Who Is Doing a Run with the Running Boom?

Abstract

Originally, running was a sporting activity which was mainly, if not only, practised by competitive athletes in private track and field clubs or through extracurricular school and university programmes (Bale, 2004). Today, running has become an immensely popular pastime pursued in the public sphere by millions of recreational participants worldwide. Up to the 1960s, however, recreational jogging along the street, in a park or in a forest was considered a strange activity. In his analysis of public order, Goffman (1971) described patterned characters of everyday life and, among others, analysed pedestrian traffic systems. At that time, people huffing, puffing, hobbling, plodding and sweating while running in the streets was less evident than it is nowadays. Stokvis (2006) noted that in this context, leisure-time running was rather perceived as a disruption of social codes between pedestrians, and thus marring the existing public order. If people ran in public, this was mainly the case because they were in a hurry. Doing forms of physical exercise in public meant that one was ‘frivolous’, ‘idle’ or even ‘subversive’ (Florida, 2002; Paunonen, 2009). Running in public was seen as a waste of energy and, therefore, people practising leisure-time running activities risked being scoffed and jeered at (Van Bottenburg et al., 2010a). Thus, apart from the club- and school-organised version, recreational running used to be a rather unusual physical activity for the greater part of the twentieth century.