Answering our Why with geography
Thinking about why we run is one thing, but deep academic research into why and where we run as a population can lead to a less anecdotal answer.
I’m so interested in the intersection between running and geography. It’s what I studied at university, and if you’ve spent more than a few minutes with me, I’ve probably tried to convince you that it’s the best subject in the world. I believe we can find the answer to everything using geography.
I talk about “stepping deeper into running culture,” for instance, and just generally thinking more deeply about why we spend so much time doing this thing that we do. That stems from a Masters in cultural and economic geography, but it’s not unusual for a long-distance runner to spend an eight-hour shift per week on their running. That’s an extraordinary amount of time to be spending on a leisure pursuit, and it begs the question of Why. I think we can get closer to discovering the answer with geography.
One of a growing cohort of academics looking to explore and explain the cultural nuances and reasoning behind why we run is Simon Cook, a British geographer who runs the Jographies website. I happened upon Simon’s work because of my own background studying cultural geographies. Yes, like everyone else, I’m constantly searching for more people with the same perspectives as me.
Geography is the study of people and place – it’s the essence of how I examine the world. Understanding why and how a population relates to where they are is essential in delivering quality insights.
When you consider that running is people moving through place or space, it makes sense that the geographies of running (jographies) can help explain our Why so successfully. The study of movement itself, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon
So what exactly are the geographies of running?
“I think about it as running with spaces rather than in spaces. The space informs who the runner is, and the runner informs what the space is, what impact they have on each other, what places become meaningful through running, and what’s feasible in a space. A lot of my attention is on that quite intimate relationship.”
Take runners versus pedestrians, for instance. Simon talks about the hierarchies of sharing the pavement. It’s an issue of power, both in terms of velocity but also in terms of societal power. It’s been a hot topic since the number of runners doubled through the pandemic, thrusting more runners into the shared public realm. Questions thus arose of who is “subverting the use, who feels like they belong, and who yields the pavement.” These are the geographies of running.
Geography isn’t just coloring in maps, then?
“We do love a good map,” Simon laughs. “The Strava heat map is a wonderful example of running geographies. People are using Strava to literally color in a personal heat map of every street near them. In doing that, they’re exploring their city in new, different ways, and engaging with the city as a running subject.”
It was while Simon was studying geography for his undergraduate degree that he became attuned to “ideas around people’s engagement with space.” He started to pitch his work around running in an emerging field of work called Mobility Studies, which “was more interested with the way that movements themselves impact people’s lifeworlds,” rather than just the motivations behind movement. Interestingly, Mobilities didn’t exist when I was studying. It’s really that fresh a topic to study.
As a runner, he noticed that many of the theories he was studying, he was experiencing first-hand. He’d moved to a new city to study, and was exploring it by running. He realized that running was unique and critical in the study of Mobilities because runners often ‘go’ nowhere. Because we run in a loop, there are no push or pull motivations to run, so different questions had to be asked, and he was there when those questions started being asked in earnest.
As a result of his observations and personal interest, a lecturer suggested that he drill down his research into mobilities around running specifically, and the rest is history. (Or geography…)
According to Simon, there are four reasons why geographers should study running:
Running is is “imbued with all sorts of meanings, experiences, contexts and cultures.”
Running “transforms [runners’] understanding of and connection to those spaces and their bodies.”
A study of where running physically takes place forms important hard, useful data.
There has not yet been much exploration into the effect of the digital experience.
All of these concepts lead to a greater understanding of the reasons why and where we run. For a real-world example, he talks about city marathons, and the study of how they affect perceptions both globally and locally.
“A big city marathon is a wonderful act of permitted transgression. You’re running on a road you can’t normally run on. These spaces that are normally kept aside for cars are now suddenly given over. You’re re-experiencing the city.”
“If you think about the reaction to event t-shirts, and whether they’re a good or bad thing to have, people are more aware of what impact our running is having in terms of environmentalism. And charity, for instance. Can we use our running to connect us to other people, other places.”
I personally run for my physical and mental health, so I don’t engage with races in this way, but I do love to explore my city with friends, usually over distances between four and ten miles. My heatmap holds some weekly routes in deep red, as well as some in orange that hold fond memories of sprinting away from a wrong turn in Downtown Los Angeles with some new friends. It’s when I first started to understand the disparity in wealth between Skid Row and the rest of LA. I look at the two-minute-mile I recorded when I got on the train home without stopping my watch.
Simon’s PhD on run-commuting looked at how running with a bag impacted the experience, but also at the businesses that provided the essential, but expensive item. He brought together the otherwise disparate themes of travel, work, consumer, and exercise cultures.
As he looks to further that research, rather than looking into the tribalism of whether you can wear a hydration vest for a 5k, his next research partner is a sports biomechanist.
“I’ve always been really keen to maintain my geography identity because it feels really core to who I am, but then I really look at who’s using my work and who’s engaging with it, and it’s mostly from sport. I get asked to peer review papers in sport more than I do in geography.”
I understand this very well. My own PhD proposal was about looking at the geographies on digital music consumption. Back in 2005, that involved Kazaa and MySpace (RIP), but Spotify was founded the very next year. If I’d pursued academia rather than music journalism, one imagines that work would’ve been more popular with the music industry than geographers.
A by-product of this running boom is that there’s a larger public audience longing to understand their place in this sport. Coupled with a more established Mobilities discipline the hope is that more jographers will emerge. Through their academic findings, maybe even using Strava’s large, anonymised datasets that are shared with academic institutions, they might help solve those issues of sharing the pavement in the future, as we better understand why and where we run.
Read Jographies
Further reading
Housekeeping
UPGRADE - Upgrade your subscription for just $1 a week if you can. It’s probably tax deductible!
BUY ME A COFFEE - Think of it as a tip jar for my writing.
SHARE - If you enjoyed reading this, share it with someone else who would enjoy it.
WIN - Upgraded subscribers can win a $100 Janji gift card every single week of 2025. And you can win once a month! 100s of dollars of potential winnings…
MERCH - The Crying & Running t-shirt from Running Wylder got so many comments. Great if you’re lonely!
GET FREE STICKERS - Get 5 Running Sucks stickers for FREE. Yeah, I’ll just send you some stickers. I’m sure you’d do the same for me.
CONNECT WITH ME - Instagram / Strava
Thanks for reading
Raz x
A timely article. I'm visiting my wife's family in New York, and we are staying in a new city 45 minutes from her grandmother. I'm amazed at how quickly I'm learning the roads and landmarks by out and back routes from the house.