“Running makes me feel …”: The production of emotion through leisure

ABSTRACT

Using data from twenty ‘running autobiographies’ – written or voice-recorded reflections – we examine runners’ changing emotional relationship to running during the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the complex, often fluid, and occasionally contradictory ways that leisure pursuits produce emotion, and how emotions shape subjects and communities. Mainstream conceptualisations of amateur running often frame it as a tool with which runners modulate their emotions. For example, running is commonly celebrated as a way of controlling stress or improving mental health. This approach is premised on the interiority of emotion – the idea that emotions reside within the runner. Conversely, our approach is concerned with how the practice of running and the circulation of the running body as an object produces emotion. We argue that understanding why and how people run, and what the running body does hinges on understanding the productive capacities of the running body – not only what emotions they bring into a run – and how, through its circulation, the running body produces social affects and emotions.

KEYWORDS:

• Running
• leisure
• affect
• emotion
• archive of affect

For runners in the northern hemisphere, April and March typically herald the start of the racing season. But in March 2020, COVID-19 pandemic-related restrictions brought a necessary shift to business as usual, and impacted runners’ leisure habits. As passionate amateur distance runners ourselves, these changes produced significant, often unwanted, affects. For better or worse, our running habits changed, and consequently our relationships to our leisure practices, our running communities, our bodies, and our emotions changed too. Inspired by our altered affective experiences and by Kinnunen and Kolehmainen’s (2019) approach to ‘touch biographies’ and Cvetkovich’s (2003) conceptualization of archives of feeling, we set out to collect an archive of affect from runners across the English-speaking globe. Our call for participants asked runners to reflect via written or voice-recorded document on their experiences with running during the pandemic, focusing on their feelings and emotions. Drawing primarily on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) approach to emotion and affect, we understand affect as inseparable from emotion in practice. We see affect and emotions as productive – they do something – and as social – not ephemeral, internal feelings but as something born and shaped through interaction with the world. Our understanding of affect and use of affect theory is further detailed in the ‘theory’ section below.

After reviewing twenty reflections we found that our archive of affect comprised a fruitful window into runners’ emotions in general, and during the pandemic specifically. Our interest principally lies in running-related emotions rather than pandemic-related emotions. This is to say that we are not specifically interested in the pandemic and its’ impact on leisure, but are instead interested in the how the shifting emotional intensities sparked by the pandemic precipitated changes and ruptured norms to such an extent that habitual experiences and their attendant emotions and affects, which may have otherwise been so rote as to become unnoticeable, were made obvious.

Analysis of our archive unearthed myriad interesting affects that allow us to reconsider the role of emotion in running. Frequently, in both popular culture and academic literature, running and other physical leisure is considered a way to manage emotion. Indeed, many of our respondents note in their submissions that they use running to manage their mental health and emotional state. While this is an important framework for many runners, we move away from it in this article, in favour of exploring the complex, often fluid, and occasionally contradictory ways that leisure pursuits produce emotion, and how various emotions shape subjects, communities, and running cultures.

Our paper aligns with this special issue’s intention of moving away from psychological understandings of emotion by exploring the social and political aspects of emotion related to leisure. We contribute to the wider study of emotion and leisure by examining the sociality of running’s affects and demonstrating that, as a leisure pursuit, the act of running produces emotion in relation to a complex set of norms and expectations about running. Our exploration of running’s productive capacities enriches the field through our nuanced exploration of how emotions are not simply individual feelings divorced from wider contexts, but instead circulate as socially produced and culturally contingent forces, thus supplementing understandings of leisure as a means of regulating emotion.

Literature review

The idea that running serves as an anti-depressant has become rather cliché. As Trail Runner Magazine Editor in Chief Zoë Rom (2020) wryly observes, ‘Saying “running is my therapy” is about as common as spandex in trail running’. Reflecting the preoccupation in popular culture with running as mental health care, work on leisure activity and emotion – particularly in the psychological literature – often focuses on emotional regulation (see systematic review by Chan et al., 2019; Lane et al., 2012 expert statement on behalf of the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences) and the ways in which sport and exercise impact mental health and wellbeing, especially anxiety and depression (see meta-meta-analysis by Rebar et al., 2015).

Similarly, some social scientists in the leisure studies subfield have taken a qualitative approach to the study of mental health and psychological wellbeing, emotion, and leisure (see, for example, Blanco & Barnett, 2014; Fullagar, 2008; Nimrod et al., 2012). Drawing on research by Newman et al. (2014), Dechenes (2011), and Carruthers and Hood (2007), among others, Iwasaki (2017) demonstrates that leisure is often linked to subjective well-being. Emotions often considered ‘positive’ are conceptualised as creating a liberating space removed from everyday productivity-focused life or personal challenges, or are seen as having the capacity to imbue life with meaning or purpose and to build interconnectedness and community. The connection between emotion and wellbeing in the leisure context has been fruitfully explored in a 2020 Leisure Studies special issue, wherein several articles illuminate the centrality of emotions like happiness in the pursuit of wellbeing (Cain et al., 2020; Liu & Da, 2020; Mansfield et al., 2020).

