing the number of people over the age of 59 who use the athletic facilities at the University of Toronto (St. George campus), has been problematic. The first reason for this is that none of the entry systems in place that allow one admittance into the athletic facilities – that recognize membership as part of student enrollment, and paid through tuition fees; membership as part of employment conditions for “eligible” employees of the University; community memberships that allow for a reduced fee on reaching the age of 60, in the case of one facility, and a reduction at age 65, with a further reduced fee after 80 at the second facility; and yet another arrangement whereby one can purchase a ‘joint’ membership to both facilities and the University of Toronto Faculty Club offered to “eligible employees and pensioners” - none of which are tracked. There is no way, at this point, to obtain a snapshot of how many current students or faculty are over sixty, as those data are correlated in a separate part of the University, unrelated to facility use. Further, although we know how many memberships have been purchased, there is, as of this time, no data collected through the card swipe system at the facilities -- beyond the point check to ensure current membership status -- that would allow us to see and potentially track the users by age to determine how many of those various memberships are used and how often. At this point, we still do not know how many of those in possession of memberships use them.
4.2 Estimated Participation of Older Adults at Hart House and the Athletic Centre
Put the classes of older adults over 50. Why should it be 65? Who wants to take a class for people over 65? Nobody wants to feel like… like they’re walking in on a stick… Have it for over 50.
Lukus
Each of the staff/administrators of the athletic facilities were asked to estimate the percentage of the user population of the facilities in which they primarily work that are over sixty years of age. The responses varied wildly – from 10% to 40% of the overall user base of the facilities - and these estimations seem to tell a story about the staff
52 member’s identification with the older group. The staff interviewed range in age from approximately 25 to 58 years. When asking this question, it was borne in mind that there is a wide variance of ability to estimate approximate age, and, very often, younger people tend to over estimate age of older adults, often being misled by hair colour, bearing, and other unreliable visual clues of age (Moysé and Bredard, 2012).
Susan: Estimates that 30 to 40 percent of Athletic Centre users are over 59 years of age.
Joe: Estimates that 20 to 30 percent of Athletic Centre users are 59 years of age or older.
Lukus: Estimates 40 percent of overall user population at the athletic facilities at Hart House; he estimates 10 percent of user populations at the Athletic Centre are over 59.
Danielle: Estimates that 15 percent of Athletic Centre users are 59 years of age or older.
Gillian: Estimates that 20 percent of users of the Hart House athletic facilities are over 59 years old.
Philip: Estimates that 10 percent of the Hart House athletic facility users are over 59.
These estimates, of course, need to be subjected to closer scrutiny: the wide variance of the observations result from any number of perspectives: they may have a heightened awareness of older people in the space because of the conversation we were having about older adults. Equally true however, is that the observations may – as it is, in fact for at least two of these participants – be influenced by the number of people they judge to be older, who participate in their classes.
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4.3 Facility Memberships
Hart House Community Memberships, 60 years and older.
Important note: these data do not include the students, “eligible staff” or the joint membership holders who may be over the age of 59:
HH senior members
Year – Sept 1 to Aug 30 60 years + male female
2011 – 2012* 172 135 37
2010 – 2011 174 135 39
2009 – 2010 158 120 38
2008 – 2009 183 142 41
2007 – 2008 175 137 38
2006 – 2007 138 113 25
*Sept 1 to July 31, 2012
Table 1 Shows the number of sales of seniors memberships - for ages 60 years and over - at Hart House from 2006 to the end of July, 2012
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Athletic Centre Community Memberships, 65 years and older
The Athletic Centre has two tiers of memberships for older people, 65 years to 79, and 80 years and above.
These data do not include students, “eligible staff” or the joint membership holders who may be over the age of 59:
AC Senior Members
Total over
Year - May 1 to April 30 65 - 79 years male female 80+years male female 65
2011 – 2012 267 175 92 43 20 23 310
2010 – 2011 278 176 102 41 19 22 319
2009 – 2010 300 171 129 28 13 15 328
2008 – 2009 288 172 116 29 11 18 317
2007 – 2008 284 166 118 20 7 13 304
Table 2 Shows the number of sales of seniors’s memberships, 65 to 75 yers of age and the further discounted ‘80 Plus’ memberships, from May 1, 2007 to April 30, 2012
4.4 The Institutional Disposition - the View From the Trenches –
There is a disconnect that occasionally emerges in the data between the understanding of ageing and older people by those who design or deliver exercise programming to older adults, especially by those staff or administrators who have not begun to face their own ageing, or that of someone in their care. Some athletic programming staff occasionally made generalized assessments of observed behaviours of the older adults in their classes
55 during the interviews. One staff in particular, Lukas, ascribes a willful refusal to learn to older adults that is difficult to parse. Lukus made several references in our interview to older adults in his classes not cooperating in class. Lukus is clearly exhibiting his frustration with what he believes to be recalcitrant behaviour and a sign that the offender is not serious about exercise, which is clearly in conflict with Lukus’ perception of the activity and his role in the class. I asked him for specific descriptions of what the older adults are doing to warrant the assessment that they “don’t care” about the exercise or about their health. Consider, for example, the following exchange with Lukus:
Lukus: When I first started here, there was someone in the class, and they were stepping up and down, leaning and hunched over, ok? I knew straight away that it was not how you step. But I was a new instructor, what could I say to someone…? I could make suggestions, but no, they carried on and on and on. And now, they can’t come to any class where they do the up and down, solely because of technique. This can happen with exercising with the older adult.
I: But that could equally happen to a younger person as well, couldn’t it?
Lukus: But a younger person is more open to listen to technique.
I: You find?
Lukus: A thousand percent. If I say ‘step up onto the step, heel down, heel first, heel-toe, heel-toe, the whole foot on the step, you know: pelvis tucked in, nice and long’, a younger person is going to be open to listen to it. An older person, it’s in one ear and out the other.
I: Why is that?
Lukus: It’s because they’ve been doing it for 30 years, and they know. Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude…
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I: But I wonder if there isn’t a different way to look at that same point. It may be that they are not just being stubborn. It may be that they don’t… they don’t know what it feels like, so they can’t find it on their own.
Lukus: Ah!
I: So when you say ‘tuck your pelvis in’… you can only tuck your pelvis in if you have enough control over your body, and if you have the body awareness –
Lukus: Yes…
I: - to be able to make that shift. You’re talking to somebody who has been, perhaps, walking around for 40, 50, 60 years without that kind of physical engagement, and they may not have… and so they don’t know what it feels like, so they can’t get it there.
Lukus: Ok. Well, there’s another example where there’s an older person… They don’t come to my class because they don’t want to be told what to do. Because I would say ‘keep your weight in front of you’ and I demonstrate and I say ‘look how my back is hyper-extended’ and they just don’t. They have been doing it for 30 years, and they want to keep doing it. They want to just zone out. I hope I’m not being rude, because I love all these people… But they want to just zone out and to go into their space. And be not really in the present.
In this example, Lukas generalizes the experiences of the older exercisers in his class by giving two specific examples to stand in for all older people. And the trouble with older people is that they don’t want to listen to his expertise. This is a case of Lukus applying a specific doxa within the field of exercise in a way to explain the behaviours of some of the ageing individuals. This explanation is then generalized to all those in the gym who
57 are in possession of an ageing habitus. Even those individuals who are singled out as exceptions, are estimated against the backdrop of this negative assessment:
One older person comes to all the classes – they are in amazing shape, but I feel that he could benefit from more personalized instruction. I’ve suggested that he go to the zoomer fit, but he won’t go. He doesn’t want to be stigmatized that way.
Lukus
The point must be repeated however, that this is not the only discourse to come from the staff and administrators interviewed during the course of this study. Indeed, there are some very young individuals whose disposition leaves them very sensitive to the conditions that may be operating upon the older actors as they use the gym spaces at the
University. Joe, for example, is well aware that of the two programs in his facility that attract a much higher number of older participants than other programs and the self- directed facilities -the aqua fit and the zoomer fit classes - the participants are primarily community members, not older students or staff or faculty. When asked why older students, staff and faculty might not want to use these programs he is quick to point out that some do – but the majority of participants in these classes are community members.
Without directly linking this reluctance by students, staff and faculty involvement in these classes that are so popular among older members, Joe mentions his concerns over what he identifies as a “culture-based and leadership-based” environment of institutional antipathy towards the older users of the Athletic Centre and that older user are “made not so welcome” not only by instructors, but also by other students in the classes at the Athletic
Centre. The evaluations were not made available, so I was unable to see the program evaluations from the Athletic Centre, other than those evaluations for the swimming
58 programs, to corroborate Joe’s claim that he had seen some anonymous program evaluations that contained ageist remarks targeting both older instructors and older participants in the class as well. Comments in these evaluations, such as “too many grannies in the class” and references to “the wrinklies” contribute to what Joe believes is a culture of ageism that is tolerated at an institutional level. If there are such comments being made – and, given that the evaluations were not made available to me when requested, I am forced to make the negative inference that the evaluations contain these remarks as reported – it is unusual that the institution has not created an anti-ageism program to combat the problem, similar to the anti-racism, or anti-homophobia campaigns already in place at the facility.
One of the older participants in the study, Ella, has been taking the same fitness class regularly for more than four decades. While she does not make references to the evaluations (and indeed, how could she have seem them), Ella does mention “dark dealings” with the administration at the AC. Unfortunately, Ella was not specific in her comments, and her mercurial thought process took her somewhere else almost as soon as the comment was made.
There have been recent attempts made to create classes expressly for older users of the
Athletic Centre, including a re-branding of one of the oldest, continuously running exercise class at the facility as a ‘zoomer fit’ class and by promoting the aqua fit classes as older adult friendly.
Gillian, who works primarily at Hart House, has a slightly different interpretation of the institutional culture at the Athletic Centre: she sees a greater segregation between community members and all other members at the Centre. According to Gillian, the
59 administration at the AC is torn between the offerings for students and those for the community. As the revues generated by the community programs, including all the camps, classes and programs for elementary through high school students are a substantial income source for the Athletic Centre, the institution is obliged to concede to the demands of the community for programming rather than to design programs around the wishes and needs of students and staff. “The squeaky wheel gets the oil” as Gillian observed.
However, Susan might refute Gillian’s claims of a privileging of the needs of community over those of students, at least when it comes to older community members. Susan reports that there is a mandate at the Athletic Centre that the facility is there for students, who are implicitly believed to be 17 to 25 years old. Not only are the older populations at the facility left out of the conceptualization of the use of space, according to Susan’s report, there is an institutional failure to understand that the demographic of ‘the student’ has shifted; while the great majority of students are in the 17 to 25 year-old range, there are enough older students at the University to push the median age of students up towards 30 years old.
It is possible, of course, that both Gillian and Susan are correct in their observations: it is true that the focus on community programming at the Athletic Centre can take over the physical space and that administrative attentions and resources are focused on the money- making kids’ camps and programs that take up large sections of the calendar. At the same time the adult programming for drop-in exercise classes and the registered classes may well be designed to be more appealing to the younger students using the Athletic Centre, through the choices of class times, exercise styles, music selections, and the volume at which the music is played.
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Gillian believes that Hart House offers a “better socialized culture” for all members, including the older members. The emphasis on the enrichment of student life is extended to the older members of the University community including the older community members, as distinct from the older students, the older staff and the older faculty who use the athletic spaces at Hart House. The administration of Hart House under a previous
Warden had pushed the programming for students “a little too far at the expense of the older users of the space”, in an attempt to attract more student gym users. This “has been rebalanced” says Gillian, and there are programs, like the zoomer fit, the aqua fit and a cycle fit designed for older people that are marketed directly to the older users of the space. Gillian reports that the noon-time fitness classes at Hart House “can be fifty percent older and fifty percent younger” participants.
Philip, who also teaches at both facilities, observes that many of the staff have grown older at Hart House in a way that is more accepted than at the Athletic Centre – and this assessment is echoed by Gillian’s observation about the users of the space: “Hart House is a weird place – it tends to get people who come as undergrads, they just stay through middle and older age. They grow old here.” Philip extends the same observation to the staff.
The older participants have an effect on the style of classes offered according to Philip:
“we don’t do as much boot camp style classes here – the older people don’t like it”.
“It’s down to earth – it’s not a club, do you know what I mean? The classes have a lot of regulars of all ages. And it’s really sociable…It’s not just exercise. It’s a large, social group. Sometimes a group of us will go out for something to eat after class. We’ll have 20 year-olds and 70 year olds and we’ll be going out for lunch afterwards.”
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Philip
The Hart House classes tend generally to be friendly and accepting of newcomers – Philip relates that in his class earlier in the week, a young woman seemed to be struggling to keep up in the class, when one of his older students, a woman in her 70s, reached out, touched her lightly on the arm and reassured the younger woman “It’s ok: you’ll pick it up!” He points out, however, that many newcomers, and most particularly the older newcomers, do not return to the classes, often because they are intimidated and because they cannot cope with the combined unfamiliarity of the routines that everyone else seems to be able to do without instruction, and an inability to do the individual exercises that make up the routines. Philip tells of two women who had come into one of his classes just a few weeks before our interview: they came in a pair, as often happens when people are new to exercising – they come with a friend for mutual support – and they had new, brand name exercise clothes on as part of their commitment to a new exercise regime. Philip says he was very concerned for them in the course of the class because neither woman could complete even one of the exercises. He reports he tried to be supportive without drawing too much attention to them, because he didn’t want to be seen as “singling them out in any way”.
I: So what happened with them?
Philip: Nothing. They finished the class. But they were a lot quieter than when they came in. It was too much for them.
I: Did you see them again after?
Philip: Nope. Never saw them again. It happens all the time. I wish we could do more to get them, know what I mean? But some people aren’t very realistic. You can’t go from doing absolutely nothing to doing a whole class.
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Not very many people can do that. And you can’t just walk into a class halfway through the term and expect to be able to follow along: the rest of the class has already been doing it for weeks, so they know it; they know the routines. They know we do this bit and then this and then this and it makes sense. You can’t just walk into that and expect to get it.
One of the strategies that Hart House athletic staff are instituting is to have the first weeks of classes of both the fall and the winter term “technique week”, in which there are as many as three instructors in class: one to teach and the other two to rove the room, spotting and correcting problem techniques for new and established exercisers. This practice, the staff feel, will help integrate new people into the classes and to support them as they learn the types of routines they can expect to encounter. It is a problem for Philip that there is no on-going program for integrating new exercisers, like the women who spent a fortune on new exercise clothes they won’t use now, because they came into a class at a point when the majority of participants were accustomed to, and could anticipate the structure of the routines.
4.5 Concerns of Older People Over Injury From Exercise
Concerns over potential injury emerge through the discourse on older people and exercise and the potential of injury is stated as a significant reason older people are reluctant to engage in physical activity (Burman et al., 2010; Chae et al. 2010; Mansfield et al., 2010).
The fear of injury or the fear of exacerbation of old injuries long healed was prominent among the findings of the preliminary study that precipitated this present study and which focused on older students (45 years and older), at the University of Toronto, none of whom exercise at the University facilities. A point of interest from this study is that that
63 finding did not emerge in this study of 21 older people within the University community,
12 who exercise at the University and 9 who do not exercise here. The issue likely did not emerge this time because none of these participants, unlike the set of participants in the preliminary study, were asked directly why they do not exercise here. Instead, I allowed the participants to tell me what they do and where and how they do it. Only one participant, Ivan (90), admits to not being active at all, although that was found to be inaccurate, as noted later. Ivan did not mention injury as a reason for not exercising, despite the fact that he – in common with several of the other study participants – has had a series of significant health issues. None of those study participants who have been found to do minimal exercise mentioned a concern over safety, either.
