Description

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Among the most difficult athletic events a person can attempt, the iron-distance triathlon—a 140.6 mile competition—requires an intense prerace training program. This preparation can be as much as twenty hours per week for a full year leading up to a race. In Iron Dads, Diana Tracy Cohen focuses on the pressures this extensive preparation can place on families, exploring the ways in which men with full-time jobs, one or more children, and other responsibilities fit this level of training into their lives.  An accomplished triathlete as well as a trained social scientist, Cohen offers much insight into the effects of endurance-sport training on family, parenting, and the sense of self.  She conducted in-depth interviews with forty-seven iron-distance competitors and three prominent men in the race industry, and analyzed triathlon blog postings made by Iron Dads. What sacrifices, Cohen asks, are required—both at home and at work—to cross the iron-distance finish line? What happens when work, family, and sport collide?  Is it possible for fathers to meet their own parenting expectations while pursuing such a time-consuming regimen? With the tensions of family economics, how do you justify spending $5,000 on a racing bike? At what point does sport become work?  Cohen discovered that, by fostering family involvement in this all-consuming effort, Iron Dads are able to maintain a sense of themselves not only as strong, masculine competitors, but also as engaged fathers.  Engagingly written and well researched, Iron Dads provides a penetrating, firsthand look at extreme endurance sports, including practical advice for aspiring racers and suggestions for making triathlons more family-friendly. 

About the Author

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DIANA TRACY COHEN is an associate professor of political science at Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain. She is herself a nine-time IRONMAN  finisher with over forty marathon completions.

Praise For…

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"Lucid, accessible, and engaging, Iron Dads reveals a simultaneously lauded but worrying athletic world whose tentacles inevitably affect family and workplace."
— Kevin Young

"Cohen's work is path breaking in its qualitative examination of fathers and IRONMAN events … The work is an excellent example of how various qualitative methodologies, which included participant interviews, surveys and textual analysis of extensive online formats, can be woven together to create a detailed and textual portrait of trials and tribulations of Iron Dads."
— Sport in American History

"Iron Dads is the best inside look at triathlon culture in academia to date. Not only does this pathbreaking book detail the particulars of what it is like to be immersed in the grueling and yet rewarding culture of triathlon, it illustrates how participants must manage competing social roles, obligations, and identities away from the sporting field. Iron Dads is essential reading for qualitative researchers."
— Michael Atkinson

""The author has beautifully captured this journey from beginning to end."
— International Sociology