But, as Iwasaki (2017) points out, the experience and meaning of leisure is not limited to so-called ‘positive’ affect and emotion (see also Fullagar, 2008; Sharpe & Lashua, 2008). Following Iwasaki’s (2017) reminder of the danger of (over)accentuating the positive, and Fullagar’s (2008) caution to not ‘romanticize’ leisure as a space of pure freedom outside of hegemonic power relations, we use this article to draw more focus to the fact that leisure, as a productive practice (something that produces affect and changes the body’s ability to act and be acted upon), can also produce alienation and isolation; sadness and grief; and stagnation and blockages. Moreover, we seek to explore affect and emotion beyond the binary of good/bad or positive/negative. These binaries are precariously constructed, especially when it comes to leisure; take, for example, Ryall’s argument that when presumably-negative emotions like shame and humiliation in sport are recognised, they are often framed by athletes as ‘quasi-virtue[s] that hol[d] the spirit of sport together’ (2019, p. 130). In contrast, Ryall emphasises that emotions like shame and anger can have ‘destructive effect[s]’ on athletes (2019, p. 130). Similarly, our discussion of emotions focuses on how athletes think and make value-judgements about their emotions, and the ways these feelings may orient runners towards or away from themselves, their own leisure practices, and their communities (Probyn, 2005).

Another example of how scholars might productively move away from the instrumental model of wellbeing can be found in Fullagar’s work on the leisure practices of women recovering from depression. She draws on Kristeva to argue that:

…leisure can be understood beyond the biomedical function of an anti-depressant. Instead, leisure can work as a ‘counter-depressant’ embodying particular transformative affects, and effects, in relation to gender norms. Leisure experiences can embody different intensifications of emotional relations such as joy, care, pleasure, fear, love, anger, and boredom

(Fullagar, 2008, p. 37).

Here, Fullagar (2008, p. 37) demonstrates that leisure is a site ‘through which “emotion play” enable[s] the performance of different relations to self and with others’. In other words, she proposes that the act of performing leisure is a way of practicing diverse types of ‘emotion play’ and that this play can enable broader transformation (p. 38). We are similarly interested in how our participants ‘felt their way’ through a difficult time using running (Fullagar, 2008, p. 40), focusing not just on how they used running to navigate their experiences, but also on how running generated opportunities for embodying transformative emotional relations or reshaping bodily potentialities.

The running body does not exist in a vacuum, it is shaped by social structures and environments (Rana, 2022, p. 4). Our participants’ bodies and environments were being shaped and reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. This impacted the way that they used running as a playful practice that gave them space or made it possible to subvert or transform constricting norms. Leisure scholars such as Fullagar and Rana provide examples of how emotion produced through leisure can be considered distinctly from the study of health and wellbeing, to capture the generative capacities of emotion itself, as influenced by the larger social world.

Finally, our approach to affect and emotion, and how these shape and are shaped by athletes’ bodies and practices, is related to but distinct from approaches that focus on narratives-of-the-self and identity (e.g. Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2001). Such research focuses on how ‘people organise and assign meanings to their experiences’ and how narrativization affects identity construction (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2008, p. 3). While there can be no neat distinction between what affect and emotion do, the cognitive process of making sense of emotion and affect, and identity, we nonetheless attempt to hold on to the messy and uncertain potentiality of emotion and affect, rather than the ways in which they are subsequently narrativized, ordered, and justified. We seek to explore the body’s many feelings, affects and emotions and to understand how they shape athletes’ relationships to leisure. We recognise that as a practice, running allows runners to ‘use their bodies in multiple ways [and] affec[t] themselves and those around them’ (Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2015, p. 484).

Theory

In another publication based on results of this study (Ketterling and Desjardins, in submission), we adopt a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach towards affect and running, arguing that running is a practice by which amateur runners practice the creation of the Body without Organs and ‘cultivate possibilities for alternative modes of thought and existence’ (Markula, 2019, p. 18). There, we focus on intensity and potentiality. Here, we shift our theoretical orientation towards the data. We draw on Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and emotion – itself a joyously promiscuous text that draws on feminist and queer theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, etc. – to consider the way that emotions arise in relation to something (running, other runners, particular spaces and places, races, etc.), and how they move or orient bodies, shape individuals and collectivities, and reproduce worlds.

We follow Ahmed (2004, p. 206) in our position that a turn towards affect ought does not require turning away from emotion or labouring to create ever-finer distinctions between affect and emotion, and that in practice affect and emotion cannot be easily separated from one another. Because this framework sees affect and emotion as fundamentally co-constituted and ‘contiguous’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 210), we use both terms throughout the paper.