When the question is reframed from ‘why do you not’, as in the preliminary study, to ‘tell me what you like to do’ in this study, the narrative changed entirely. This might be a useful point to bear in mind when framing the discourse of why some older people might not want to try to exercise.
Also of note: the six athletic programming staff or administrators interviewed report that the older participants at Hart House and the Athletic Centre are not identified as more injury-prone than other facility users; all staff and administrators of athletic programming observed that the older participants are less likely than the general populations to be injured while exercising. This later estimation appears to be borne out through the data acquired from the facilties’ Injury and Accident Reports.
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4.6 The People Participating in the Study
Of the 21 study participants over 59, one also participated in the pilot study (4%). Also of the older participants, one is an undergraduate (4%); two are graduate students (9.5%); three are alumni (14%); five are administrators (24%); two are retired administrators
(9.5%); one is an occasional lecturer7 (4%); three are faculty (14%); two are emeritus faculty (9.5%), and two are retired faculty (9.5%).
29.6% of all study participants are non-white, and 33% of the participants were born outside of Canada. Among the older participants in the study, 28% are not Canadian-born, and 19% are non-white, with 14% identifying as black, and 4.7% who identify as mixed race, Caucasian and First Nations.
Chapter Summary
Chapter 4 attempts to place the context of this study of older people among the University community and their exercise habits, through an examination of the locations where those two groups who engage in physical activity at the University are most active. An attempt has been made to estimate the population from which the study participants is drawn by assessing the numbers of older people who are able, through membership, to use the athletic spaces using the special memberships fees available. There is also an attempt to examine the veracity of the commonly held myth, as demonstrated in the literature, of
7 This individual works primarily outside the University, but because of his expertise in his field, he is regularly invited to give talks to both Graduate and Undergraduate students in the Faculty of Arts and Science at least three times per academic year over the past four years. Additionally, this person participates in symposia presented by the same department in which he lectures, at least once per academic year.
65 reasons older people give for not being physically active, namely, that older people are more likely to be injured through exercise than younger people. This appears to be effectively refuted through a brief analysis of the injury reports at the University faciltities. The social context through the qualitative data interviews with athletic program staff provides the institutional context for the older users of the space, and finally, the ethnicity and employment data for the older participants in this study is presented.
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Chapter 5
The Structuring of the Older Exercisers
Introduction
This chapter examines the wider social contexts that have had a structuring influence on the older participants, including the social placements and predispositions that, I postulate, relate directly to their exercise choices. Specifically, this chapter examines the participants’ placement in the context of the “Baby Boom”, the socio-political culture in
Canada, the wars, and the looming threats of war that characterize the 20th Century. Also of immediate relevance to this population is the opening up of the post-Secondary education systems across this country, and these participants’ journey to the University.
As you get older, you tend to change your sights, as you, as you get past, and that’s it. I’ve had both of my knees replaced two years ago, and, to me… I used to walk 18 holes, and now I have to take a cart. And that’s very important to me. That’s the context now.
Edgar (71)
5.1 The Social Placement
The location of any study can be seen as a focusing mechanism, which places limitations through population selection and social placement: education levels, class mobility and income among other elements that factor into social constructions. This study is not an exception, but rather it provides an illustration of the rule. Looking specifically at the
University athletic facilities automatically pre-selected some of the attributes of the participants and a focusing of their location within larger cultural phenomena. I will argue that the older adults who participated in this study occupy these locations largely as a
67 result of the educational and socio-economic capital they have acquired, and which have undeniable effects on the ways in which the individuals experience and reproduce their ageing and their experience of physical activity, exercise and sport. That age is a social construction has been starkly reinforced through this study. However, there emerged other, significant themes that go some distance to suggest answers to some of the questions that precipitated this study in the first place, principally, the question why do some older adults exercise in a location in which other older adults in a pilot study said overwhelmingly (100%), that they would not go into, because of how those locations made them feel about themselves as older adults and how it made them feel about their ageing bodies. Subsequently, it became clear that we need to know more about those individuals who do exercise in those locations and what disposes them to set aside the time to work themselves in ways which, strictly speaking, are not comfortable, as much of sporting practice and exercise training is, well, taxing. What are they seeking? How do they see themselves? And why, while we are asking about people exercising, do the people who do not exercise, not exercise? What can we learn from the people who do exercise that can potentially allow us transform the way we think of those older adults who do not participate in physical activity?
5.2 The Hinge
5.2.1 The Boom
The older adult participants in this study are aged 59 to 93, and the majority (71%), are part of the phenomenon known as the “Baby Boom”: the years immediately after the 20th
Century Thirty Years War in Europe, when the population increased at the rate that has been consistent, historically, with population ‘bulges’ following other wars in other places
68 and other times; but, because of the number of countries involved in this particular set of conflicts, the birthrate has been come to be accepted as astronomical. More importantly, this ‘boom’ has been enormously economically significant, and therefore of greater perceived cultural, and historical, significance. The majority of study participants were born between 1944 and 1953, which puts them squarely in the Boom period, with the result that those participants are now between 69 and 59 years old. This historical placement makes the study participants who were born and raised in North America the recipients of not one, but two complementary cultural traditions: the first is the phenomenon of ‘Muscular Christianity’ (Kidd, 2006, Smith Maguire, 2008); and the second is ‘the soldier mystique’.
5.2.2 Muscular Christianity
‘Muscular Christianity’ is a British cultural phenomenon that spread through North
America from the early 19th Century, coming to a peak between the great European conflicts of the 20th Century and which is best exemplified through the works of the
‘Young Men’s Christian Association’. The ‘Y’ sought to develop and spread the concept of ‘Muscular Christianity’, which suggested that, to do God’s work, one had to be fit of mind and body. In Canada, this concept of ‘Muscular Christianity” extended to a concept of social responsibility (Kidd 2006), and an identification with working men, whereas in the US, it remained primarily located within the middle classes, alongside a relaxed version of Puritanical beliefs in predestination; Muscular Christianity in the United States became entrenched in the American mythology of pulling one’s self up by one’s bootstraps (Smith Maguire, 2008), and, by extension, the image of ‘the self-made man’.
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Muscular Christianity evolved out of a re-focusing from God in the pulpit to God in the urban streets, where the work of young, Christian men, flocking to the cities in search of work. A system of Young Men’s Christian Associations emerged with the spread of capitalism in urban areas across North America as part of this message that there was a safe place for them in the cities to rest their heads at night until they could move on to more permanent arrangements. The location of the YMCAs in solid, middle class neighbourhoods clarified the position of these establishments as targeting the middle class
(Smith Maguire, 2008) and upholding the values the middle class held for their youth.
Puritanical conceptions of physical fitness as solipsist misbehaviour (if God had wanted you fit, He would have made you that way) were softening with growing urbanization, and exercise became a practical means to an end: for, if idle hands are the tools of the devil, what better way of keeping young men busy and away from potential harms than to keep them busy with exercise. The young men of the YMCA, once housed and fed for a modest fee, could be kept busy playing basketball. How much trouble could they be getting into with that? Playing sport – especially team sport, kept the boys from getting unruly; newly created games, such as basketball and volleyball (Smith Maguire, 2008), would keep them occupied, in robust health, and it would channel those hormone-fed energies away from lusting and fighting.
One of the women who participated in this study, Doris (93), took swimming lessons at the YWCA when she arrived in Toronto in 1937 from the small town where she grew up in rural Manitoba. Doris took lessons at the Y as part of her social integration into her new environment. She reports that Betty Quiggan, then Director of the Central YWCA – had typewriters in a room for women to learn on, so they could get jobs. In addition to
70 swimming lessons, Doris belonged to the “33 club8”, a social club at the Y with whom she would “go over to the YMCA during the war, to dance with the men, and, before we went, Miss Quiggan would remind us we were Y girls”.
Another woman who took part in this study not only grew up swimming at the same
YWCA that Doris made the centre of her social life in the pre-during- and post-war years,
Julia (61), went to Y camps in her childhood. Now, in her adulthood, Julia has returned to the Y to use the gym and to become involved in community programs. Julia’s late life redundancy from an all-consuming career has left her scrambling to find work, and to upgrade now deficient educational credentials (Julia earned her BA in the 1970s and is currently finishing her Master‘s), and to re-build her social structure now that her work has evaporated. Julia is finding the means to fill to some of those deficits at the Y, taking job training courses and fitting in workouts there at the gym around her graduate studies.
Of the men in the study, 40% report attending YMCA clubs and programs in their childhood and teen years, playing the team sports, such as basketball, volleyball and baseball that the Y system believed so character building.
All of the participants in this study though, with the exception of Peter, Linda and Rosie, who came to Canada as adults in the 1970s and 80s, lived through the implementation of what became among the most radical social reforms in a democratic context: a system of welfare to support poor families, and later, poor individuals, both men and women; a
8 Doris’ best guess for the name of this multi-purpose social club is that it was founded in 1933. Rather astoundingly, Doris reports that she still has contact with some of the women she knew from the 33 Club. More enigmatically still she reports that two of her friends from her Y days use the gym at George Brown now, leaving me to wonder how many of these robust women there are scattered through the gyms of the city.
71 system of employment insurance to support families, and subsequently, individuals, who had lost their jobs, and finally, among the most daring experiments in social engineering ever undertaken – a universal system of comprehensive medical care. These social reforms, begun in 1949 and established by the mid 1960s, are the direct descendants of the tenets of Muscular Christianity of the 19th and early 20th Centuries (Kidd 2006).
5.2.3 War and the ‘Soldier Mystique’
The oldest participant in this study was born in 1919. Peter, the youngest of the study participants, was born into the Stalinist Soviet Union and was playing his games and throwing sticks with his friends during the very hottest moments of the Cold war under
Krushschev, and subsequently, Brezhnev. But all of these study participants were born into the politically turbulent world of 20th Century conflict, and they lived their childhoods, and much of their adult lives, in the shadow of war.
The ‘soldier mystique’ (Smith Maguire, 2008), that valorization of the fit body in fighting trim and ready for action, was part of the culture in North America well into the 1960s.
But until the late 70s, the soldier and the business of soldiering were represented in the media by bodies and minds that were disciplined, neat and tough. The internalized lessons of hundreds of years of the civilizing process was brought to magnificent fruition in the bearing of the soldier: he was male, he was strong, virtuous and brave.
Lord Baden Powell, at the beginning of the 20th Century, had established a system of inculcating the concerns of the Empire in young boys through the Scouts. Boy Scouts learned the skills of stalking, surveillance and reconnaissance, the transportation of supplies, basic woodland survival and the art of command. This was paramilitary training
72 for youth, which emphasized the chain of command, and their motto was “be prepared”, but for what? To be prepared for war. One demonstrated this preparedness by keeping one’s body in shape, one’s tent dry and one’s mess kit in order. In pride of place in every community centre, every school room, every mess hall where the little soldiers of the
Empire met, was a photo of the Monarch and a photo of Lord Baden Powell, the symbols of the King and Country the children were pledged to defend. Of the men who took part in this study (75%), report having participated in Scouts, Cubs, or an equivalent group, and some (36%) of the women who were growing up in the 1950s report having been
Guides or Brownies.
Thus the valourization of the soldier’s body, and particularly, of the icon of the soldier’s discipline was transferred directly to the children who have become the men and women in this study through multiple cultural conduits: through the discourses of Muscular
Christianity and the expectation of remaining fit to serve in whatever ways presented; through social groups like Scouts; through media, in radio, film and later, through television; through play of the ever-popular territorial invasion games, like Red Rover, which is consistently identified as the game most enjoyed by the older participants in the study, reported by both the men and the women9.
The reverence for many of these same, soldierly qualities is evident among the discourses found in the gyms. The bodies of these little soldiers grown up – even those who were
9 Red Rover is followed by baseball in popularity among respondents, including versions of baseball played with soccer balls or broom sticks (also played by both sexes), followed by hockey and skipping, which were sex differentiated, in that only the girls report skipping outside of the context of boxing training (as for Edgar and Jack) and only the boys reported playing hockey. “Oh no: in those days girls didn’t play hockey. Hockey was just for boys.” (Nora, 68)
73 title holders in weight-lifting (Edgar and Jack), maintained not just fit bodies, but strong, sleek bodies. These are not the puffed-up bodies of subsequent generations: these bodies are made for work, not for grimacing, window-dressing intimidation. The body-project for the study participants who have remained physically active through their lives and into older age is part of a larger undertaking that is regular and committed; it is social even among those whose workouts are solitary, as is demonstrated through the commitment to a particular space: in this study, there is an allegiance to either Hart House or the Athletic
Centre, never both. For many, the commitment to training is done without question because they had been habituated early in their lives. And through this training, they are ripe for the order to age successfully. They are ready to mobilize.
Peter’s experiences growing up in the Soviet Union was undoubtedly, in many ways, very different from the experiences of the people among whom he is growing older here in
Canada, but, surprisingly, the descriptions of his games, and particularly the descriptions of his free-time, child-initiated activities are almost identical to those reported by people who had grown up in various parts of Canada. (The mandatory athletic competition through school and into his graduate training is a serious point of departure, however.
Peter is unique among the study participants in this regard.) Rosie, growing up in Jamaica, played similar games to the girls who grew up in Canada, particularly the games played by the study participants who had spent their childhoods in rural communities (38% of the
74 total), despite the many cultural differences and the variables in life experiences between growing up in Canada and Jamaica10.
Consumption takes place largely via the creation of invidious distinctions between various classes and class fractions, and such distinctions are created, not via the use values but via the symbolic property of the goods. Further the emergence of new class fractions within the professional-managerial classes, as well as the increased internal stratification of the working classes, not to mention the heightened importance of age and gender stratification within and without all classes, will be integral to the shift towards specialized consumption.
Lash, in Calhoun, LiPuma and Postone (1993).
5.2.4 Education and the Great Lurch Forward
The present social locations of the study participants, relative to the general population, illustrates that the participants in this study represent a privileged group by every determinant of social placement: 80% of the men, and 90% of the women who took part in the study have at least one degree from a university. The high numbers of degrees, and particularly advanced degrees, are not representative of the percentages of degree holders outside of universities or other research institutions, and in no way reflect the percentages of degrees among the general population. The percentage of those holding university degrees in this study is not representative of the education levels among the wider
10 Rosie grew up playing cricket, table tennis and rounders, and she reports that the conditions and rule structuring was similar to those who played forms of baseball here: the games were loosely structured and flexible to accommodate the number of available children and a lack of equipment.
75 population (the national average for this same age group is 21%),11 and the percentage of degree holders was certainly not even close to a common distribution in the mid 1970s, when the youngest of the study participants were finishing their first degrees. Moreover,
52% of the total number of older adult participants in this study hold postgraduate degrees, with 38% of the 21 older participants holding advanced postgraduate degrees
(50% of all the older adult men, and 27% of all older adult women). The unusually high level of academic attainment within this population is, without a doubt, an artifact of locating the study at a university.
But this sampling is also indicative of other, larger social conditions of the mid to late 20th
Century that allowed these participants to be able to attain post secondary or advanced degrees. The educational profile of the parents of these individuals illustrates the change: only 28% of the study participants had one or more parent who had taken post-secondary education. The remaining 72% of these older adults were among the first members of their families to achieve a higher level of education. Most compelling is that, among the eleven older women in the study, less than 5% came from homes where one or more parents had a post-secondary degree.
The post war economy of Canada was booming, as in many other western countries not having to dig themselves out from under the rubble and ruinous costs of the wars. (In
Britain, and the other European countries ravaged by the wars in Europe, West, South, and East Asia, and North Africa, it would take a decade and many austerity measures longer to hit their postwar stride.) Because of a burgeoning industrial base that would
11 http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/090908/t090908b1-eng.htm Accessed October 20, 2012.
76 soon require more managers, and because there was a sense of debt owed to the men and women who fought in the wars, or who had contributed to the defenses of King and
Empire, there was an easing in the restrictions of who was seen as eligible for post secondary education. Post secondary education was suddenly attainable by people who would not have had the same opportunity prior to 1945: low and middle income ex- service men and women who qualified were able to enter universities on special scholarships as part of setting them up in civilian life. In a fit of cultural optimism, men and women too young to have fought in the war began to enter universities on various support schemes, too.
There had been, of course, women taking degrees at the University of Toronto before the turn of the 19th Century, but the trickle increased after the war to the point that it was a stream in the 1950s and a torrent by the 1970s and ‘80s. Now, enrollment of women outnumbers the enrollment of men at the University of Toronto12. Ella (67), gained her
Bachelor’s degree in the early1960s. After teaching for a few years subsequent to completing her undergraduate work, and contested by her parents, who felt she’d had enough and was perhaps getting “too far above herself”, Ella returned to university and completed her Doctorate, after which she joined the Faculty in 1978: Ella was not alone among a sea of men, but she and some of the other women who were hired in that period might have felt a little lonely. It was no surprise then, that Ella was thrilled to find an informal group of women who had been exercising at the Athletic Centre for over a
12 In the 2007-2008 academic year, 59% of undergrads and 51% of graduate students in Canada were women. Statscan: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-599-x/81-599-x2009003-eng.htm. Accessed October 20, 2012.
77 decade at that point, which became her avenue back into the physical activity she had so greatly enjoyed as a child.
Not only were the older adults taking part in this study in most cases the first generation to have been educated past the end of high school, an analysis of their geographic locations illustrates some wider trends of location and relocation that reflect the urbanization of the populations and the conurbation of the communities surrounding the urban areas, that both drew and subsumed a far more mobile population than we had yet experienced in this country during the two decades after the wars. Of the older men participating in the study, 60% were born and raised in urban centers, 20% were raised in small towns, 10% were from rural areas and 10% more were raised in the peculiar limbo of an armed forces base: that liminal space that is neither rural, nor urban, nor yet small town, but which combines the best and the worst of all three: large populations of children in close proximity, access to some facilities, such as swimming pools and libraries, but small in size, which makes a child’s expanded range seem enormous, and surrounded on all sides by a vastness of open wilderness: in short, the best of all possible playgrounds.
In contrast to men’s experience, 46% of the women report being from urban homes13, 9% from small towns and 56% came from rural areas. In total, 62% of all older adults in the study had grown up in, or had spent significant time in a city. Some 38% grew up in small
13 The numbers of study participants who come from rural environments is actually larger than these data would suggest: my study focused on school-age activities through to the present, and so these numbers do not reflect the true location within the migrations from the rural and small town areas to the urban due to the number of cases in which the migration occurred for those individuals prior to school age. In several cases, there was some overlap between two or more types of locations. In the end, I chose for each individual a childhood location that reflects best the participant’s dominant set of childhood locations, based on the reported strength of their related memories. For example, if subject X came from Co. Galway, Ireland, when she was eight, but her strongest memories are of Toronto, I count her among the urban-raised children.
78 towns or rural communities. But, when looking at where their families lived at the time the study participants were born, 67% of all older participants were born into rural situations (50% of the men, and 82% of the women): so, even among those whose memories are located in an urban setting, the majority had their beginnings in rural communities. It might be difficult, from this distance, to determine just how this position within a large migration might have affected a person’s sense of location in the new setting; for example, were small community values transferred to the urban setting for these older study participants? Were expectations of children’s roles different after migration to the city? Did the idea of childhood change as a result? What seems certain is that these migratory babies received the message that not only was mobility possible for these subjects: it was part of their inheritance.
And, indeed, most of the participants in this study have experienced extraordinary levels of class mobility as well: based on estimations of parental position from information given in interviews (descriptions of parent’s work; living circumstances as a child; the number of times they describe moving house as a child; sensitivity to the cost of activity programs and other qualitative expressions of class and economic placement), 81% of the older adults who participated in this study enjoy a reasonable income and life position through job identity and prestige that is significantly above that of their parents, including those individuals whose parent had had social and economic capital which was lost as a result of emigration; 19% have experienced little or no change in status from the previous generation; and, in all but one case (4.7%), those who did not experience a significant change in social or economic capital are those whose parents were situated at the higher end of the income scale.
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There’s a feeling of exhilaration associated with physical activity. And this exhilaration, it’s, it’s… I’ve had it all my life. I’ll be 75 in 4 or 5 weeks, and I’ve felt it all my life. To this day, when I race with my little friends – we have races every week, and, of course, we don’t go very fast, but I still feel that exhilaration from the competition.
Jack (75)
Chapter Summary
In this chapter I examined the cultural contexts of the 20th Century in which the older participants in this study grew up and lived much of their lives. The inheritance of Muscular Christianity, carrying on into the valorization of the soldier, which was inculcated early through military-style training for the children of the Empire, created the conditions under which the older adults in this study readily spent time training their bodies to be prepared.
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Chapter 6
Introduction
This chapter expresses the attempt to closely interrogate the data from this study to comprehend why these older adults engage in physical activity, and further, why they locate their practice of physical activity at the University. Section one considers how the ageing habitus is constructed in the University setting. The narratives of the older participants are examined in Section two. In Section three questions are raised about the commodification of fitness in the gym setting, the valourisation of gym spaces, and where the older participants fit in those structures. In Section four, I examine the question of the
University gym spaces as dominated by younger people to the detriment of participation by the older study participants. The creation of the gym as a social space is questioned in
Section five, and in Section six, I examine the ‘health narrative’ that has a strong operating influence on the study participants. In Section seven, I engage with the discourses of illness and exercise as presented by the older study participants. And finally, in Sections eight and nine, I engage with the narratives of illness and ageing and the exit narratives that were presented in the data.
… Frank (2006) argued that narratives are like actors in that they do things that can make a difference in terms of the claims made for what counts in relation to other people. More recently, Martin (2007: 54) noted that, ‘Stories are performative: through them we initiate, suggest and call for responses’. In such ways therefore, rather than being passive, a narrative is a form of social action and the act of narration is a social activity involving other participants who may provide storied responses to a story heard.
B. Smith, A.C. Sparkes (2011)
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6.1 Expressions of Habitus
All of the older participants in this study occupy an ageing habitus. Some inhabit it fitfully, as with those whose physical prowess gives them access to multiple planes, or fields, at a time. For example, Jack (75) is seen as a wonder of fitness: his prowess provides inspiration for other users of his gym, both young and old. Peter (59) when asked if he has ever experienced negative interactions with any of the younger users of his gym spaces, immediately responded, “No. No. In fact, the opposite. They are so amazed to see a man who is 75 who can do these things. They begin to think of what might be possible.
They are amazed. And it is amazing.” It is interesting that, although I was asking Peter about his own experience, he responded by relating a story about Jack because Jack best exemplifies the ageing habitus to Peter. Peter and Jack both experience higher social and symbolic capital as a result of their performances in the gym (the field), because of their ageing that give them access to social interaction that otherwise, they might have been excluded from because of their ageing, and they are both held in esteem by those who witness their training in the gym in the context of their ageing. Their ageing habitus is viewed positively, but Jack and Peter’s expression of the ageing habitus is clearly seen as exceptional, if not unique. Additionally, Peter and Jack maintain each other in their mutual approval of their performances. But here, Jack occupies the place of superiority because his athletic performance is related to his age: not every person is to be rewarded with such esteem because he is 75 years old. Nor is every one who can handle the weights
Jack lifts is seen as noteworthy. Jack is celebrated within his circle at the gym because he is 75 years old and because of what he can do in the gym. And for that reason, Peter defers to Jack in the field. For Peter, Jack represents what he would like to aspire to when he himself is 75 as a model for appropriate ageing (Phoenix, Smith, 2011.) However, this
82 elision also serves to allow Peter to avoid his own ageing habitus by diverting attention to his older friend.
On the other hand, Nora (68), relates her experience of a humiliating devaluation of her physical, symbolic capital at one of the university athletic facilities, which precipitated her switch to the other facility when she went for a fitness assessment after years of training and a long history of physical engagement. Nora wanted to hear, she said, if there is something she is not doing and if there were any recommendations to think about. The experience left her feeling embarrassed and angry, when the person who was conducting the assessment treated her like Nora was “just wasting her time. I’m sure it was because of my age. I am sure of it.”
6.2 Conflicts Within the Narratives of Exercise:
The Masquerade
Of the nine study participants who use neither the Athletic Centre, nor the Hart House athletic facilities, or 43% of the total of older adults interviewed, only one reports doing no physical activity at all. Of the remaining eight study participants who do not exercise at the University, only two others were found to have an established pattern of regular exercise. Of the remaining respondents who do not use either of the gyms at the main campus, four give varied reports of activity that appear somewhat inflated, in that reports of regular, extensive walking, for example, turn out to be, on closer scrutiny, less than a mile of walking every few days. This is certainly not the case with all of those who identify walking as a principle source of exercising: Julia (60), for example, lives in the east end of the city, and walks to downtown Toronto four days per week, a distance of almost 14km per round trip. In addition to walking for transportation, Julia walks to get
83 all of her groceries, including all of her special shopping trips, which mostly take her downtown. Doris (93), walks approximately 6km per day, including the 3.23km round trip from her home to the Athletic Centre three times per week. Nora (68), routinely walks just under 10 km in the round trip to play bridge:
“Still, walking is my great love. I will walk three miles to play bridge and three miles back, even now. People laugh at me because I walk everywhere, you know. It’s in me. It’s ingrained, my love of walking”.
Nora (68)
It is, however, difficult to assess the sporadic, seasonal activities that take place well away from where the individual lives. These activities are clearly significant to the individuals, otherwise they would not have been mentioned. However, it does seem that, in many of the cases in which sporadic and seasonal activities are reported as core activities, the frequency of the activity is quite low, with vague assessments of time spent, or frequency.
In such cases the reported frequency and duration of activity emerges after a closer quantitative calculation of the subject’s regular involvement in physical activity appears to be less than reported. While many of the regular exercisers report these kinds of seasonal, occasional, or past activities as well, they are not the focus of their self- perception as people who identify as runners, or martial artists, or cyclists, and who devote time throughout the year, regardless of the season, to the activity from which they take their primary active identity. The participants who identify themselves through a set of specific activities do not identify as for example, cross-country skiers because they may occasionally ski; they will say, after talking in detail about their primary activities,
“Oh - and we go up to the farm and we cross-country ski every second weekend in the winter’ (Linda, 66). Or “Oh, yeah: and I go horseback riding most Friday
84 afternoons…I’ve done that ever since I was in high school. Sorry - I forgot to mention that.” (Tom, 68) These secondary activities reported by the regular exercisers are clearly casual, if frequent, practices for these participants, but not their principal activity, and therefore not something from which they take an identity. The self-identification as a cross-country skier becomes somewhat tenuous when the reported activity occurs not more than once or twice every few years, as is the case with the study participants whose participation levels in any physical activity are generally low.
It is possible that the apparent over-reporting stems from a perceived need to report as a participant in something is an artifact of the interview process with someone in Exercise
Sciences: the participants feel they need to perform to be considered a good subject as they help me in my research. Also possible is the internalized message of the dominant medical, public policy discourse that we all must be exercising as part of self-care: a message that has been widely accepted. Nobody wishes to appear negligent in this regard.
Even the lone individual in this study who reported no physical activity at all (Ivan, 90), says he regrets his inactivity.
Except on further prodding, Ivan disclosed that he goes hunting by himself and with friends, on three or more occasions every fall, although he admits that he shoots nothing;
“it is a regular hike through the bush with artillery, followed by tea” (Ivan). Also an enthusiastic fisherman, Ivan gets out of the city at least three times per year in the
Southern Ontario region for day trips, and, for the past five years, he has been returning to his family home outside Prague, where his nephews take him fishing every day – weather permitting, - over a six week period, annually. This activity means walking for about half a kilometer over uneven ground and low bush, and then back after walking in and around
85 the riverbank, casting and retracting his line for as long as hunger, wet, the light or his nephews allow him to stay out. Additionally, he still participates in three or four fly-in expeditions to James Bay each year for a duration of 10 days to 2 weeks on each occasion, jumping into and out of seaplanes, carrying heavy packs, and hiking, setting up tents, and other activities reminiscent of his days at the local Sokol club14 of his childhood.
Ivan appears to be employing an inverted version of the ‘mask of ageing’: given that this activity level is a fraction of what it was a decade ago, he dismisses the significance of his current activities, leading him to under report his activity levels, accepting, in anticipation of a time when he may become inactive, and contrary to the facts, that he is done with activity. Ivan has assumed the identity of an old man who had quadruple bypass surgery eighteen years ago; an old man who has had both hips replaced within the past two years, and the old man habitus, with its diminished social capital and the attendant narratives of decay and immobility, has overwritten the reality that he is still active. Without a doubt he is less active than he once was, but Ivan is still quite mobile, and demonstrating substantially more bodily engagement than his own estimation of his activity levels would suggest, even if he is engaged in physical activity for three of four seasons of the year15.
The phenomenon of over-reporting activity – the ‘halo effect’ - is the opposite of what
Ivan is apparently doing by overstating his frailty and understating his activity. And yet this impulse to manage one’s image through reporting what the speaker believes the
14 Sokol, was a Czechoslovakian pre-Soviet era Scout-like organization. 15 This appears to be in keeping with Ivan’s life-long habit of concentrating his activities in the wilderness.
86 listener wishes to hear rests in an historically-located self-image: all of the individuals who may be over-reporting their activity levels have, at some time in the past, participated in prolonged, sustained activity over the course of a year or longer. Despite the clear indication that these are activities in which they used to participate, they overstate their current participation as an extension of that active identity because they do not wish to be excluded from the ranks of the physically active as part of holding off the identity as that person who used to cross-country ski, or run, or swim at the YWCA. That person who is visibly ageing, and who used to…
The employment of hyperbole in reporting current activity levels seems to work as follows: if one admits that one walks no more than ten minutes a day, three times per week, one will have to acknowledge that that is probably not enough to sustain the level of activity one would like to be able to think one maintains. If, however, one says ‘I walk all the time’, or, ‘I walk a lot’, the lack of specificity frees one of troublesome quantitative assessments of how little one is actually doing. This is once again open to theorizing using the ‘mask of ageing’: it describes the experience of using activity – here the suggestion of activity – to shield against the reality that not only are they ageing, but that they are doing less than they feel they ought to, to retard that ageing. Further, it leaves the door open to the possibility of restitution; that the individual can return to the activity at some time, placing both the ageing and the activity in the realm of the temporary: a repository of potential agency.
