Andy Fuller
Independent scholar & Podcaster
Most of us runners aren’t elite. We jog, we shuffle, we hurt. We have ungainly gaits, and our bodies move loosely – leaning the wrong way and with our feet hitting the pavement in irregular patterns. Our breathing is laboured and each time we go for a run, a different part of our body feels on the brink of a new kind of injury. And then, some days, the winds die down, the temperature becomes temperate and mild; the sun comes out. And we run effortlessly. Our bodies move smoothly through our environs. The wind is still, and we are fast.
What was yesterday a conscious effort, today has become automatic and fully embodied knowledge. Our knees are up and our feet flick up to our butts; our hands move backwards and forwards, rather than across the centre lines of our torsos. Our movement is ‘economical’ – or so running gurus say. We’re not wasting the resource of our body’s energy systems. Our breathing is controlled. And, there is almost a kind of silence and stillness. This may be a race or may not be. It could just be a training session. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we might just well be in the zone; in a state of flow.
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For the elite athlete, running is work proper. It is the mobilisation of the body to achieve an income, money, fame, adulation. And of course, ‘self-realisation’. Dutch athlete and several time national champion, Noah Schutte tells me, ‘I want to see how far I can push myself.’ When he says this, it makes me realise that it is also a deeply personal kind of striving. Turning running into work almost means instrumentalising it: making it exist only for something else. What Noah tells me is barely different from what former professional classical dancer and now ‘masters’ athlete, Rebekah Kennedy of New York tells me about her own running practice. Rebekah, who only started running in her late 40s, sees running too, as a practice of refining her new bodily skill.
I’m not sure where the boundary lies between the elite and the amateur or the everyday runner. Perhaps this is in part because there are so few opportunities for becoming fully-professional: living an existence paid-for by one’s athletic ability. Athletes break national records one day and then the next they return to being almost anonymous joggers in the park, where only the running-fanatic will recognise them. There are probably few sports where elite performance requires so much daily labour and where opportunities to perform can be so irregular: a minor injury, after all, can interrupt the year’s schedule.
There is little infrastructure that supports a culture of professional marathon athletes. There is yet to be a ‘Marathon League’. Although, the Abbott World Majors seem to be an effort at creating a series of somehow connected races. Some commentators bemoan the lack of head-to-head racing and that the sport has become obsessed only with the times that athletes can achieve. And thus, there are projects which seek to enable an athlete to break the 2-hour barrier for the marathon. Like Mike Crawley says in his interview in Episode #37, this kind of fetishization of time promotes the expertise of the sports scientists around the athlete, rather than the athlete himself (for indeed ‘breaking 2 [hours]) was indeed focused on a male athlete.
I use ‘runner’ to refer to someone whose performance in races is largely of little consequence except to her or himself and ‘athlete’ to refer to someone who runs to win varying levels of competition. But this division can be arbitrary too: for a ‘runner’ somewhere can win competitions elsewhere. And, an everyday runner may well compete and structure their running, training in a manner analogous to that of the so-called elite athlete. I thus think of the ‘runner-athlete’ rather than believe too much in the divisibility of the two terms. I am an everyday runner and my race times won’t be written on my tombstone when I’m no longer of this world; but I know that my running is part of my family and social life. So, I also can’t say that it is an entirely solitary act.
The runner learns from, and models her or his actions on the athlete; they imagine themselves as an athlete. The athlete moves in and out of everyday running training and only sometimes transitions into being elite: within the confines of a stadium or a city-marathon event where she or he is adulated and given special treatment and affordances. But so much of being elite involves being an everyday runner: for ‘they’ also run the same paths, run the same paces and do the same kinds of training as the ‘everyday runner’.
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I’m making the Everyday Runners podcast, one week at a time. I’m interviewing athletes, runners, runner-athletes, and of course researchers. My focus is on researchers coming from the humanities and social sciences – which is my own background. I’m interested in the stories of these folk that I interview. I have some standard lines: I don’t discriminate against fast athletes, and I don’t tolerate false modesty. If one runs well and fast, I want my podcast to be a place to celebrate it. But I also don’t want to fetishize fastness. I’ve learned from Veronique Chance (Episode #36) that running can also be an opportunity for play. Sarah Ackland (Episode #35) has reminded me of and re-enforced the gendered nature of running through urban spaces. Rebekah Kennedy (Episode #39) shared her intimate knowledge of the sensorial geography of New York and its boroughs. Lindsey A Freeman (Episode #21) spoke to the possibilities of queerness in running and how queerness has been marginalized in a largely heteronormative sporting culture. And, Reem Ali (Episode #18) spoke of doing a marathon under military occupation in Palestine.
Copyright © Andy Fuller 2025
Andy Fuller is the host of Everyday Runners Podcast and a co-founder of Reading Sideways Press. If you are, or want to be, or want to know more about the everyday runner, you can do worse than to be a regular follower of Andy Fuller’s podcast. If you would like to support his project, consider subscribing via his Patreon page.
The podcast interviews are part of a research process for a book about the practices and projects of running which we undertake in our everyday lives. If you want to get in touch, he can be reached at everydayrunnerspodcast@gmail.com. His Instagram account can be found here.