Ahmed’s work is informed by phenomenological approaches; she is concerned both with ‘how we are affected by things [and] with a more phenomenological concern with intentionality about things’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 209, emphasis in original). She argues that ‘to be affected by something is an orientation or direction towards that thing that has worldly effects’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 209). What we find most valuable in her approach is the question of what affect and emotion do. Ahmed argues that ‘emotions work to shape the “surfaces” of individual and collective bodies’; they shape what bodies can do (Ahmed, 2004, p. 1, 4). She focuses on how emotions arise and how they circulate and asks ‘what sticks’ and ‘what slides by frictionless’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 4, 11). Most importantly, ‘emotions are not simply something “I” or “we” have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others’ (p. 10).

By way of Ahmed’s phenomenological approach to emotion, our work is related to a body of sport and leisure scholarship that traces its phenomenological roots to the work of Husserl, Merleau Ponty, and Schütz, among others. This body of work focuses on consciousness, corporeality, the body’s relationship to the world, and ways that individuals assign meanings ‘in everyday interaction with others in the lifeworld’ (Allen-Collinson & Evans, 2019, p. 296). It includes a growing body of scholarly work that uses phenomenology and phenomenology-inspired sensory ethnography to explore the embodied practices of running and other sporting practices.

In relation to running specifically, scholars informed by this phenomenological tradition have published work on how runners make phenomenological sense and construct narratives about injuries (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2001); the phenomenological particularities of being a running woman (Allen-Collinson, 2013); the importance of proprioception, kinanesthesia, and haptic sensations (especially temperature and pressure), touch-based enskinment to particular terrain, and the physical ‘feel’ of feet hitting various surfaces (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2011; Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2019; Hockey, 2013); and the rhythms, sounds, smells, and sights of running (Edensor et al., 2018; Hockey & Collinson, 2006; Hockey, 2006). In his essay on running, Lorimer characterises ‘the long-distance runner as a highly accomplished sensualist, as someone who comes to know the variety of the world according to the feeling of differently textured terrains…’ (2012, p. 83). Similarly, Gross argues that runners are sensory thrill-seekers, using their bodes as ‘arenas of experimentation’ from which to experience ‘novel bodily sensations’ (2021, p. 526).

Like these scholars, we are interested in embodied experiences, the senses, and the interaction between the human and their environment. However, this body of literature either does not address affect and emotion, or considers it as a secondary concern to sensual information. Thus, while we share many intellectual investments, our work is also markedly different because of our prioritisation of affect and emotion and what they do, politically, socially, and culturally. It might thus be more readily compared with Fullagar and Pavlidis’ (2018) work on affect in roller derby, in which they too draw on Ahmed’s theory of affect and emotion; Cai et al. (2021) research on the role of affect as bodily potential in shaping ‘affective spaces of health’; and Laurendeau’s (2014, p. 16) study of embodied emotion in sport, in which he illustrates that ‘our inter-corporeal emotion is a process of bringing (particular) social relations into being’.

Methods

We explore affect and emotion through textual analysis of affect autobiographies. Inspired by Kinnunen and Kolehmainen’s (2019) approach to ‘touch biographies’, we recruited participants to submit a ‘running reflection’: a 2–3-page written reflection or 5–10-minute voice memo reflecting on how the pandemic affected their relationship to running, with a focus on feelings and emotions. Participants were also invited to submit photographs. The study was open globally to anyone who identifies as a runner, regardless of skill level, and was able to submit a reflection in English. Submissions were open from May 2021 to February 2022.

18 participants submitted a singular reflection. We prompted participants to express themselves freely, focusing on any aspect of their emotional experiences, but provided several questions to help prompt reflection. Questions included: ‘How has it felt to run during the pandemic? Is this any different than pre-pandemic? Did these feelings impact your running practices?’; ‘Think of one particularly “good” or “bad” moment related to running during the pandemic and then tell the story of that run. What emotions, thoughts and feelings were you experiencing?’; and ‘Did you choose to race this year? Why or why not? If you ran virtual races, tell us the story of those races. What emotions, thoughts and feelings were you experiencing?’. We did not request that participants record a diary of reflections over a period of time, write their reflection immediately after a run, or something else similarly structured, because the aim of our method is not to capture a record of quotidian personal experiences. Rather, our request for a single, retrospective reflection allows participants to remember and narrate their emotional journeys, focusing on moments that stand out as particularly intense, or that they recognise as shaping their experiences and relationships. This gave us a participant-driven archive of affect that enabled an exploration of salient emotions.

Both authors also completed their own autoethnographic reflections (bringing the total number of texts to 20), drawing on current and remembered histories of running. Autoethnography blends autobiography and ethnography and is rooted in the belief that reflexive consideration of personal experience can reveal something about the social and political fabric of life and ‘give audiences a sense of how being there in the experience feels’ (Adams et al., 2017, p. 3). Ellis writes that autoethnography ‘explore[s] a particular life, [in the hopes of] understanding a way of life’ (Ellis, 2004, p. xvii). This personal experience can help ‘complement, or fill gaps in, existing research’ and ‘articulate insider knowledge of cultural experience[s]’ (Adams et al., 2017, p. 3). Like ethnography, autoethnography is concerned with ‘thick description’ and we have found that our reflections – written by more practiced writers of sociocultural description – have helped flesh out the emotional and affective character of the experiences we share with participants. Also critical is the recognition that this research project was designed in response to our own changing relationships with running and conversations we were having with one another about these fluctuations; including our own autoethnographic reflections in the data is an important way of honestly communicating this motivation and our positionality to readers. That is, the autoethnographic element of this project is indicative of our ‘rejection of an objective “view from nowhere”’ (Adams et al., 2022, p. 1). Key to successful autoethnography is the ‘merg[ing] of personal and cultural experience’ – the researchers must subject their experiences to interrogation, ‘show how [they] make sense of these events’, and analyse the sociocultural forces that shape our interpretations (Adams et al., 2017, p. 7). Thus, while our the process of writing informed our research and writing process, we also subject our autoethnographic reflections to the same analytic processes to which we submit the participants’.