In contrast, some of the active exercisers who report they walk are going considerable distances in addition to their other routines. Doris (93), walks an average of 6 km per
87 day16, based on her routine activity regardless of weather, except storm conditions17. “Of course I’ve always walked. And I’ve never liked crowds. Still don’t. I’ve always walked to work” Doris (93). Kathie (67), who reports walking as her primary exercise, says she gets off a stop before her destination and walks the rest of the way to work, meaning she walks about 800 to 900 meters three times per week, based on the route and the subway stop she takes between home and work. Margot is unable to be concise about her running, which is something she reports having done regularly up until a few years ago, even having participated in some public running events. Now she runs sometimes once a week, but is not precise about distances or frequency, saying only it is “not as much” as it was.
This kind of thinking is a barrier to participation in activity. If one’s identity is wrapped in the creation of a status of being active, and if one is actually to be in a situation in which one must demonstrate that activity, it has the potential to force a collision of those competing presentations of their self-construction. The tensions between those two presentations - the notional active person, and the person who must then become that presented active person, each concept holding the other hostage in an odd version of the prisoner’s dilemma. It must be very difficult to bridge these competing concepts of the
16 The estimation of distances was done using a simple rubric of distance from home to regular, daily destinations, and how long it takes to get there. Also the subjects reporting walking as a physical activity were asked about the furthest, by location, they will go in a typical week, and by asking about how groceries are transported, how often there are outings to see friends and whether walking is the sole or an ancillary mode of transportation. Subjects who reported walking were also asked how they do their irregular shopping – large items, or for special occasions. The routine routes were put through an on-line distance calculator designed for runners to plan their runs to confirm estimations of distances based on reported routes. (http://www.walkjogrun.net) 17 Doris identifies walking as a secondary source of exercise; her primary exercise is the exercise class she has been taking since sometime before her retirement in 1984.
88 active self to actually become active. It must also be difficult to accept that one may just not want to be active in that way any more.
Two of the study participants identified the costs of the athletic facilities membership at the University as prohibitive: as administrative staff neither is classed as ‘eligible staff’ qualifying for membership as part of their employment conditions. “This University is supposed to be one of the top one hundred employers in the country. If they are so wonderful, why don’t they allow us to have access to something that is right here? Isn’t that part of being a good employer? By letting all employees to take care of our health and not just some?” Margot (67). Rosie (65) echoes this feeling of being excluded from an important aspect of self-care and the culture of the university where she works. Rosie learned to swim at the Athletic Centre when she was a student, and for some years after she began working at the University, she used the gyms at Hart House because “They had treadmills at Hart House; they didn’t at the Athletic Centre”. The cost of maintaining a family was the principal reason Rosie gave up her gym membership.
Adelle (69), said on the subject of costs and proximity to the facilities, “Maybe I’d try it if it (using one or the other of the athletic facilities) was free. But it’s not. So I won’t.” At first sight, this statement may appear to be a flippant dismissal of the concept of her exercise and an off-loading of responsibility for her decision not to exercise onto the
University, but on a closer examination - and regardless of whatever obligations the
University may have to its employees and concentrating instead on Adelle’s history of engagement in physical activity, while she does not have a history of sport involvement, she took regular dance training - ballet and tap - from the age of five. Adelle continued to train in ballet at an elite ballet school, taking regular classes into her “mid ‘50’s –
89 something like that. Until it was embarrassing for me to continue. You know, I was surrounded by all these beautiful young things, and here was me.” So Adelle’s reluctance to join a gym is not predicated on laziness, nor is it a moral failure on her part to care for her corporeal self, but from a double bind of having a high self-identity within a structured activity that she feels she can no longer do, in part because of the stresses on her body and damage from long-term use, and partly from her perceived need to conform to the behaviours appropriate to her age. This reflects an employment of the ‘mask of ageing’ similar to the mode in which Ivan uses the ‘mask’; under-reporting his activity out of a need to conform to understandings of what should be possible to do within the context of his medical history and his chronological age. Except in Adelle’s case, she is not under-reporting her activity: she has opted out of activity altogether as befits a woman of her years. She has retired from the activity from which she derived her greatest self- definition as part of a graceful retreat; she was shielding herself from the embarrassment of moving her ageing body in the limited public of a dance class. Adelle has taken her habitus from the field and has gone home.
6.3 The Gym and the Commodification of Fitness
6.3.1 Locations
This study has, to a large degree, a focus on the locations of the athletic facilities of Hart
House and of the Athletic Centre: specific places within the specific place of a specific campus of the University, accessible by specific people: those who have access to memberships through purchase, or through employment agreements, or student access.
Within those spaces, however, a dizzying variety of types of bodily exercise is available: dance, a dozen different martial arts, exercise classes of a seeming endless variety and with all kinds of equipment: steps and poles and soft, plastic balls filled with sand in
90 addition to openly available equipment for self-directed exercise with or without high tech machinery.
These gym spaces at the University are, in many ways, less-commercialized versions of the highly commercialized profit-generating gym spaces outside the university setting.
The university spaces may not market internal classifications of memberships based on luxury or on upgrades to ‘executive’ amenities, which can, in the commercial arena, stratify members by access to services, the gym spaces at the University have nonetheless adopted some of the tropes of the commercial spaces, including displays of body culture and athletic couture, both of which emphasize youth and wealth. The institutionalized cultures of gyms favour those who already know how to use the equipment and who can display at least an athletic competence, if not prowess and a social competence in the environment. Even these less commercial gym spaces can be intimidating for the uninitiated.
6.3.2 The Valourisation of the Body in Place
As we have already seen, Ivan (90) discounts the value of his activities, reporting himself as inactive, when he is, in fact, remarkably engaged for at least three of four seasons of the year. The major difference between Ivan’s activity and say, that of Jack (75), or Doris
(93), is a privileging of place in the formulation of what counts as physical activity or exercise, and a demarcation of devalued recreational pursuits that occur outside, as compared with the highly valued gym-based activities (Sassetelli, 2006). All of Ivan’s activities take place outdoors and none are part of the commercialized, commodified gym culture and so are not interpreted – not even by Ivan himself - as ‘working out’. That he
91 carries heavy packs and not barbells, and walks through rivers and the surrounding banks in his hip waders and does not do an exercise class with a sprung floor in sneakers makes
Ivan less of an athlete, even though he is very likely engaging his body as much or more than many of his gym-bound counterparts in the study.
Ivan is not alone in this valourisation of the built-space of the gym over the outdoor. As has been observed earlier, there is a tendency among those who work out regularly in gyms to minimize the significance of their outdoor activities, recalling them as incidental, even if they are regular, even frequent activities.
And I used to ski. Downhill. Although I used to do more cross country, I kind of prefer downhill. It’s just faster. More fun… But two or three weeks of not going to the gym is significant down-time for me.
Tom (68)
There is a sense in which physical activity for most participants in the study has greater symbolic value when it takes place inside, in a gym. Simply put, it counts for more when activity happens in a gym. Possibly because the time and the activity become easier to quantify when it happens inside, in a space set aside for the express purpose of exercising.
‘I go to the gym three times a week for an hour and a half’ sounds far more committed than Margot’s “sometimes” running and Diane’s dog-walking. But is this not a version of what Tom does when he brushes off his outdoor activities while elevating the value of the time he spend in the gym?
Gus (70), who began working out at the Athletic Centre after almost four decades of inactivity, reports that his main aim, after having lost his excess weight, is to train so that he can travel with his partner to untamed parts of the globe. Gus works hard in the gym to
92 support his ability to explore the world outside the gym, and his measure of the success of his training is whether he can walk in the wider world.
6.4 The Younger and the Older Adults
The other day I was in the gym and I was doing that thing where you bring the bar up, and there was a young guy – he had his earphones in, and he was looking. So I said to him – I am very sorry for keeping you, but I do my age. And he lightened up and he said, oh - I guess you’ve got a while to go!
Edgar (70)
When I come in here and see all the people working so hard – and they are so serious! It motivates me. I think I work hard because the other people work hard. It motivates me. When I go to Florida - the gym in Florida is mostly older people - but I go to the gym and I motivate the other people. I know because they tell me. Here the people motivate me. Because the young people are so focused in what they do. And it motivates me.
Nora (68)
Since our first meeting during data collection for the preliminary study in 2010, Eric was sufficiently encouraged by that conversation to try the athletic facilities. While it is clear that Eric is not disposed to engaging in the type of environments he found at the Athletic
Centre and Hart House, his attempt to exercise at both the Athletic Centre and Hart House certainly demonstrates his willingness to explore the reasons why he does not find these spaces congenial. Many of his arguments are similar to reasons he stated in our discussions that were included the 2010 study: he doesn’t like the feelings of being compared with very young people, together with negative past experiences with people
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Eric identifies as “jocks” who stand for him as a barrier to engaging in the particular field of publicly exposed physical activity.
After we talked about it last time, I thought you know, this is dumb. Like you said, I’m paying for it. And I tried it. I went to the Athletic Centre… It was everything I was afraid it was going to be: it’s big, it’s loud, it’s full of jocks. … I didn’t know what to do with all the stuff and I wasn’t going to ask... Because all the guys there, I don’t know… I couldn’t wait to get out of there… I tried going to Hart House a couple of weeks later, and it was not as bad… But… I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know who to ask without looking completely stupid. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like feeling stupid. Nobody does.
Eric (68)
While the term ‘jock’ came up repeatedly in the narratives collected in this study, the term was used very differently than it was employed in the preliminary study. In the 2010 study, the term was used to describe some fearsome creature that appears to have had power over the lives of the participants, in that they did not want to enter the spaces where the ‘jock’ holds sway. Among the older users of the University gyms, the jock is a figure of fun, not fear. Eric remains the exception in this study. It remains an open question as to whether this fearsome jock remains a boogeyman to older students because of the older students’ heightened vulnerability that may stem from a sense of inadequacy and a host of attendant fears that is a result of entering into advanced studies surrounded by younger people.
The closest we get in this present study to an echo of those fears that rang through so clearly from that preliminary work in 2010, is the concern over having one’s body on
94 display in the changing room. Karen (66) reports being afraid of having her students see her while she is getting dressed in the locker room.
I live in fear of meeting one of my students in the changing rooms. It hasn’t happened yet, but I have had some close calls. I don’t know what difference it makes, really, but I am afraid of that. It’s just too… I don’t know. I guess it’s silly, but I think it will rob me of any authority I may have, if my students see me getting out of the shower… But it doesn’t stop me from coming here.
Karen (66)
This is not a generalized fear of all students, or all younger people; Karen is concerned about being caught in an awkward position by her students seeing her without her clothes on, because she fears for her authority in the classroom: she is afraid of losing the respect of her students if they should see her ageing body on display. While the fear of having the body, and specifically the ageing body, displayed with all of its perceived flaws was a strong thread in the narratives coming from the preliminary study as a reason for not going into the athletic spaces on the campus. Karen, though, is saying two things that are very distinct from that narrative. First, Karen does use the space, despite her concerns.
Secondly, her fears are centered on a concern about whether she could remain effective at her job if her students see her outside of the role of instructor. This last concern does intersect with some of the concerns reported by the older students of the 2010 study, the fear Karen voices is more specifically focused on her ability to hold onto her classroom authority by having her body, and not her body of academic work become the focus of her presence.
Gus (68) is more deliberate in his interactions with the younger occupants of his workout space: he does not fear interaction with the younger users, but he does not encourage it.
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He takes control of his space by defining the terms of interactions.
The only time (dealing with the younger people in the space) has occurred –
and it doesn’t happen very often – but the only time it’s occurred, is when I
talk to somebody in their 4th year as personal trainer, or if I see one of my
students – somebody I’ve taught. Then it’s just a conversation; we don’t work
out together, or anything. It’s just – ‘Hi, how’re you doing?’ ‘Ok, thanks.’
That’s probably my attempt to cut it off because this is my mind-free time,
rather than social engagement time. Whereas, they look at it as social
engagement time.
Gus (68)
Regardless of how they do or do not interact with the younger users of the athletic spaces, the older users are intensely aware that the majority of the users of the space are younger than they. That is a dominant condition of the field. Eric and his fellow older students from the preliminary study were uniform in their reaction against engaging in the field of physical activity in the university context because of that fact. And even when he does venture onto the field, Eric’s predisposition towards fear of the other actors in the field – those whose youthful habitus Eric perceives as threatening – overwhelm his intentions to engage within the space. Karen is able to use the spaces, and, despite a nagging fear of the consequences of exposure on her authority, which for Karen resides in her body, or rather, in the perception of her body. Gus, however, has complete mastery over his space in
96 terms of his interactions with the younger actors on the field. He does not fear the interaction with the younger actors on the field because he has spent the greater part of his life creating the terms of engagement for those younger actors. This is what allows Gus, a relative new-comer to exercise, to engage in this new field of endeavour without fear: his doxa as Master, and his understanding of his innate symbolic capital resulting from many years of being dominant in his field means the rules of engagement are different for him than for Eric, who comes to the field without anything he recognizes as doxa18.
Karen occupies a middle ground between the powerless Eric and the independently dominant Gus. Her occupation of the field is troubled by her fear of being confronted in her ageing by one of the younger actors in the field – and thus she risks her authority every time she enters the space. These younger actors, Karen fears, have the power to take away her authority in the classroom by the act of observing her body. By observing her body not in the field of engagement in an exercise class, or on the track, but in the cramped, closed quarters of the locker room. Her naked, ageing body is vulnerable to the power of the younger habitus; her sway in the field of the classroom is potentially made more tenuous by the ability of the younger habitus to upset the balance of power by transferring doxa from the changing room to the classroom.
And yet, despite the belief that she has something important to lose by having her ageing body visible to her students in the locker room, and brushing aside for the moment the tricky question of whether this perceived vulnerability is any different for younger
18 It would be interesting to follow Eric over the course of his studies – he remains uncertain at this point if he will go on to Graduate School – to see if his social and symbolic capital increases with his occupation of the social spaces at the University.
97 professors or instructors in the changing room who might fear losing authority through the emphasis on their similarly constructed bodies (similar in age and presentation to their students’ in the locker room) Karen actively uses the athletic space, even though she believes she has something to lose in doing so because she trusts that the activity itself is good for her. The health narrative outweighs the fear of being undone by the scrutiny of others for Karen. For Eric, though, there is no such redemption story. He perceives his capital as having been eroded before entering the field, by virtue of wearing his age into the classroom when he enrolled at the University while in his late fifties. Eric, like the other students in the preliminary study, does not have a sufficient accumulation of symbolic or social capital to contemplate engaging in the field of the athletic spaces.
Karen has, for her reservations, a sufficiently robust store of capital to use the spaces at the athletic facilities of the University. Gus, and many of the other older people who use the athletic spaces at the University, have long ago acquired the capital to allow them to use the spaces under their own terms. Gus is so confident of his use of the space, that he negates the cultural dominance of the field by the younger habitus. I pressed him at one point on his sense of comfort in an environment that is organized primarily around the needs of younger people, i.e., younger students:
I’m not certain it is organized around the needs of younger people. When I wanted to update my swimming skills I took a class, and there were other profs in it. I took fencing, and there were all kinds of people. So, I don’t know. Maybe some things are organized that way, but I’m not certain if it is as baldly as you put it. And in the weight room, I don’t know… Other than the first week in September and the first week back after Christmas, when everybody’s in there trying to lose weight or trying to impress somebody, but if you come back after Thanksgiving, or after midterms, there’s a good mix of ages in the weight room.
