Bodies as Arenas of Experimentation: Experiencing Novel Ways of Running

Abstract

Recreational running has been a widely popular form of leisure for half a century, and many countries have experienced a marathon boom in the past decades. In recent years, however, runners have started to run in new ways, often in unconventional settings, and compete in races with various alternative formats. Through an ethnographic approach that builds on in-depth narrative interviews with recreational runners, analysis of runners’ blogs, and participant observation in running events in Estonia, I suggest that as completing a marathon becomes a routine activity, increasingly many dedicated runners turn their bodies into veritable “arenas of experimentation.” Drawing on Zeiler’s concept of bodily “eu-appearance” and Ingold’s concerted approach to movement, perception, and knowledge, and building more generally on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, I argue that such corporeal experimentation is motivated by novel sensorial experiences that lead to a heightened awareness of one’s own body as well as by a pursuit of altered and intensified perceptual awareness of the environment one runs in.