Participants were recruited through the study’s website, which hosts information about the project including consent forms, instructions for participants, and the portal for submission. The recruitment poster, with a link to the website, was distributed in the following ways: 1) through social media, 2) through running and triathlon listservs, 3) by contacting amateur road and trail running clubs in Canada and the USA and requesting that they share the poster with members, 4) by contacting coaches and requesting that they share the poster with their athletes. We collected a total of 20 reflections, including our own autoethnographic accounts. Of these, 17 were written and three were voice-recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim. All participants were amateur runners (i.e. did not self-identify as a professional, semi-professional or elite). Participant demographic information is recorded in Table 1. Based on their locations, participants would have experienced a range of pandemic-mitigation measures. While participants did not always detail the precise sociolegal conditions in which they were living/running – and we did not ask – most participants would have been living under an overlapping set of laws, regulations, bylaws, and recommendations that constrained their usual leisure behaviours in some way. For example, many participants indicated that their usual practice of running with a group was prohibited by their regional or local regulations, but no participants indicated restrictions on the amount of time they could spend outdoors.

Table 1. Participant demographic information.

Pseudonym	Gender	Age	Country of Residence	Race
Mark	Man	52	Canada	White
Ed	Man	67	Canada	White
Sophie	Woman	25	Canada	Asian
Jocelyn	Woman	48	USA	White/Hispanic
Meredith	Woman	34	Canada	White
Xavier	Man	25	Canada	Invalid response (‘Canadian’)
Katherine	Woman	59	Canada	White
Blake	Man	31	Canada	White
Helena	Woman	56	USA	White
John	Man	27	Canada	White
Arthur	Man	58	Canada	Invalid response (‘Canadian’)
Carson	Man	64	Canada	White
Cecelia	Woman	53	Canada	White
Kendra	Woman	70	Canada	White
Kevin	Man	47	Canada	White
Nathan	Man	No response	No response	No response
Kate	Woman	32	Australia	Filipino-White
Sam	Man	36	Australia	White
Bridgette (first author, not a pseudonym)	Woman	30	Canada	White
Jean (second author, not a pseudonym)	Woman	32	Canada	White

We chose to use written reflections for several reasons. From a research standpoint, the reflections provide data in the form of ‘“evocative” cultural writing where the participants’ experiences and feelings were foregrounded’ in a way that makes it possible to ‘put them into dialogue with the scholars’ own autoethnographic accounts’ (Kinnunen & Kolehmainen, 2019, p. 33). Practically, this method was a response to the moment: participants were facing pervasive ‘Zoom fatigue’ and other pandemic-related challenges (including illness, lack of privacy, measures to prevent illness transmission that limited mobility, etc.). Given that long Zoom interviews may be impractical or undesirable, we felt that written participation, completed on the participant’s own schedule, would lower the barrier to entry.

There were drawbacks to this method. The extent to which one can ‘excavate intensities of feeling’ – especially when these are fleeting, contingent, and perhaps simmering below full consciousness – is up for debate (Spinney, 2015, p. 235). As Spinney (2015, p. 236) argues, asking participants to speak about their lived experiences after the fact risks losing much of the ‘effervescence’, the ‘over-flowing’ nature of lived experience partly because we ask them to do so through language – a form of representation not always suited to describing bodily phenomena – but also because we ask participants to recall these experiences after the fact and may thus lose ephemeral details. Also, because participation was self-driven, we found that there was a higher-than-usual drop-off rate between participants reviewing and signing the consent form and submitting the reflection. There was also less depth and more ambiguity in the submissions than we would expect to see from in-depth interviews, because we could not ask follow-up questions or prompt the interviewee when the meaning of their statements was unclear.

At the same time, our method has many strengths. In addition to reducing the barrier to entry as described above, our method enables participants to tell their stories fully. While we designed our instructions to help participants recollect particularly intense sensory and emotional moments, the nature of reflections gives participants freedom to build their own discussion of areas of interest, allowing them to focus on their most salient emotions without influence from interviewers and in a way that can help circumvent discomfort with sharing intense emotional recollections with near strangers during the interview process.