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Gus 70
Jack has similarly dominated in several fields over his life course and he transferred this command of his environment to the gym when he took up his professorship in the late
1960s. That he still holds authority at the site of his athletic endeavours is a sign of his barely diminished symbolic capital. Despite his age – or possibly, as has been discussed, because of his age, he seems to have accumulated even greater symbolic capital on account of his extraordinary physical prowess. Unlike Gus, whose accumulation of capital transferred successfully into the sphere of the gym after many years of very senior placement in other fields, Jack has a similar social placement outside the gym, but he has been dominant in the gym setting for almost 50 years. Although he is comfortable in several fields, the gym is his turf: it is where he feels at home. His interactions with the younger users of his space are a source of enjoyment. Jack has gone out of his way to include younger participants into his “gang” at the gym, and yet he feels that some of the culture in the gym is tarnishing:
Jack: I cannot tell you… how much pleasure I’ve had over the 40 years, interacting with graduate and undergraduate students, running with them and sort of inspiring them in different ways and coaching them. I’ve coached a lot of them, in lifting and so forth. I would say that it’s enriched my life, and hope it’s enriched theirs. It’s been very positive.
The only negative thing I have to say, and this is in a humorous vein – semi- humorous - is that one thing that bugs me about the young people I that they come into the gym and they have these bloody things in their ears, and they sit down on the machines, you know, and it says on the signs – if you’re going to do a set, try and let other people work in with you. They sit down at the machine with those things in their ears and they do a set, and they just sit there. I watch them, because I am waiting to use the machine. I go up to them
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and I go like this to them – (mimes removing earphones) and then I say to them, are you going to do another set, here? Yes. Then I say, did you read the sign? I’m waiting to use the machine. They are not very respectful, some of these kids. Though, it’s a minor point.
I: Is this worse than it was 20 or 30 years ago?
Jack: Yes. I think so. I think the kids have a stronger sense of entitlement now. There’s a lack of respect for their elders than I suspect was there years ago. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me.
Jack (75)
6.5 Observations of Social Space
I used to think about them getting in air conditioning. Why? It’s part of a workout to get all sweaty. But now I think, how nice to have air conditioning on a hot day!
Edgar (70)
As was observed previously, the athletic facilities at the University excite a strict allegiance to the place among the frequent exercisers who participated in the study. Some few respondents had switched facilities and can explain in great detail why they like their currently preferred site over the failings of the other. Tom (68) had worked out at Hart
House for many years as an undergrad and later on an alumni membership. Since his retirement, though, Tom has returned to the University to work out regularly at the
Athletic Centre. “I don’t like Hart House. I don’t know why: it’s dark and I don’t like it. I like it here much better.” These same sentiments are echoed by Gus:
I never liked Hart House. There is something… it’s dark, and it’s… the track is – yelch. I haven’t been in for a long time. Not once I found this space. It’s
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a wonderful space. My god – we have an Olympic sized swimming pool and a weight room that is the envy of a lot of people. And nobody knows about it! And I’m glad!
Gus (70)
Nora, who found the Athletic Centre less congenial after she felt humiliated by a student during a fitness assessment, switched her allegiance to Hart House, where her acceptance is total and unconditional, down to the mats in the hallway.
I like, first of all, I like the building. This beautiful, old building. And then I love the halls with the mats – I just love that, I don’t know why. And the gym upstairs with the machines there, I just love the high ceilings. And do you what I like? It’s like an oasis. It is so peaceful. Not like the Athletic Centre. Up there in the Field House, it is so noisy. There are games there of basketball, and in summer there’s the summer camp. You can’t hear anything.
Nora (68)
Linda (68) is one of the few study participants who trains at one facility, but who would rather train at the other. The reason she is “stuck” is that Hart House does not have air conditioning, which is important to her. When it is pointed out that she might switch for the winter months, and then return to the Athletic Centre for the summer months to take advantage of the air conditioning, Linda demurred19. No: her lot is cast at the Athletic
Centre and that is where she must stay. For the sake of the air conditioning.
19 Linda’s hesitation on this point may be on the economic concern that her work at the University does not leave her “eligible” for gym membership, and now that the membership fees for the facilities are partitioned, membership is exclusive to one facility or the other, not both. It would cost her a fair bit to possess two memberships for the sake of the air conditioning in the summer months.
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Rosie, who, like Adelle and Margot believes gym access should be a condition of employment at the University, has not used the gyms she used to use at both the Athletic
Centre (as an undergrad) and Hart House (as an administrator), primarily because of the financial cost of the memberships. Rosie talked about her acculturation in the locker rooms when she began using the spaces as an undergraduate.
When I was younger, I didn’t like going in the locker room. It bothered me. All the different sizes and shapes – I was inhibited about going into the locker room there. And you know, there are always some individuals who just don’t care!
Rosie (64)
Eric had said adamantly that there was “no way” he would use the athletic spaces because of his concerns about having the younger students looking at him and “judging” him on his body and this fear was intensified when he imagined using the locker rooms. The thought was horrifying for him. So when Eric went into the gym facilities in 2011 it was to test himself against his own fears. He went into both gym spaces on separate occasions to work out. (Eric reports that he exercises regularly at home.) He disliked the spaces, primarily because he felt exposed. He reports feeling “stupid” because he didn’t really know what he could be doing in the space, and he felt intimidated by those he identified as proficient users of the equipment. And interestingly, he eliminated the need to use the locker rooms – the sites he had earlier identified as the most intimidating for him.
I didn’t change. I went in wearing some clothes that could pass for gym clothes or street gear, so I didn’t have to get changed. I had to go to the change room, but I didn’t stay in there. I just stuffed my stuff in a locker: I didn’t bring anything to steal, and I went up. I wasn’t about to change there.
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Eric (68)
Several of the older participants reported on the centrality of the local rink in their childhoods: the rinks were a site of community social contact for adults and for children and many report the importance of skating as a safe place to meet boys.
At Saturday morning, you went skating at the indoor rink. And that was a place to meet boys. And, my god – I was there every single Saturday. And, you know, we each put each other’s arm around our waist, and go around and around.
Nora, (68)
Gus takes obvious delight in reporting having observed a similar phenomenon at the gym spaces where he exercises regularly. Clearly he is pleased with this observation. I wonder if his enjoyment springs from an extension of the temporal potential of the space, in a way that Nora reports in her recollections of the girls, daring in their acceptance of the boy’s arms around their waists as they skate round and round in the chilly, charged air of the rink. Or perhaps this is the warm glee of an older adult watching very young people take their own tentative steps into adulthood:
Oh – and I love this, with the Asian kids: a boy and a girl can’t date, but they can walk around the track together and talk. I love this! It doesn’t work the same way among the Islamic kids, but I see it among some Asian kids. It’s fascinating. The cultural implications of that. Three or four girls will get together and work out with three or four boys. It’s a date! Gus (70)
6.6 The Health Narrative
I was always reading. I already do this (exercise class) for my health. I don’t do it for any other reason. I think I should do it.
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Doris (93)
There were two questions asked of all of the study subjects who identified as exercising regularly and all answered the same to both questions, regardless of any other factors or situational differences. The first has already been mentioned: all participants reported that there was no separation between themselves as a child doing the activities they enjoyed best, and their present perception of themselves. The other question that was asked of all those participants who identified as exercisers (including the one participant of the
21older adults taking part in the study who claimed to be inactive, who, as we have seen, is far more active than he reported), was - why do you exercise? All of the respondents answered, without hesitation, that they do it for their health. Ivan answered by saying he felt he should be exercising for the sake of his health – and his belief that he is not active, and his stated failure to be so seemed to make him uncomfortable. All of the participants have internalized the imperative to train, first, as part of a cultural reproduction of Empire, but also latterly as part of the neo-liberal ideology of taking responsibility for one’s health in an effort not to be a burden on the community.
All of those individuals who have engaged in life-long physical activity, regardless of the nature of the activity: dance, running, skiing, walking, lifting weights, martial arts, group engagement or lone activity, all those who have maintained a life-long attachment to moving can recall a powerful sense of joy in the movement that was present in their childhood and that continues through their activities today. While there is no demonstration of a causal link between the positive responses to early activity and long- term physical activity engagement emerging from this study, there is sufficient suggestion
104 of a connection to warrant a closer examination of the potential role in physical engagement through the life-course.
… I liked running. Ever since I was a little kid. I just loved the feeling of running. And just looking at the sidewalk and seeing the spaces go by. Just the joy of running. I think I really experienced it; the joy of running. That’s a life-long feeling.
Jack (75)
I have always lived for the competition. When I was a little boy running four quarters20 around the football field, I’d be running with somebody else, who might have two quarters, so I’d run abreast, and for his last lap around, it would be a race. And then doing circuits – I see lads now, doing circuits, and they’re doing 34, 36 seconds and we would always be doing below 30 seconds and then we’d drop down to 28 and then we’d take our shoes off and there’d be blood on the track. And it was always a contest, but – I’ve always been competitive with myself.
Edgar (70)
A rule is sometimes best demonstrated by the exceptions, and in this particular regard, there are three examples that prove the rule: Doris, Ivan and Gus. Most long-term exercisers report deriving significant pleasure from the activities themselves, despite the metaphor of labour that is attached to their training. The respondents “love” their body- work. They “really enjoy” the movement; they have “fun” at the gym. This is probably
20 Edgar regularly received ‘quarters’ as punishment at his boarding school, where recalcitrant boys were made to run two times around the football field, per quarter. No one seems to have noticed that Edgar thrived on the punishment. In fact, Edgar grew up to duplicate the punishment himself in his daily practice since then.
105 not a universal response to the level of physical toil these individuals engage in. But our soldiers were trained early to step up to challenge. The narratives of Gus and Doris, on the other hand, tell about finding some joy in this essentially unpleasant process of being active for the betterment of their health. Gus (70), has found the joy of solitude and has come to enjoy the responses of his body through bodily engagement: while Doris (93), prizes the society of her exercise classmates after the class is done.
Gus (70), has had a patchy history of exercise engagement. He was involved in baseball as a child and describes his outdoor activities in the working class neighbourhood where he spent his early childhood with a wistful enthusiasm. After he moved in his teenage years, however, Gus reports that he felt more comfortable with his books and away from the jocks.
I was the Richard Dreyfus in American Graffiti – I was the guy who was nerdy, sits with the books, and has his way paid through university because he’s bright. And that was not – it just was not on my radar at that point. In high school I found academics easy, but that was also where I put my focus. That (finding the gym), happened later.
Gus (70)
Gus played hockey in a B league - he was invited into the A league at his University, but he abandoned that because of the aggressively competitive environment and returned to the B leagues where he was much happier among the guys who were just learning to skate. Giving up playing hockey when he took on full time work, Gus subsequently fell into a state of inactivity for 35 to 40 years.
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I became aware, well – I knew it wasn’t right, but I got into the particularly academic administrator’s trap of, ‘I don’t have time to do this’. You come home at night and you’re tired, so you drink, and the calories go on. You don’t exercise, and the calories go on. You drive to work, rather than taking the subway – because you’ve got to get into the office early! It was on its way to some sort of early destructive episode. I don’t know what it would have been…
Gus (70)
Gus’ passage back into physical activity was neither smooth, nor enjoyable, but he persisted. When we spoke in late August, Gus had got back to a place in his workout experience that he recognized from this childhood play with his friends in the street outside his home: he reconnected with the potential for fun in movement.
It was horrible. It hurt! You start feeling so much better. You feel the physical signs: first of all, you feel the pounds dropping off. It’s remarkable. Then you start feeling good. And I’ve had a recent experience of that, we can talk about that, if you’d like, but you start actually feeling good. And you’re just capable of doing more. You know you can do this. So when Mary had it planned out so that we would acclimatize slowly, I think we went to Arikipe first, which is 6,000 feet. And the first day we walked – maybe a mile, a half a mile, from where the hotel was into the town square, and I was puffing a little as we went up hill. The second day I was not puffing anymore. This works. This works.
Gus (70)
Like Ivan (90), Doris (93), has always been more drawn to the library than to the gym.
She reports swimming in the local river with her large extended family as a child, and at the Y when she came to Toronto in the 1930s, but Doris did not become a regular exerciser until she was already in her 60s. As with most of her activities, Doris is attracted to doing things when the activities hold the promise of increased social involvement: she
107 had noticed people she knew from both church and the University out running around the field on the “back campus”, and so she began to run at her lunch times when she was already in her 60s. And similarly, when a group of people she knew began taking a class at the Athletic Centre, just before her retirement in 1984, Doris joined. She remains with that class to this day. But when asked what she likes about the class Doris said, “Oh, no, I don’t enjoy it. But afterward, a group of us go for coffee and we talk.”
Doris, like every other participant in this study, reports that formal exercise is something she does for her health. However, from Doris’ narrative it is clear that the social opportunities offered through participation in a regular gym class are a major focus for her, and that the social opportunities have always, from swimming in the Red River more than 80 years ago, to taking swimming lessons at the YWCA in the years before the war in the 1930s, to her present activities, which she has done with astounding regularity since she first began running in 1979, moving to her exercise class at the Athletic Centre on her retirement in 1984: the social opportunities have been Doris’ reason to begin, and her reason to continue to engage in physical activity. Extending her activities outside of the gym (the gym is what Doris identifies as her primary exercise location), Doris is among the more determined walkers in this study – clocking approximately 6 km per day, when she is going about her routine. Doris will frequently exceed this amount of walking when running occasional errands.
Oh, yes! I spend very little on car tickets. I think that… you’ve got to keep the body moving. And I’m fortunate in that I don’t have an ache or a pain. I have enjoyed good health all my life.
Doris (93)
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Ivan (90), says that he always preferred to be reading and only did activities as a child because his parents insisted he do so. While Ivan has persisted in his activities over a span of nine decades; one suspects he gets some benefit from them. That Ivan does not include his hiking and associated activities as physical activity has been mentioned in the context of his devalourization of outdoor activities over those that are located in gyms.
6.7 Illness and Exercise
The participants in this study are no less prone to accident or illness than the wider population despite the meta-narrative about exercising for their health. Exercise does not prevent or cure illnesses: push ups offer little protection against autoimmune, or metabolic, or mood disorders, although exercise might arguably provide a stronger base from which to recover from a significant illness or it might provide a therapeutic support when used in injury or illness recovery. But, as can been demonstrated through an examination of the Incident and Accident Reports of both facilities, not all incidents of injury are reported to the facilities staff. Many injuries of the types reported by the participants in this study are cumulative, not sudden: they are borne of repeated stress, and most of those – especially among the seasoned exercisers – go unreported: the injuries and sometimes the incidents that produced them are considered by most regular exercisers to be personal matters, outside the purview of the institution. Injuries are personally acquired and personally dealt with. Even in the situations where the condition is directly related to the training type or style, there are no records kept of the illness or accident, except on the bodies of the participants. Edgar’s knee replacements do not
109 appear in any of the injury and accident reports. Nora’s debilitating depression went undetected by all but those closest to her.
The ageing individual has a vested interest in under-reporting both injury and the journey back to full bodily engagement, as there is always a risk to capital within the gym setting when the habitus weakens as a result of bodily injury or illness. This loss of capital occurs in the medical fields as an older patient, as in virtually all of the other fields the ageing habitus can occupy. There is very little capital available to an ageing habitus that is ill or broken. The medical field frames illness as the natural state of the ageing habitus: for those who have invested considerable time in reordering their bodies to circumvent ageing by spending time in the gym labouring to build up their bodies it can feel like a betrayal to find they can be just as vulnerable to illness or injury as someone who has not spent hundreds or even thousands of hours working out. Old injuries are a joke or even a source of pride to athletes. Toughing out an injury shows commitment. A new injury among the older exercisers is a source of worry: will this be my last? Will I, like Edgar, need to give up something else I love to do? Or like Gary, will I have to choose the “old man option”?
