CARP initial literature search

I created Ageing Runner to solve a problem. I want to be running in my 80s but I don’t properly understand how to best increase my chances of doing that. Chris’s Ageing Runner project (CARP) is basically a piece of first-person action research. My academic life has been about how as practitioners, we develop an understanding of our work and relate to the world around us. I intend to apply the same processes to my life as a runner and ensure that my CARP endeavour has some proper social science methodology behind it.

As a starting point, I speculated that those running successfully into later life were managing to stay free of both debilitating illness and injury and they were also retaining their motivation for running as they got older. You can read more about my initial thoughts here. The next job was to see where these initial thoughts sit in the landscape of prior research on the subject.

The initial plan is to systematically review the academic literature around being an ageing runner. The first trawl (read more about the process here) is now complete. I discounted those papers that were not freely available to all. I plan to ask the opinion of runners and feel it is important that runners can read the source material if needed. This has left me with 98 papers as a starting point.

I then coded the papers using the original categories of disease, injury and wellbeing. I used the terms ‘mortality’ as a synonym for ‘disease’ and ‘musculoskeletal’ as a synonym for ‘injury’ as I felt these more accurately captured the essence of the papers. I also speculated that longevity might be a more upbeat term than mortality to shift the emphasis to living longer rather than simply death. This was top-down coding. I was comfortable with that at this point. I know that themes will emerge as I go, however, I did at this point also add ‘ageing’ as a category in itself as well as the smaller rogue categories of ‘performance’ ‘nutrition’ and ‘training.

Each paper was assigned a primary category with some also assigned a second and even a third category.

My initial thoughts are that there is a bi-directional relationship between each of the category headings and running. For example. Ageing has an effect on running and running also has an effect on ageing. Categories also impact on each other and do not exist in isolation. My thoughts are developing and I now no longer think this is simply about longevity and living longer. It is about retaining a quality of life as I age.

I plan to start with the ‘ageing’ category and take the papers in chronological order so that I see how ideas in the field have developed over time. I will be using the connected papers tool to take key papers and see where they sit in the academic landscape and widen my review. I will let you know how I go on.