With the aid of NVivo software, we coded the submitted reflections line-by-line using emotion coding – which ‘label[s] the emotions recalled and/or experienced by the participant or inferred by the researcher about the participant’ (Saldaña, 2013, p. 105). While the topics discussed in reflections covered a range of subjects, we coded with an exclusive focus on leisure and emotion in line with our research aims. As a result, topics only partially related to our research focus were not captured during coding (for example, discussion of leisure practices without reference to emotion were excluded; discussion of emotion related to non-leisure activities, such as to emotions related to the pandemic in general, were excluded). After several rounds of re-coding, we arrived at three top-level codes. The first, ‘Emotions Affecting Leisure Experiences’ captured emotions participants bring into their leisure experiences, including subcodes such as ‘Managing Emotion’, a code dedicated to discussion of how participants use running to regulate unruly emotions such as anxiety. Phenomena included in this top-level code primarily involves conceptions of emotion as interior, and thus is not central to our analysis. The second top-level code, ‘Emotions Produced Through Leisure Experiences’, is particularly relevant for our analysis as it includes all references to emotions created via the leisure process, and thus features heavily in the below discussion. The final top-level code, ‘Sociality’, includes all references to emotion produced via leisure in relation to social connections and community. Data included in this top-level code is also relevant to our analysis as it enables understanding of how leisure pursuits not only produce emotion, but also how emotion is instrumental in shaping interpersonal connections and community. We read these participant-generated texts following Ahmed: by ‘tracking how words for feeling, and objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick, and slide. We move, stick and slide with them’ (2004, p. 14).

Findings and discussion

Where do emotions come from?

As discussed above, it is often oversimplistic to treat running as a tool for emotional regulation, without acknowledging that the act of running (as a relational process) produces emotion itself. This is not to dismiss the importance of running as a strategy for managing and modulating emotions. Many participants made some reference to using running for this purpose. For example, Arthur – a Canadian man in his 50s who works for the military – describes running as, ‘an outlet’ while Nathan – a Canadian man currently undergoing treatment for cancer – uses the term ‘coping mechanism’, and Sam – an Australian man who works in education – frames running as ‘a real escape’. For these participants, running is a way to manage or improve emotional wellbeing in a positive manner by lowering the intensity of felt emotions or ‘clearing’ the mind. Kate – an Australian woman with a stressful job – exemplifies this phenomenon, saying:

On days where I felt like I had lockdown blues, being outside and running gave me a timeout from that mind-frame – I could be present in the moment and just focus on what I needed to do for my running program – instead of being in a head fog where concentration was hard or lacking motivation.

Kate also uses running as a means of managing poor mental health. She says:

I also currently manage anxiety. Running has been an activity in the past that actually helps me feel much more calm and provides me with mental clarity afterwards. Generally, the more I have ran, the less anxious I feel throughout the week.

We share these excerpts to acknowledge that many of our participants conceptualise running as a tool to manipulate, modulate or escape the emotions brought into a run and that while we may critique the simplicity of this narrative, it is not wholly untrue, and for many is a key draw of running (see also Cook et al., 2016).

Given this, moments where using running as a tool for emotional regulation fails are particularly interesting from an analytic standpoint. These moments not only illustrate the relative shallowness of the idea that running simply manages and modulates intense affects and emotions, but encourage us to see running itself as an alchemical component of our emotional lives (rather than as an simple machine with which we launder our messy emotions). For example, Sophie – a Canadian woman and a multi-sport athlete with a tumultuous home life – notes that running is often an escape mechanism from her turbulent living situation but recounts a particular incidence where the run did not work as expected. She says:

I found myself thinking a lot about my situation at home at that time. I wasn’t able to escape during that run. […] I really got into my thoughts and really started thinking about my own situation, about my health and what’s going on. The pandemic has really taken a toll. So just getting into my head, thinking about those thoughts, I did really break down during that run. I ended up being a walk and a call to my cousin, but I feel like those moments are definitely educational and open up your eyes. So that was one of the bad moments. However, I do still think take it as a positive moment that I had, and I’m thankful for it because it definitely opened up my eyes to some of the situations going on in my life.

Sophie was unable to escape the emotional turmoil she brought into this particular run, but still considers the experience as ultimately ‘positive’ because it ‘opened [her] eyes’, implying that she was able to process and work through the emotions precisely because of the way the emotions manifested during her run. While the run ‘failed’ to modulate her emotions, it helped her make a connection with her cousin and reframed her understanding of her situation. Jean, the second author and a Canadian woman and graduate student, had a similar experience where the act of running itself produced intense, paralysing emotions:

In the months before the pandemic, I went to the sports medicine clinic at Carleton University. I had been running terribly. I was in the middle of training for an 80 km ultra and was supposed to run 40 km the Saturday before my appointment. I started on an easy loop that I had done dozens of times before. But three very slow kilometers in, I wound up weeping on the side of the trail, feeling pained, utterly emptied out, and disconnected from my body. Even the idea of walking it in to the car seemed impossible. I knew – and the doctor would confirm – that the problem was ‘multifactorial’: my iron levels were low, I probably needed to be eating more protein, and I was feeling seriously depressed for the first time in years. I was scared because this felt like the same sort of amorphous thing that had slowly eroded away the joy I used to get from swimming. Trying to run made it all – my failing physical and mental health, and the trail itself – feel utterly insurmountable and paralyzing. I could generally hold things together in my daily life but running made me flounder; it brought all my misery to the surface and made it feel impossible to move through the world. With three or four weeks before the competition, I pulled out. This felt like the right decision – how ridiculous would it be to not even be able to get to the first aid station? – but running in the months afterward would remain shot-through with shame and frustration.