The only participant in this study who disclosed an illness that was as the primary impetus for beginning to exercise is Gus.
My weight hit about 230 pounds. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. My wife is a physician; she could hear my breathing stop at night. And she said, you’ve got to do something about this. She was very kind: she never said I was overweight, or anything like this. She just said, “I don’t want you to die.” So I did the study and found my sleep was being interrupted 120-130 times a night with the apneaic breathing.
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Gus (70)
Gus began the laborious process going to the gym and getting over his intense dislike of gyms, and jocks, and exercise. In the process, Gus has recovered his health: he sleeps better, he feels better and he and his wife are able to enjoy the active life they had imagined for their retirement years. Gus consciously trains to be able to extend his years of mobility and he has accomplished what he has – dramatically decreasing his weight, increasing his aerobic capacity and his stamina, through finding the play in the activity he had begun by hating.
As noted in the literature, most people demonstrate an impressive knowledge of the reasons they ought to be exercising, with citations of chapter and verse from the gospel of exercise (Chae, et al 2010). They are good consumers of the messages that they will age better, experience fewer health problems, and live into an active old age if only they would exercise more. From the older participants in this study, a belief that they are not exercising enough does not appear to trouble those who work – or have worked, in unstructured groups.
There is also a confrontation by some of the study participants with the fact that their regular adherence to physical exercise has left them broken. Edgar (70), Gary (62), Adelle
(69), and Tom (68), have all lived through, or live with significant medical disorders that have resulted directly from their physical activities over time and that have left each of them with some degree of permanent impairment. That this potential for harm is not part of the larger discourse that physical activity is good for you, has left these individuals with a sense of betrayal.
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You put the time in, and you invest the energy in getting good at something, I mean getting really good at something, and then you find one day, you can’t do it anymore. Because of something that happened all that time ago. So what do you do? The time comes when you have to move on. So you move on. Now I go to Tai Chi and I keep a low profile.
Gary (62)
6.8 The Loneliness of the Ageing
I have just reached the point where I’m tired of groups… I come down here and have an individual, relaxed time, where my brain doesn’t have to do anything; my body moves and my brain goes into neutral. So it’s quite different from when I was younger when I wanted people around me, and to have the fellowship. I don’t need it anymore. I prefer not to have it. That’s age. It’s a sense of maturing: you don’t need the peer support. I don’t need the peer support in the way I used to enjoy it. It may be egocentric without being egotistical: self-directed.
Gus (70)
Gary (62), shares Gus’ devolution from group games to lone exploration of movement as he becomes older that several of the study participants demonstrate. As a child and through high school, Gary sought to build social capital as a black kid in an all-white community through playing baseball and basketball, a field in which he showed no exceptional talent – other than scoring “a one” off 21of the school jock in baseball once, a
21 Being utterly ignorant of baseball, I needed to ask what this meant. Gary explained that he hit the ball once and got to first base when the school jock was pitching.
112 feat on which he “dined out” for some time afterward. His post secondary experiences of activity led him to try fencing, which led subsequently to other martial arts and then cycling. In his 40s and into his 60s, it was not unusual for Gary to get on his bike and cycle 100 kilometers or more several times a week. He still bikes regularly, though he is mostly confined to commuting within the city. Arthritis and stress injuries developed over decades of training prevent him from practicing in Karate and he hung up his gi for the last time two years ago. Gary now trains in Tai Chi and Qigong to keep his joints and his muscles moving. And while he regrets not being able to move like he once gloried in doing, his Tai Chi is his ‘alone’ time, even though he trains in a class setting. Like Gus’ recent realization that what he is doing is a form of play that has its roots in childhood movement, it is not lost on Gary that his life-long physical activity is rooted in the pleasures of “jumping off things, and ranging about” with his brothers and their friends.
It is this sense of play that as an adult Gary has been recreating through his activities, which has focused primarily on solitary pursuits22. “I don’t think I was ever too much into that big-groupie thing”. For Gary, as for many of the others, the play may extend to others in the immediate area, but the soldier at play is a loner.
This loneliness can result from the individual nature of the activity, but it also derives from the frustration of a practitioner with a high degree of skill who, because he can no longer train in his principle activity due to long term injury, must find a less stressful alternative to the activity from which he had derived a large part of his identity. From
22 One of the many apparent contradictions about the practice of martial arts is that, beyond the very basic levels, it is principally solitary practice, even when one works with others.
113 having been the Master, Gary is now a lowly student. But a student who is very likely a superior practitioner to those instructing him:
And you know, it’s not like I can’t see all the stuff that’s happening. I don’t mean all the political shit. I stay well away from that. But, so, I was doing a set last week – and this is one of the beginning sets, and I realized that your feet, when you get to a certain place, your feet need to be like this… (demonstrates with his hands) if you are going to get to the next step. But I look around and nobody’s doing that. None of the senior students23 are doing that. So when the instructor came by, I said don’t your feet need to be like this because of what’s coming? And he laughed and said, yeah, but you don’t need to know that. And I’m like – what? So I don’t know. I just go and do my thing and try to forget about it.
Gary (62)
I enjoyed the interaction. …When I think back…. You know, I‘m quite happy in my own company. There was a lot of emphasis on group activities. And I consider myself a bit of a loner. Like, I can retreat into myself but still participate with groups of people – and I was always an active participant.
Edgar (70)
Nora (68) too, talks about her lone exploration after her migration from the Athletic
Centre to Hart House, which came about for two reasons: the first is that she was angry about being made to feel unimportant and uninteresting when she went for a fitness assessment:
“It was because I wasn’t interesting to the student, the young woman there. Because I wasn’t an Olympic athlete she wasn’t interested in helping me.
23 By “senior students” Gary is referring to advanced practitioners of the art, not their age.
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She was not very nice about it. She made me feel like I was not worth her time.”
Nora (68)
But the second reason for Nora’s move to Hart House came about when her favourite exercise class teacher had made the move from the AC to Hart House. “I followed her, but I never did take another class. Isn’t that funny? I don’t know why. I guess I am happy on my own, doing things my own.” (Nora, 68).
Jack is distressed by the recent death of one of his gym mates and particularly the deaths of those who were, like him, committed to regular exercise. There is a sense of betrayal that emerges when fit people get sick. The illness, it is suggested, was visited upon the wrong person - unless the environment made them sick, unless the activity itself made them sick. Those left behind will grope for reasons to explain an illness or death. After more than 60 years of intensive training, Jack is fearful that the training may be turning inward against the people who thought they were immune to illness by virtue of their physical activities. Jack’s speculation here is, in part, located in very raw grief as he attempts to understand the loss of yet another friend who was believed too strong to get sick. Amid his grief, though, it is possible to hear Jack question the marching orders he undertook when just a child: he worked hard to keep fit. He had kept the faith. And now his friends are leaving. This betrayal can alternatively be interpreted as an expression of a
‘just world’ fallacy: the search for an explanation for the illness as part of an attempt to parse the world as essentially fair. In this particular example, Jack tries to understand the deaths and illnesses of his friends who had heeded the instructions of the health imperative and had become, in Jack’s words, “super fit”: despite their commitment to
115 their health through fitness, these individuals nonetheless became ill. These men were exemplars of the benefits of active ageing, and still they became sick. Jack searches here for an alternate, logical explanation of the contingent nature of life, seeking comfort in environmental hazards, or even the possibility that he himself pushed his friends too hard.
The question Jack raises about the potential harmful effects of long-term over-exertion is certainly intriguing, however.
Jack: We were fantatics. The sad thing is… a lot of the original guys have died – and sadly, they died young. Which is a real...That’s a perplexing problem for me. But that’s another subject. It bothers me because - that guy - (points to photograph on his desk) do you see the guy... there? He died at 53. And (pointing to a another man in a different photo on his desk) he’s the latest guy who died. An Architecture professor here at the University of Toronto - died at 58. These guys were super fit. They are the last people you would suspect that they might succumb to leukaemia, and brain cancer, and stuff like that… Why are these super fit guys getting sick and dying… in numbers that exceeded what you’d expect? This is all supposition, now, I don’t have any hard data on it, but it led me to wonder about, number one – was there something about - ‘cause we trained on the track in Hart House a lot - was there something about the Hart House track? Something in the air? Some chemicals? Because when we trained, we breathed so deeply, I mean we were inhaling whatever there was that was there, that could have contributed to this? Or - and or, I should say, was the type of fanatic training that we were doing, which is really excessive, playing a role, suppressing our immune system, doing something we can’t measure, either individually, or in concert with something in the air at Hart House that we were breathing in? That would lead to this unusual – highly unusual - number of sicknesses and deaths that we’ve experienced.
I: How many deaths have you had in your group?
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Jack: I would say about maybe eight have died. And almost none of them are old. They were younger guys.
I: Out of…? 20? 30?
Jack: In a group of… I can’t say without checking the data, but I would say… 30…. And now there a couple more guys that are very sick, too.
But it’s only something we can speculate about, if we haven’t made a proper study. But even if I look at it from a scientific point of view, let’s say for example, hypothetically, that there was something in the air that we were exposed to all those years, breathing in and could have affected us, and also that the hyper stress that we subjected ourselves to, could have contributed to it. Then, the ones who survive, myself included, maybe our DNA repair mechanism is more effective. This is a genetic thing. And we survived, whereas our less fortunate friends didn’t. I’m just speculating. This is highly speculative. But, I – you know – I wonder about this, to be honest with you.
But interestingly… in our entire group, only one - a couple of guys - died of heart attacks. But they were - I don’t like to use this term, but those were some of our lesser lights, who didn’t really push themselves, like our main group. But really, only one of our main group who worked really hard, had a heart attack. He had a heart attack about 7 or 8 years ago, and he did the Sunnybrook Rehab thing, and he’s still running. I’m going to run with him today.
Jack (75)
6.9 The Long Goodbye
And one of the biggest things you lose as you age, is the concentration. And one of the things you learn, when you start losing your concentration, is when you’re going down a straight on a race track, is - you don’t touch – you don’t
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put any pressure on the break, but you take your foot off the accelerator and you touch the brake pedal at the marking sign when you know you’re going to have to start braking. And that’s your wake-up call. ‘Cause the number of people you see coming in on a rig, because they end up in the sand trap, and then I was coming in, and all of a sudden, I was in the sand trap. And this happened, because when you’re doing two hundred miles an hour and … I was a force in it… in (the 1990s), I was Race Car Driver of the Year in the States. Someone living in Canada – for the States. And this is a vote by other drivers, other former recipients of the award. It was a sport I had a mediocre talent for, but I loved it. I really loved it. So, when we talk about… that was a passion that I realized I should stop. And I was quite comfortable. It was the time to retire.
Edgar (70) Edgar (68)
Adelle (69) had spend more than fifty years taking a regular dance class, and she gave it up when she felt she looked “a little silly” taking class with all the ambitious, svelte young women. But why was that an issue? And why did Adelle stop when she did? Was it just the ageing habitus that had outlived her right to be in the field? Probably not. After all, Adelle had not aged overnight. She must have been aware of the age disparity between herself and her fellow dancers long before she felt she must stop dancing. When gently pressed on the point, Adelle began to talk of the injuries: the aching knees and the feet damaged by the dance and the confining slippers she wore for over five decades.
Adelle is wistful when she says, “I wish I could still dance. But I can’t.” It would seem, then, that it was less the fact of being an older woman in a room full of young aspiring dancers, but rather, the limitations of her own body resulting from accumulated injuries that led Adelle to abandon her participation of dance.
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What is presented through these data are not narratives of retirement, or ‘social death’ such as those found among retiring athletes who have be cast aside by what looked like a fulfilling life into the unappreciated life of the average Joe; the average ageing Joe. In the case of athletic retirement the athlete is put out of the game: the decision is made for the athlete, whether through injury or an external decision-maker. In the case of these narratives, the participant is leaving. The difference is the motivation, which is intrinsic; the older participant is making decisions about how to negotiate the way she or he leaves the field. This is a subtle story of a person designing their own exit, which is in itself a metaphor for the end of life, but a soft one that illustrates the power of choice after the realization that it might be time to leave. What is clear is that these are not snap decisions.
As Adelle did not just suddenly decide to stop dancing, Edgar is not stopping his activities without giving himself a lot of warning and a number of transitioning stages, through which he can manage his identity. Edgar performs the role of the transitions he enacts, first as a former proficient in (x) activity, and then as a former practitioner of (x) activity, now a practitioner of (y) activity. Gary negotiates his way in T’ai Chi in a way that allows him to be active: to negotiate the politics of this transition, he needs not to be seen to have the expertise he has: so he takes on the iconic role of the blind master. Or like Kathie, who uses vague language to simultaneously encompass past practices and present intentions to negotiate her own unstated performance of a transition from past activity to present inactivity, these respondents are managing their identities through change.
Among the most accomplished athletes to participate in this study, Edgar (70) tells a story that is fundamentally an exit narrative when he talks of cutting back on his expectations of his performance – although he is aware he can still pull a crowd when he wants to put the effort in. But that effort costs. The back story of significant illness and knee replacements
119 and other health issues leading to his gradual decline in participation are barely given a reference when he talks about his retreat from the high-octane feats – both literal and figurative - of the previous six decades: this is primarily a narrative about exiting the field slowly and with dignity. Edgar asks self-reflexively if his prowess was driven by a lack of confidence. He has given himself permission to pull back, but one wonders what the journey has been for him to get to this place of giving that permission. Will Edgar and
Gary become like Ivan - always active but denying the facts of his activity because he believes it to be – whatever it is - below his estimation? But as he gradually withdraws to a place of greater safety on the edges of the field of physical activity, Edgar wonders about the negative side of athleticism:
Edgar: I remember my dad came once to a five mile race we had – I must have been about thirty-eight or thirty-nine at the time, and my dad said to me, he said - you know, being a doctor - he said, you were really very pale there – do you really think you’re doing yourself any good? And two years later, I decided, yes, I’d set all the fast times in running, [in terms of the informal, but intensely competitive training group at the gym in which Edgar was a central figure for four decades] but I really wasn’t going to push myself hard anymore. I think it’s counter productive.
And I did something, oh – about eight months ago. We hold these… we have… you know, with these ankles, I couldn’t do the ellipticals, and so I was falling out of the contests the guys were having. And you know, a lot of the young students compete, too. And they - on one Friday - they were going to have a calorie burning competition… you know: 15 minutes on the rowing machine. And I practiced for about six weeks for it – I didn’t tell anybody, and I’d come in around 11 o’clock. And, for me, it was like my last car race. I just wanted to do… And I did, 258, which is pretty good. The chap next to me was 356, but he was a third my age. And anyway, I beat everybody on it.
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But it was tough. I knew I’d do 10 minutes and my competitive nature would carry me through the last 5 minutes. But I had to get to 10 minutes at a certain number of calories and then just keep going. And… I couldn’t even stand up to get off the rowing machine, I just sort of sat there.
But I’d made a statement. You know, there were a whole lot of people watching. The person next to me was the chap that they all thought would win it. That is, I suppose, you could say it is a lack of confidence, to do something to prove they can still do something… And I didn’t tell anyone at that time… Jack said to me, God, he said, you looked terrible when you finished that. And I said, yeah: I didn’t feel too good, either. I went home, had a cup of tea and went to bed!...
I: So would you repeat that contest?
(Edgar shakes his head adamantly)
I: No?
