Running the Routes Together

Abstract

The mundane, concrete practices of social life have remained underanalyzed, unproblematized, even taken for granted by some social theorists, despite their being constitutive of the very foundation of social life. Despite a growing corpus of ethnographic studies within the sociology of sport, little analytic attention has been devoted to the concrete practices of actually “doing” sporting activity. Based on data derived from a collaborative auto-ethnographic study of distance runners, this article analyzes 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, analyzed in relation to three specific areas: ground and performance, safety concerns, and “the other,” in the form of training partner(s), highlighting the importance of aural and visual components. It concludes with a call for more detailed analytic descriptions of sporting practices to better ground more abstract generalizations about sporting phenomena.