Before this time (and, eventually, after it), running had served Jean as a tool for managing stress and intense emotion. However, like the excerpt from Sophie above, these incidents of mental pain that arise while running are a clear reminder that running produces its own affects and emotions, and that these do something and shape bodily capacities and orientations. This can be easy to forget when running feels good and the body works as we hope it will. Ahmed (2004, p. 26) explains, ‘…experiences of dysfunction (such as pain) become lived as a return to the body, or a rendering present to consciousness of what has become absent … The intensity of feelings like pain recalls us to our body surfaces: pain seizes me back to my body’.

We begin our analysis with these two excerpts because, like pain itself, they revisibilise the running body and its embodied sensations, affects, and emotions. They demonstrate that ‘moments of intensification’ like these continually (re)define ‘the contours of the ordinary surfaces’ of the body and open us up or close us down to other objects, people and communities (Ahmed, 2004, p. 27). As these examples illustrate, it is simplistic to assume that emotion can be straightforwardly managed through the act of running. Emotions brought into a run are sometimes tempered, sometimes magnified as new emotional intensities are produced through the act of running itself, sometimes metamorphosed, and sometimes made slippery instead of regulated.

Emotions’ movements: bodily affects

Emotion helps construct not only narratives about the running body, but also shapes the very surface of that body. As the running body circulates – both metaphorically, such as through representations of wiry, muscled individuals depicted in running magazines, and literally, as runners trace routes through their towns and cities – emotions move along with them. Cook et al. make this point well, explaining that ‘jogging in shared public spaces rarely happens in isolation from non-runners’, rather ‘particular negotiated socialities emerge through and punctuate the rhythms of runners’ activities in the shared infrastructures of the city’ or the trail (Cook et al., 2016, p. 751). Through this circulation, running bodies can become ‘become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11).

The emotion and affect that sticks to the running body varies. Jocelyn – an American woman in her late forties – discusses the time before she began running herself, neatly summarising one common thread of feeling: ‘I hated running. I had always questioned runners about their reasons for running long distances of 10 miles or more. But those same runners were happy. They were productive people. They had a zest for life’ (emphasis added). Complex and contradictory emotion – love and admiration, sometimes contrasted with hate for running and potentially runners – often sticks to the running body, especially if that body otherwise fails to conform to normative standards of beauty or fitness. But for many, the pandemic changed how even the ‘ideal’ running body moves and in turn, how running shapes emotion for onlookers and passerbys caught up in the circulation of ‘the runner’.

In April 2020, engineers from Belgium and the Netherlands published a pre-print paper modelling how movement speed might affect the disbursement of airborne droplets capable of transmitting COVID-19 (Blocken et al., 2020, preprint). They conclude that ‘avoiding substantial droplet exposure’ from a runner running at 14.4 km/h requires that a physical distance of 10 m (32 feet) be maintained, far more than the recommended measure of 6 feet of physical distance. A blog about this study (Thoelen 2020) circulated widely, including among our own networks, even as more reputable news articles challenged the researchers’ conclusions (e.g. Koebler, 2020). Cecelia – a Canadian woman in her fifties and amateur running coach – describes the effects of this study on her running practice:

There was a big study going around about fluid dynamics and the risk of running or walking behind someone. At that time, a lot more people were trying to get outside with their kids–walking and on bikes. The traffic was down, but there seemed to be so many people out and about … I really gave everyone a big swath of space. I did stop running altogether for a while or go very early in the morning to avoid people. I found the thought of running stressful … So overall, I have had feelings of stress, disappointment, even fear when running outside.

This recollection reveals something about the intensity of the emotion produced by the circulation of this ‘big study’ (which was, in fact, a blog based on a pre-print, based on computer modelling). Despite giving others a ‘big swath of space’, for Cecelia, running began to create feelings of stress, disappointment, and fear. Bridgette, the first author and a Canadian graduate student in her early thirties, had a similar experience; while not explicitly linked to the pre-print publication discussed above, it also illustrates the transition from the running body as an object of joy to something more painful:

I have a visceral memory of an early morning in May 2020. I was running through a park, not wearing a mask, approaching the canal path by running down a short flight of stairs. I came to a three-way, T-shaped intersection. It was impossible to go off the path as the canal lined one side of the path and the steps coming down toward the canal path had large rocks on each side. An older woman runner (also maskless) wanted to get up the stairs, and there was a couple with a dog and a baby stroller (wearing masks) also arriving at the intersection, coming from the canal path. We all awkwardly stopped at the intersection trying to figure out how to traverse this path without coming closer to each other. I eventually just decided to sprint through, which required me to pass closer to the older woman. I remember the look on her face – horror and afront, deeply upset that I was entering her two-meter bubble. I felt terrible. I regretted upsetting her, on one hand, but I was also irritated: someone needed to move and there was no way to get through the intersection without passing each other, so what did she want me to have done instead – fly!? This mix of negative emotions was not uncommon to me during this period of the pandemic, but it still sucked the joy out of the run.

