ABSTRACT
Joyce Carol Oates wrote: ‘Running: If there’s any happier activity, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be’ (quoted in Burfoot 2000, 66). On the other hand, a former long-distance runner recalled that by the age of nineteen she had ‘already given too much, all my blood and my driving, pounding heart and guts, I cannot possibly keep doing it, giving it more and more again’ (Heywood 1998, 97). So, far from supplying the free, joyful idyll of bodily movement invoked by Oates’s lyrical representation, the serious runner can be read as a product of ideological, technological and carceral acts that produce a kind of ‘human motor’ (Rabinbach 1992). The twenty-first century world of running as sport sustains the notion of ‘work’ and hence contests Anson Rabinbach’s suggestion that the twentieth century witnessed the disappearance of the human motor. This chapter, therefore, focuses on running in its utilitarian, rationalised and commodified form. The kind of running dealt with here is one of several similar ‘structured mobilities’, abstracted and mechanised (Cresswell 2006, 9) and largely focuses on Britain and the West.
