ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on fictions and non-fictions, existing academic literatures to offer a socio-cultural analysis of running pleasures. It reflects a form of autoethnography, as Denzin posits, is a departure from traditional social science research. The chapter requires different ways of writing, as well as of reading: 'The writer asks the reader to submit to the text's casual version of how and why something happened'. It aims is to challenge running cultures of achievement and running discourses of success. The chapter offers idea on how running, and other similar repetitive movements, can be related to pleasure. It co-opt a range of literatures and personal experiences to show how running pleasures exist within the sociocultural contexts of class and gender relations. The chapter explores the possibilities of an inclusion of the aesthetic, sensate and visceral to an understanding of running and pleasure. It disregards traditional notions of success and accomplishment in favor of embodied sensations, emotions and affect.