Key here is that as an object that circulates, the running body produces emotions, which are shaped both by the runner’s internal affects, processes, and sensations, but also by others and these people’s own sensations, affects, and emotions. As Rana argues ‘The ways in which people move and relate to their bodies and environments are intertwined with the social structures that comprise environments and bodies’ (Rana, 2022, p. 4). She writes: ‘People’s sense of their bodies is shaped by how they perceive others’ interpretations of them. How people move and feel they are expected to move cannot be understood without a consideration of how individuals perceive themselves and respond to their interpretations of others’ perceptions of them’ (Rana, 2022, p. 10).

Here, Rana is concerned specifically with the ways gender, race, and other vectors of power may change the embodied experience of running, and she draws attention to the importance of sociocultural (and, in the case of the pandemic, sociolegal) forces in shaping the embodied experience of running and how affect ‘sticks’ to certain bodies. For us and some of our participants, while running may have otherwise produced feeling of happiness and freedom, the way the running body was circulating as a threatening object changed what it was possible for the running body to be and do. Writing about women and people of colour specifically, Rana pushes back on the idea that running is ‘accessible, and open to anyone’, pointing out that ‘the threshold of recreational running in public space can be high and learning how to run can feel strange’ (Rana, 2022, p. 2). For runners like us and many of our participants, who might otherwise feel comfortable and at home in a running body – namely white, non-disabled, and thin people – moments like those outlined above may have (ever so slightly) denaturalised the normative affective relationship they have with their bodies and (re)shaped what their running body can do, highlighting the affective, emotional and interrelational nature of bodily capacities.

The act of running (or not running) also articulates with ideas of what a runner is and what a runner does, ideas that produce particularly potent affects and emotions. The hegemonic ideal of what a runner is is perhaps best demonstrated by Allen-Collinson and Hockey’s (2001) autoethnographic article about the process of recovering from injury. In the article, they offer suggestions of what it means to be a runner: disciplined, tough, gritty, ‘healthy’, thin, and fundamentally different from the non-runner based on their ‘capacity to endure’ even tough challenges.

Some of our participants echo this ‘hardcore’ image of the gutsy and gritty runner. Carson – a Canadian man in his sixties and lifelong runner – opened his reflection by asserting that he was likely to be a ‘disappointment and dissenting voice in respect to the ongoing pandemic’ because he found that the pandemic presented him with some new athletic opportunities and a ‘refreshing…interlude from the “normalcy” of life [to which] we were all accustomed’. He explains:

[The pandemic] hasn’t hampered my training or enthusiasm for running in any measure. You see, I’ve always trained alone (with few exceptions) and do all my running outside year around, regardless of the conditions. I’ve always stated, ‘You can’t pick your conditions on race day, so why pick them in training?!’ … I have no use for treadmills and gyms with more fancy frills and equipment … I’m strictly ‘Old School’. Motivation has never been an issue for me and even on those days when I’m ‘not really feeling it’, I manage to complete at least some portion of my intended workout. There’s never any excuse not to and as I heard one person say, ‘There’s never bad weather, just weak people’. Completely agree!

(Emphasis participant’s own)

Carson’s espoused preoccupation with commitment, toughness, and an ability to persevere despite obstacles is punctuated by images he submitted of scraped, bleeding, and bruised limbs. To Carson, runners experience pain but they overcome it; they are not ‘weak’. While he does not explicitly state that those who fail to persevere and overcome are not ‘real’ runners, his statement implies a hierarchical scale: on one end, Carson, who does not need ‘fancy frills and equipment’ from gyms because he runs outside no matter what. On the other, ‘weak’ people. Scorn for those who do not run outside in inclement weather, or who do use treadmills and gyms, is implicit. Though he does not explicitly state it, we infer through analysis that Carson conforms to his own idealised vision of a runner – one who is not daunted by weather, who does not need fancy equipment, who never gives up, etc. – which also aligns with broader social conceptions of the ideal runner, as described by Allen-Collinson and Hockey. Carson speaks only about himself and his own running practice, yet his place in a broader community is alluded to throughout his comments: his assumption that he will be a ‘dissenting voice’ demonstrates his perceived removal from a community of runners negatively affected by the pandemic, and his quote about bad weather and weak people, heard from someone else, demonstrates that even though Carson trains and runs alone his ‘no excuses’ mentality towards running is shaped, in this case bolstered, by others who live by the same mantra. Carson’s comments are significant because they illustrate how objects and the emotions they produce come to matter and ‘stick’ to public conceptions of what a running body does.

