Running the Routes Together: Distance running and runners' knowledge

What is it about?

The mundane, everday practices of social life have often remained under-analysed, unproblematized, even taken for granted by some social theorists, despite their being constitutive of the very foundation of social life. To-date, whilst there exists a growing corpus of ethnographic studies within the sociology of sport, with some notable exceptions, very little analytic attention has been devoted to the concrete practices of actually “doing” sporting activity. Based upon data derived from a collaborative autoethnographic study of distance runners, this article analyses the ways in which two runners jointly accomplish running-together. The article also examines and “marks” some of the knowledge in action that underpins the production of running-together, analysed in relation to three specific areas: 1) ground and performance; 2) safety concerns; and 3) “the other”, in the form of training partner(s), highlighting the importance of both aural and visual components. It concludes with a call for more detailed analytic descriptions of sporting practices in order better to ground more abstract generalisations about sporting phenomena.

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Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash