The Runner | ‘Running is a cult’: Swedish PhD thesis trashing endurance running reminds everyone why no one reads PhD papers

There’s a reason no one reads university theses – they are often out of touch with reality, argument-driven to a fault, full of confirmation bias and reek of ivory tower penmanship.

A PhD thesis by Carys Egan-Wyer, from Lund University in Sweden, promoted on The Conversation, an independent news site based in Australia, reinforces this notion as it bolsters itself with a column from the writer herself and a doozy, clickbait-friendly title: “Running: not so much a liberating hobby as a cult”.

Let’s break down the word “cult” before we go anywhere with this mess of a thesis, which I’m sure cost a pretty penny and will look grand on a LinkedIn profile. The term “cult”, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious”, hardly applies to endurance athletes, which is the “research context” of Egan-Wyer’s thesis.

The negative connotation associated with the word is undeniable. The actual title of the thesis, which is an exhausting 200 and some odd pages, is not much better: “The Sellable Self: Exploring endurance running as an extraordinary consumption experience”.

The crux of Egan-Wyer’s argument, if there is one to be found, is that running is rife with “neoliberalism”. In layman’s terms, Wyer is saying running is individualistic, results-based and bad for your stress and anxiety levels because the pressure to perform and post, and thus self-scrutinise, is too great for us to handle and we should all go lie down before we hurt ourselves.