ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how an elite running culture can become sustainable through the formation of distinctive embodiment. It offers details of the Runtleborough Students Athletics Club (RSAC) training program in hope of illuminating how the embodied cultural habitus of the runners is created and sustained. Training methods for elite high performance athletes have not changed too much over the last 40 years at RSAC. The pull of the elite running culture in and around Runtleborough is such that many club members stay in town, long after their student days, in pursuit of the fastest times their mortal engines can muster. The data collected in this research is gathered during training sessions, at races and individual meetings that the author had with the runners. Ethnographic accounts of sporting practice allow readers detailed insight into their sensuous nature. Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of corporeal schema helps to determine how middle and long-distance runners make the decisions without really thinking about them.