The affective ideal of the ‘ideal runner’ circulates socially, and runners’ emotional relationship to this object shapes their bodily practices and orients them towards or away from running. For some, like Allen-Collinson and Hockey, or Carson, they may be motivating and affirming – orienting them towards the ideal running body as object and producing better training and performances. For others, even when they may not recognise it, the affects in circulation impinge on what their bodies can do. The figure of the ideal runner haunts Jean’s reflection; the circulation of the ‘ideal runner’ and her failure to meet its affective and emotional promises made running painful and physically limit what her body can do. It is likely that these blockages may be most keenly felt by those who, by virtue of gender, race, class, and disability, are never able to conform to the ideal. Similarly, Cecelia writes,

I noticed some people in our club increased their running volume and pace. At the same time, my motivation was really flagging and my volume and pace went down. I felt embarrassed by this. Here I was the marathon coach and I had lost all mojo. Also, compared to many people, I had things pretty easy. No kids at home or lost job etc.

Cecelia’s feelings of embarrassment and shame were produced because of decreasing engagement in leisure activity but are not produced in isolation. The embarrassment is a result of failing to meet socially produced expectations which demonstrates the sociality of emotion, even when it is produced as a result of individual leisure activity. As Probyn (2005) argues, shame is often a relational emotion, manifesting when we fail to uphold communal or reciprocal social expectations. Thus, the guilt and embarrassment described above indicate that even emotions produced through changing leisure habits are affected by the socially circulating affects sticking to the idealised running body. Bridgette, the first author, also felt guilty for a perceived failure to perform:

I ended up buying weights and doing strength training in my home, and I found I quite liked it. I could do it any time of day (unlike running at this point, which I only wanted to do early morning to avoid crowds), and it was a new physical challenge. I found I quite liked strength training and after a while I found I didn’t miss running. I did, however, feel guilty about not running. My mileage was way down and therefore my cardio capacity was way down (even as I was stronger than ever). I tried to convince myself to run more, even though I really didn’t want to, because I thought I should keep a base fitness level for when I return to running. But I didn’t really want to, so I didn’t run as much as I thought I should, so then I felt badly about myself, etc., etc. I tried to be forgiving of myself–‘it’s ok to not be on top form in a global pandemic’ and ‘this is a hobby. It’s supposed to be fun. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t doing it’.

For Bridgette, while pursuit of new strength gains brought joy and pleasure, feelings of guilt arose when moving away from previous running-based priorities. Unlike Cecelia, the first author’s feelings of guilt are not inspired by comparison to others who are performing their running practice ‘better’. Despite this, both examples show that the socially circulated image of the ‘real’ running body produces powerful affects.

Conclusion

While popular conceptions of running imagine it as a leisure activity best suited to regulate emotions brought into a run, we posit that the relationship between running and emotion is not so straightforward. In analysing our collected archive of affect, we have demonstrated that while runners may value running for its perceived ability to aid in emotional management – using running as an escape or an outlet – running itself produces emotions, often intense and sometimes contradictory and complex. Said production is a complicated business, because the social circulation of affect means that it is impossible to neatly identify where emotions originate. It is undeniable that runners bring emotion with them into a run: perhaps frustration from a bad day at work, or excitement from looking forward to running. However, in direct contradiction to common conceptions of running specifically and leisure in general as an ‘outlet’ or way to manage unruly emotions, we demonstrate that emotions are produced through leisure activities such as running: through joy derived from the rhythm of a pleasurable run, or frustration over aches and pains, for example.

Further, in an effort to bring theories of affect and emotion into studies of leisure, which has often relied on psychologically based understandings of emotion, we show that emotions created through running are not individual or divorced from wider contexts. The ideal of the runner is an affective construct: tough, determined, dauntless. These affects stick, circulating amongst runners and wider popular cultures, and while not all runners orient themselves towards this ideal (and indeed, not all runners can), such affects retain the capacity to affect our emotional experiences. Understanding why and how people run, and what the running body does hinges on understanding the productive capacities of the running body – not only what emotions they bring into a run – and how, through its circulation, the running body produces social affects and emotions.

Overall, we contribute to the wider study of emotion and leisure by demonstrating how emotions arise processually, through running, and then do something. In other words, the act of running produces emotion in relation to a complex set of norms and expectations about running and bodies, and in turn shapes bodily capacities, social formations, and runners’ orientations towards human and non-human objects. Our exploration of running’s productive capacities enriches the field through our exploration of how emotions are not simply individual feelings divorced from wider contexts, but instead circulate as socially produced and culturally contingent forces, thus supplementing understandings of leisure as a means of regulating emotion.

Acknowledgements

Bridgette Desjardins is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Jean Ketterling is supported in part by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Bridgette Desjardins

Bridgette Desjardins (she/her) is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University. She studies sport as a cultural artifact, often through the lens of gender and sexuality, or nationalism and militarism.

Jean Ketterling

Jean Ketterling (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of game studies and pornography studies, with a particular focus on affect and emotion.