Edgar: No. I go up, and I was on the rowing machine yesterday and I did 218. And it was very comfortable. And 218 is good, – you know, it’s not… 218 is good. Anyway, you know, it’s… I’m trying to say… Anyway... It’s … You know, I stopped running, as I said, when I was 43, because I had a {X} on my leg, and when I came back, I found it had affected my running style. But I could see all my friends were running 32, 33 minutes, and I could not envisage myself running at more than thirty. When I turned 50, I came down here early in the morning, and I thought: I’m going to run a sub-thirty, and it was the toughest run, I mean… at thirteen laps and I was about 5 seconds under 30, and I just felt like I was swallowing my heart - it was that, my legs were sore. Anyway, I did it. Actually, I was about 8 seconds under when I finished… But the next day, my whole legs were so stiff. These muscles here and things like that. It’s not …You’ve got to move on. And I think, the main thing is… A lot of people are having knee problems, hip problems, lower back problems…
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I: Activity will exact a toll.
Edgar: This is what I’m saying. Great golfers have shoulder problems, hip problems… These tennis aces they have now, I’d be interested to see how Federer is when he’s 70.
Chapter Summary
This chapter illustrates my interrogation of the study data to understand the ways in which older people explicate their physical activity praxis and their ways in which the spaces and extrinsic culture operates on them in their pursuit of their activities.
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Chapter 7
And tell everyone to save, no matter what pensions you think you’ve got.
Doris (93)
Summary of Results
Introduction
The findings of this study include institutionalized ageism, not only at one of the two athletic spaces included in this study, but also in some of the other institutions at the
University; a need to find ways of including suggested ways to extend the scope of the data collected in this study, as well as potential future studies to supplement the data presented here. I have also included some recommendations for anti-ageist policy as well as program implementation based on data from this study.
7.1 Findings
Institutionalized Ageism in One of Two Exercise Facilities
The study demonstrates a tolerance of ageism at the Athletic Centre as reported by both staff and users of the space. This tolerance for ageism was illustrated in reported experiences of older members who say they were “humiliated” by AC staff during fitness testing; for example, the staff member appeared uninterested in the respondent because she was older and not an elite athlete. Additionally there were unconfirmed reports by staff of overtly ageist remarks about both staff and other members in anonymous program evaluations. These reports remain
123 unconfirmed because the AC administration did not respond to requests to disclose the contents of the evaluations. Staff and older members’ reports appear consistent on this issue, however.
Further, the requirements of the Research Ethics Board that the population of this study be provided with extraordinary safeguards, (for example, that older people should not be included in focus groups due to an inability to guarantee anonymity) and that they be recognized as having heightened vulnerability to manipulation by researchers because of their age, and that they be given contacts for mental health professionals as well as pamphlets for long-term care facilities because of the potential of unintended consequences of being asked questions, is interpreted by this author as another form of institutionalized ageism. The suggestion that age is an unmitigated factor in mental frailty or physical frailty was experienced by respondents - and the researcher - as overtly ageist. The implicit infantalization of the older respondents in this study through the responses fro the REB illustrates the expectation of diminished social capital that is assumed of older adults generally.
The Particular Experiences of Older Students
There may be some particular vulnerabilities experienced by the older students interviewed that are unique to an older student population, because the particular vulnerabilities in their experiences as older students. This suggests that perhaps some programming could be created through the athletic facilities to specifically address the needs of mature students as part of their social integration into the wider university culture.
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The habituation of long-term users of gyms to gym culture is transportable among gym locations
There are two identifiable features of the older adults who regularly use the gym spaces at the
University: the older users of the spaces all articulated clear childhood connections with bodily movement that they remember fondly. No older participants reported such a childhood connection through structured, adult-led activities: the reports were of walking, running, skating or swimming, playing on swing sets, with other children or alone, but never in a structured context. The second feature is that, while some older participants have remained in situ at the University for five decades or longer and that, as one respondent put it, “they have grown old here” (Gillian) so that the gym spaces are as familiar to them. In this, the Faculty and the Emeritus Faculty who use the University gyms are seen to treat the gyms as their personal playgrounds, in some cases exerting a dominance over the spaces and some of the other users of the space. The long-term, regular users of the gym spaces who were more transient as adults show a similar level of confidence in their occupation of the gym spaces. These long-term users of gym spaces in general are habituated to gym culture in other places, and so their occupation of Hart House or of the Athletic Centre is a natural extension of familiar activities. This habituation to the general culture of the gym field can be interpreted as social and symbolic capital that appears to be transferrable from one site to another with increased experience within a generalized field.
The experiences of older people who use the athletic spaces in the university setting can elucidate the social context and culture of both the gym spaces and the social requirements of older people who wish to engage, or to remain engaged, in physical activity.
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To extend what emerged among the regular users of the gym spaces at the University to other, older adults less acclimatized to gym culture who might wish to use the spaces, perhaps the creation of bridging programming might make the acculturation less intimidating. Regular intake sessions, beginners’ classes, and perhaps one-on-one instruction offered less as an add- on and more as a general service to help new users of the space acculturate. . This will need to be done in an environment in which the institutionalized ageism that emerged through the study is properly exposed and remedied through the appropriate policy and staff training measures.
Is there something about the older exercisers that we can apply to physical activity programming for older adults, regardless of the setting?
Beyond encouraging more children to play outside and out of formal, structured programming so that they learn to connect to the sense of freedom and power located in their own bodies that might induce them to be active on their own terms over their entire life course, there are ways to open up physical activity and release physical activity from the gyms. Gyms, Sassetelli points out in her book, Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialisation of Discipline and Fun
(2010), have, since the 1980s, become more successful as businesses by offering up-scale environments for exercisers. Those who can afford it will go to clubs offering more amenities, including bars and laundry services over bare-bones, neighbourhood gyms to exercise. The activity is often less about the physical activity for participants than it is about the exercise of symbolic capital through the display of membership and conspicuous leisure. Gyms produce cultures that are about the flexing of social and symbolic capital. There are ways of releasing physical activity from these intense, highly commodified environments through some accessible, cultural modifications to space, or simply changes to allowable uses of existing spaces. However, gyms have to some degree developed as they did in response to a need for
126 safe social environments in which to exercise without the fear of harassment, or other forms of unwanted attention that had previously made gyms unsavoury spaces that were unsafe for some. Participation in physical activity is more accessible to many people because of this very disciplining of the spaces. What is needed is to expand on the types of spaces in which physical activity is possible, rather than to take away the conditions under which physical activity is made possible for more people. For example, walking, constructing adult-sized play structures, encouraging ways to use the built spaces of the University (e.g., walking up and down St.
George by climbing and walking around the planters as one progresses down the street) to encourage their use by the wider University community can widen the invitation to use the existing gym spaces as well.
Do the gym spaces at the University inhibit participation among older members of the broader University community?
One of the study participants (Gus, 70) actively challenged my suggestion that the gym spaces at the University are designed for younger people. The majority of the other regular gym users expressed minor concerns over social interactions that might be less generational and more generally socio-cultural in nature, such as perceived rudeness, use of head phones (which several study participants mentioned as a source of irritation, as they see those individuals using personal devices as socially removed and unaware of others in their space precisely because of “being wired” to the devices (Jack, 75)).
The ageism noted in the results of this study was reported by several users of the Athletic
Centre and by staff there who report having been made uncomfortable by remarks made by other users of the gym spaces (complaints about the “grannies” or the “wrinklies” in the classes) and by senior staff (who have verbally and through policy emphasized that the space is
127 meant for students, which implicitly excludes older adults – including older students, as well as a tolerance for ageist remarks).
7.1.1 The Health Imperative and Ageing
This investigation sought to explore the conditions and motivations of the older people who use the gyms at the University to see what is different about the older adults that use these spaces. Exercising, for all of the pressures placed on individuals to do it, is not normative behaviour in a culture in which physical labour has been devalued in favour of white-collar work.. The drive to encourage older people to exercise is part of a larger discourse of health intervention promising to forestall the types of physical decline that result from ageing as part of a larger health strategy focused on prevention of disease which, since the medical model of ageing establishes ageing as a physical disorder, includes normal ageing.
This predication of ageing as disease further stigmatizes the ageing individual, while at the same time, attempts to goad ageing individuals into stopping their ageing through physical activity. The creation of categories of ‘successful ageing’ and ‘unsuccessful ageing’ serve only to dominate the older actor and while the health imperative is clearly resonant among the older population – for who wants to die of some lingering disease that might have been prevented by a few laps, or to become a burden on your children? -All of the participants in this study reported health as a primary reason for exercising, or for needing to exercise..
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7.1.2 The Use of Gym Spaces and Exercise Persistence
One observation is that many of those older individuals who exercise do so because they have always done so, although almost all participants report periods of several months to
40 years in which they did not exercise in any consistent fashion. These individuals report a close attachment to the feelings generated by movement for them, which is absent from the discourse of the occasional exercisers, (Dallaire et al., 2012). Participants who have maintained a long-term engagement in physical activity talk about their “love” of their body-work; they “enjoy” the sensations that are expanded to include their surroundings.
Further, there is a reporting of a strong attachment to the surroundings of the long-term, committed exerciser that includes not only their fellow participants who occupy the space
– and who may or may not be engaged with them in their activities in a structured way – but that also includes a strong attachment to the location of their enjoyment: they have formed a bond with the physical space.
What is clear from this work is that the participants do not occupy an ageing habitus, as it is often presented in the literature; they occupy a separate ageing habitus of those with an engagement – often a fierce engagement - with their ageing bodies. This fierce engagement has nothing to do with the health imperative: the drive appears to be born out of a need to express themselves through their bodies and through the environments that allow them to so express themselves. This does not leave the participants immune to disease, or loss, or decline. But it does mark them as different from the wider populations of older individuals. Not because they are better although, to watch them, it is clear their mastery over their bodies has provided them with far greater symbolic and social capital than their inactive counterparts, but because they experience their bodies differently: ‘the
129 active ageing habitus’ is a distinct habitus from that which is often termed ‘the ageing habitus’.
Of the individuals who have not remained in one geographic location for most of their adult lives, and yet have maintained a high level of physical engagement, it would appear that habituation to gym environments –provides them with the confidence to go into any similar environment and to occupy the space without apology, even where the individual appears self-effacing or low-key. This is in stark contrast with the individuals from the preliminary study, who could not countenance going into an unfamiliar space because of their perceptions of their own ageing bodies and their projections of what perceptions of the other, younger bodies that might inhabit the space might be applied to them.
This does not suggest that the study participants who have a long term engagement with exercise do not have personal concerns about their bodies, or that they have no negative estimations of themselves in their own ageing processes, but rather that, because of the primacy of the activity, because they derive pleasure from the activity and from their engagement with their bodies, (Dallaire, 2012) they do not regard the location or the space as an obstacle, even among those who have experienced frequent geographic relocations over their life course. There is a clear sense of entitlement to the spaces among the persistent exercisers in the study that appears to come from a high level of generalized social and symbolic capital among those respondents whose social and educational attainment place them in the upper middle class or higher and whose use of the gym spaces are perceived as a natural extension of their offices at the university, (Jack, Gus,
Edgar). There is a similar presumption of symbolic capital displayed among those whose long-term familiarity with other gyms has habituated them to gym culture as they age,
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(Nora, Karen, Gary). Greater uncertainty in using the gym spaces is displayed among those respondents who have not been acclimatized to gym culture, (Adelle, Ivan, Diane,
Kathy).
7.1.3 The Privileging of Indoor Activity
Also of note is the unmistakable privileging of indoor space and the physical activity emerging from the data. Activity that occurs indoors now seems to be placed at greater value than activities than are engaged in out of doors, even among respondents whose activities occur exclusively outdoors, (Ivan, 90). While these outdoor pursuits may be
‘fun’, they do not warrant serious attention as ‘exercise’. They are just fun. The same individuals who report these outdoor activities as devalued because they do not happen in the gyms, also tend to identify their indoor work as the real exercise. (Tom (68), Jack (75)
Linda (66)).
7.2. Study Limitations
Among the obvious limitations of this study is the location in a university setting which affords a set of conditions that are probably unique: that the respondents have attained an unusually high level of academic achievement, and a higher than average socio-economic location which has, in most cases within this study, derived from their educational attainment and their employment. Exercise, particularly recreational exercise that takes place outside of the context of domestic, or paid labour situations, is a pursuit of the privileged classes and is an expression of conspicuous leisure. The majority of respondents in this study evince a habitus in the educational fields that appears to have
131 been transposed into their occupations of the exercise fields with a transportation of authority. This transfer of capital from the professional sphere to the gym leaves these individuals with greater social capital. They are immune to the fears and concerns of the older students of the initial study, who were afraid to occupy the athletic spaces at the
University because they possess less symbolic and social capital than those older users of the spaces with acknowledged cache within the University.
That many of the same participants have been operating within the same field – literally the same field – for so long is probably unique to a university setting, and certainly within an urban environment it would be difficult to duplicate these conditions except at a university. While this affords closer examination, the results would be very different, and possibly less satisfyingly uniform, if solicited from a more transient population.
7.3 Contributions, Recommendations and Conclusions
Contributions
7.3.1 The ‘Mask of Ageing’ and Bourdieu’s constructions of Habitus, Field and
Capital
The blending of the theoretical frameworks used to analyse the data from this study, the
‘mask of ageing’ and Bourdieu’s presentations of capital, field and habitus, has been a useful tool in analysing issues of ageing, and particularly in attempting to relocate the body as central to explorations of ageing. There is little work on ageing from the position of the engagement of the body (Tulle and Dorrer, 2012; Tulle, 2009 and 2008; Öberg,
1996). This theoretical structure offers a plasticity with which to effectively examine both reactions to, and phenomena of, ageing that allows for analysis of both structure and
132 agency within a specific context – in this case, the athletic spaces at the University. As a theoretical framework it will require more testing and development, but this study has been useful as an experiment to determine the ways in which such a theoretical combination might work. There are other frameworks to be explored as well; less fashionable theories including Continuity Theory, abandoned as limited more than three decades ago, might be reconsidered and indeed, recombined with more robust frameworks to better explicate the experience of those older adults who are transitioning to modified pursuits as they age, or engaging in different activities to accommodate physical limitations, as with Edgar or Gary, or those who are indeed withdrawing from physical activity (Adelle) and those who cannot, for complex reasons, including the need to appear to adhere to a neo-liberalist doctrine of self-care, or because they feel they need to perform an identity as an active person, (Kathie, or Diane) do not appear to wish to admit they do not want to be active anymore.
7.3.2 Highlight Ageing and the Ageing Body as a Subject in Physical Cultural
Studies and in Sociology of Sport in North America
Beyond a very narrow scope of inquiry, ageing, ageing bodies and the experience of ageing, have been largely absent from the field of physical cultural studies. This study represents a foray into this area of inquiry, where there is yet so much to learn. The ways in which age is socially constructed is subject to change and the mechanisms of those constructions need to be reassessed. The potential for the politicization of ageing beyond being identified as a consumer cohort has yet to be examined and we require further study of the performative aspects of ageing.
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Recommendations
7.3.3 Activity and the Open Spaces at the University
If the University is serious in its interest in extending physical activity programming, it might be an interesting strategy, and an enjoyable challenge, to develop a different approach to the concept of space for offering physical activity. There are open spaces in the University setting that can be used as ways to invite those who are physically active and those who are not physically active, to participate in activities that have the potential to challenge the perception of the gym spaces and the exclusivity in both the location and social inclusion in exercise. In an attempt at openness, both in the non-exclusivity of the activity and in the concept of ‘unbounded’ perhaps activity might alternatively be taken outside in order to explore more unstructured physical activity.
The data resulting from the questionnaire portion of this study hint at a correlation between unstructured play and life-long activity. Although this study demonstrated no causal link between childhood positive experience of unstructured activity and life-long physical activity engagement, a tantalizing relationship seems to emerge from respondent’s reports of strong memories of the pleasure of movement.
7.3.4 An Anti-Ageism Policy Review
It does appear that there is some work to be done to change the culture of the University – particularly at the Athletic Centre which has been reported by both staff (Henry, Joe) and users (Nora, Ella and Kathie) to have issues that may be related to a tolerance for ageism that is both unacceptable and detrimental. It appears that a politicized, anti-ageing framework needs to be put into place, both generally across the University, but also
134 specifically within the Athletic Centre, where the culture seems to be particularly disposed towards an ageist stance. Based on reports from staff and facility users in this study, it is suggested that an anti-ageist program is necessary at a policy level, and that training be given at the level of senior management, and also staff and volunteers at the
Athletic Centre.
7.3.5 Recalibration of the Definition of ‘Student”
The Athletic Centre’s concepts of who makes up the student body needs to be reconsidered. Reports from staff that the Athletic Centre “is for students” seem not to consider the demographics of the student population. There is an enormous difference between the statements ‘this place is for students’ and ‘this place is for 19 year-olds’. It might be helpful to consider that the enrollment in the Faculty of Kinesiology and
Physical Education is not representative of the wider University population. Large economic fluctuations are among the explanations of the increase in age of students over time; older people who find themselves in the job market after years of regular employment find they require further academic credentials to be competitive in the job market pushing up the average age of the student population.
7.3.6 Study of Younger Users of the Spaces
A potential follow-up investigation might duplicate this study with the younger users of the space, gaining data on both the early life experience through the questionnaire and an examination of what their perceptions are of older users of the spaces, to understand their experiences and to compare the findings.
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7.3.7 Expand Study To Include the Wider Community
A parallel study might also be undertaken of older adults outside the university setting – of both long-term exercisers and those who do not – to determine if the findings are similar outside this very privileged population.
7.3.8 Childhood Experience of Physical Activity as a Predictor of Long-term Activity
The Questionnaire (please see Appendix B on page 160) was a particularly and unexpectedly fruitful instrument in this study, and it yielded significant insight into child-centred games and left an intriguing question about life-long physical activity participation that needs to be examined more closely in a larger, more broadly-based and nuanced study.
7.3.9 Further Study On the ‘Just World’ Bias Within the Health Narrative
A finding of this study has been the emergence of a narrative describing a ‘just world’ bias among life-long exercisers when they are faced with illness or death. A significant promise, implicit in the health imperative that we must all exercise as part of self-care, is the exemption from many diseases or health conditions. There appears to be a disturbance among the older, life-long exercise participants in the sense of self and to the narrative of health when long-term exercisers get sick.
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We used to go up to the Great Hall to have our lunch, but most people are gone now. Very few of us are left.
We’ve had two people die in the last six months. One chap was 56 years old…Oh dear. It was a wonderful group of people. But it’s early to fall off your perch.
The other fellow wasn’t that old – he was in his seventies. And nowadays, seventy is not that old. But we should not be speaking about death. We should embrace being alive and not worrying about death.
Edgar (68)
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Appendices
Appendix A
Interview Guides
For focus groups One, Two and Three, where the participants are members of the
University community over 60 years of age, who are engaged in physical activity at the the University; physically active outside the University setting, or who are neither physically active at the University nor outside the University setting, the expected duration of the interviews will be 90 minutes. In the interviews with Athletic Centre and
Hart House athletics staff, the interviews are expected to last approximately 45 minutes.
The time commitment will be explained during the recruitment process and will be reiterated at the outset of the interview.
A clear statement will be made to each of the groups, stressing the voluntary nature of participation, the steps to be taken to protect confidentiality and other requirements to ensure ethical conduct of the interviews.
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GROUP ONE -
Users of the athletic facilities at the University
I will occasionally ask some questions to facilitate our discussion, but I am very interested in hearing about your experiences of using the exercise facilities at the Athletic Centre, or, here at Hart House, and I would like to know about your use of the spaces, the exercise programs or the equipment you like to use, but please feel free to add anything you like.
The aim of this discussion is to explore the variety of views and experiences: there are no right or wrong answers. This process is entirely voluntary and you are free to stop any time you like. If you don’t want to answer a particular question, just let me know and I will move on. If you indicate you want to stop and not go on, I will stop immediately and
I will assume that I no longer have your permission to use the materials we gather up to that point. If, for whatever reason, you go home and think that you don’t want to be involved in this study, you can contact me at this email address or phone number - it is there on your copy of the consent form – and I will remove you from the study. Does anyone have any questions before we begin?
Group one interview guide
1. How do you feel about using the exercise facilities here at the University? What kinds
of things do you like about coming here to work out?
2. Why do you work out? Is it for health reasons, or because you enjoy the activity? Or
do come to work out with friends?
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3. What is the response to your athletic activities from your friends and family? How do
they view your activities? How does that make you feel?
4. What interactions do you get from the younger students and staff using the facilities
here? Have you had any particular experiences that stand out for you in any way?
5. What is it like for you, using facilities that are used mostly by younger people?
6. Is there anything you might like to see changed, in the programming or in the physical
layout of the facilities you use that would make it easier for you to continue
coming here?
7. What do you think about people your own age or older who are athletic?
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GROUP TWO -
Users of the athletic facilities outside the University
I will occasionally ask some questions to facilitate our discussion, but I am very interested in hearing about your experiences. I would like to know about what kinds of exercise programs or exercise equipment you like to use, about your use of the spaces at the
University, and you can feel free to add anything you like. The aim of this discussion is to explore different views and experiences of using the exercise facilities, and we also need to understand why people choose not to use those facilities or programs in order to understand how to provide programming that is better suited to the needs of older people at the University. There are no right or wrong answers. This process is entirely voluntary and you are free to stop any time you like. If you don’t want to answer a particular question, just let me know and I will move on. If you indicate you want to stop and not go on, I will stop immediately and I will assume that I no longer have your permission to use the materials we gather up to that point. If, for whatever reason, you go home and think that you don’t want to be involved in this study, you can contact me at this email address or phone number - it is there on your copy of the consent form – and I will remove you from the study. Does anyone have any questions before we begin?
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Group two interview guide
1. What kinds of social events or other activities are you involved in here at the
University?
2. What kinds of activities do you like to participate in? Can you tell me about some of
the reasons you exercise?
3. What kinds of physical activities do you participate in outside the University? What
kinds of places do you exercise in? Are the facilities fancy? Or are they pretty
much like these ones here?
4. Can you tell me some of the reasons you don’t do use the athletic facilities here at the
University? Do you just feel more comfortable there? Do you feel uncomfortable
using the facilities here? Can you tell me a bit about that?
5. What would make it more comfortable for you to take your physical activity here?
Can you think of some things that would make you want to use the athletic
facilities or the programs here?
6. Are there any kinds of physical activities you might like to try? For example, X here
does ______activity? Might you like to try that? Or could you see yourself
trying something like what Y does?
7. How do you feel about the spaces available in Hart House and the Athletic Centre?
Can you tell me a bit about that? Are they inviting spaces? Do you feel welcome?
What about the fitness spaces specifically?
8. What do you think of people your own age or older who are athletic?
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GROUP THREE Non-Users of any athletic facilities
I will occasionally ask some questions to facilitate our discussion, but I am more interested in hearing about your experiences of physical activity and maybe we can talk a bit about what kinds of activity you might like to do but that you might not have had a chance to try. Please feel free to add anything you like. The aim of this discussion is for me to learn from your experiences: there are no right or wrong answers. This process is entirely voluntary and you are free to stop any time you like. If you don’t want to answer a particular question, just let me know and I will move on. If you indicate you want to stop and not go on, I will stop immediately and I will assume that I no longer have your permission to use the materials we gather up to that point. If, for whatever reason, you go home and think that you don’t want to be involved in this study, you can contact me at this email address or phone number - it is there on your copy of the consent form – and I will remove you from the study. Does anyone have any questions before we begin?
Group three interview guide
1. Do you participate in any of the social events or activities here at the University?
2. What kinds of activities do you like to participate in?
3. Can you tell me what you know about the health benefits of exercise? Can you tell me
how knowing (this information) makes you feel? Does it feel liberating to know
this or does it feel like yet another burden?
4. Are there any kinds of physical activities you might like to try? What would have to
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change, do you think, in order that you would like to try those activities? Can you
tell me what some of the obstacles might be?
5. How do you feel about the spaces available in Hart House and the Athletic Centre?
Are they inviting spaces? Do you feel welcome? What about the fitness spaces
specifically?
6. How you feel about people your own age or older who are athletic?
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GROUP FOUR
Staff at the Athletic Centre and Hart House Providing or Designing
Programming for Older Adults
Group four interview guide
I will occasionally ask some questions to facilitate our discussion, but I am more interested in hearing about your experiences in providing exercise programming at the
Athletic Centre, or at Hart House, and I would like to know about your observations of the patterns of the exercise programs or the equipment you think would be best used or adapted for the needs of older users of the facilities. But please feel free to add anything you like. The aim of this discussion is for me to learn from your experiences: there are no right or wrong answers. This process is entirely voluntary and you are free to stop any time you like. If you don’t want to answer a particular question, just let me know and I will move on. If you indicate you want to stop and not go on, I will stop immediately and
I will assume that I no longer have your permission to use the materials we gather up to that point. If, for whatever reason, you go home and think that you don’t want to be involved in this study, you can contact me at this email address or phone number - it is there on your copy of the consent form – and I will remove you from the study. Does anyone have any questions before we begin?
1. What percentage of the athletic facilities you work in (Hart House, and/or the Athletic
Centre) would you say are over 60 years old?
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2. Are there activities or classes where you see more older people participating? Which
ones? Why do you think those are popular?
3. Are there activities offered at either Hart House or the Athletic Centre that are better
suited to older people? What kind of activities do you think might be
implemented?
4. Are there activities that are not offered at either Hart House or the Athletic Centre that
you think might be suited for the participation of older people?
5. Have you ever noticed any situations at Hart House or the Athletic Centre where older
people were made to feel uncomfortable around so many younger people?
6. Do you think younger people at Hart House or the Athletic Centre might be
uncomfortable around older people?
7. How do you feel about implementing a strategy to attract more older people to the
exercise facilities? Do you think it would benefit the facility to attract more older
people? Or do you feel that might be courting trouble? (If yes to the latter) In what
ways?
8. How do you feel about offering more programming targeted specifically to older
people? Do you think that would be beneficial, or would it ultimately be
problematic? In what ways might it be problematic? Or beneficial?
9. Do older people become injured more often than younger people at the facility, do you
think?
10. Can you think of any modifications to facilities that might increase participation in
153 programs here at the University? For example, are there advantages to having separate changing facilities for older people, do you think?
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APPENDIX B
Questionnaire
To be completed by participants in sections One and Two of the study - that is, study participants who are members of the University community and who are 60 years old or more - immediately prior to the focus group interviews.
Please check off any that apply and give examples, where appropriate:
1) When you were a child, you were involved in:
❏ organised sports through clubs, church or community______
❏ school-based sports
______
❏ child-initiated small group games (i.e.: skipping, ball dexterity games, hand dexterity games 4-square, etc)
______
❏ child-initiated large group games (i.e.: red rover, British bulldog, tag, chase, soccer- baseball, baseball, etc.)
______
❏ individual physical challenges that you regularly undertook on your own: running,
155 skiing, archery, swimming, etc.,
______
❏ participated in no physical games or activities of any kind
1) When you look back on those activities you participated in as a child, you:
❏ recall the excitement
Which activities did you like best?
______
❏ can’t recall much
❏ remember how much you hated it
Which activities did you dislike?
______
❏ feel as if that child was a separate person from you now
1) When you were an adolescent, you were involved in:
❏ organised sports through clubs, church, or community
______
❏ school-based sports
______
❏ non-adult led small group games (i.e.: squash, tennis, street hockey, etc with your friends)
______
❏ non-adult led large group games (i.e.: soccer, lacrosse, street hockey, hockey, baseball,
156 etc. with your friends)
______
❏ individual physical challenges that you regularly undertook on your own: running, skiing, archery, swimming, etc.,
______
❏ did no physical games or activities of any kind
4) When you look back on those activities you participated in as an adolescent, you:
❏ recall the excitement
Which activities did you like best?
______
❏ can’t recall much
❏ remember how much you hated it
Which activities did you dislike?
______
❏ feel as if that young person was a separate entity from you now
5) When you were an adult, you were involved in:
❏ organised sports through clubs, church or community______
❏ University/College-based sports/activities
______
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____
❏ informal small group games (i.e.: squash, racket ball)
______
_____
❏ informal large group games (i.e.:hockey, lacrosse, baseball, etc.)
______
_____
❏ individual physical challenges that you regularly undertook on your own: running, skiing, archery, yoga, swimming, etc.,
______
_____
❏ did no physical games or activities of any kind
6) When you look back on those activities you participated in as an adult, you:
❏ recall it fondly
Which activities did you like best?
______
❏ can’t recall much
❏ remember how much you hated it
Which activities did you dislike?
______
1) Are you physically active now?
❏ yes, regularly
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❏ yes, sometimes
❏ hardly ever
❏ no, but I’d like to be
❏ I don’t like to exercise, but I will
❏ I will not exercise
______
______
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APPENDIX C
The World Health Organisation
Recommendations for Physical Activity for Adults Aged 65 and Above
(http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/factsheet_olderadults/en/index.html)
Recommended levels of physical activity for adults aged 65 and above
Photo: A. Waak
In adults aged 65 years and above, physical activity includes leisure time physical activity (for example: walking, dancing, gardening, hiking, swimming), transportation (e.g. walking or cycling), occupational (if the individual is still engaged in work), household chores, play, games, sports or planned exercise, in the context of daily, family, and community activities.
In order to improve cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, bone and functional health, reduce the risk of NCDs, depression and cognitive decline:
1. Older adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity throughout the week or do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity throughout the week or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity activity.
2.Aerobic activity should be performed in bouts of at least 10 minutes duration.
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3.For additional health benefits, older adults should increase their moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity to 300 minutes per week, or engage in 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity per week, or an equivalent combination of moderate-and vigorous-intensity activity.
4.Older adults, with poor mobility, should perform physical activity to enhance balance and prevent falls on 3 or more days per week.
5.Muscle-strengthening activities, involving major muscle groups, should be done on 2 or more days a week.
6.When older adults cannot do the recommended amounts of physical activity due to health conditions, they should be as physically active as their abilities and conditions allow.
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APPENDIX D
Source: HRSDC calculations based on Statistics Canada. Labour force survey estimates (LFS), by
educational attainment, sex and age group, annual (CANSIM Table 282-0004). Ottawa: Statistics
Canada, 2012. http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/[email protected]?iid=29#M_3
Rates of participation in university education decreased with age between 1990-1991 and
2005-2006. Participation rates were highest for the group aged 18 to 24 years and lowest
for the group aged 30 to 64. Some 24% of those aged 18 to 24 years participated in post-
secondary education in the 2005-2006 academic year, while the participation rate was
roughly 1% for those aged 30 to 64 years.
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APPENDIX E
Source: Calculations of HRSDC based on special data request from Statistics Canada, Labour Force
Survey, 2006. Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 2006.
http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/[email protected]?iid=56#M_3
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