Abstract
This paper examines how spaces of health are produced through embodied and affective practices in marathon running in China. While the social-cultural effects of distance running have gained increasing attention among public health scholars and policymakers, there has been little effort paid to the spatiality of running and its contributions to producing healthy spaces for the general public. This paper therefore fills the lacuna through a qualitative study that was conducted with 29 amateur marathon runners in China. Drawing on the Gioia Methodology in coding and analyzing qualitative data, we highlight the interactive effects of body, wearable technology, and affective atmospheres in producing what we call “embodied space of health.” We suggest that the embodied space of health is not simply the bodily experience per se but rather a relational space constituted through the co-production of body, non-human objects, and space/place. It is through these relational spaces that the effects of health and well-being (e.g., self-exploration and therapeutic feelings) emerge in marathon.
Highlights
Running has gradually become an important inquiry to public health researchers and policymakers since the late 1970s given its health-promoted benefits [1,2]
The perception and exploration of the body is central to the health effects of marathon running
Our coding processes show that the bodily experience of health can be divided into two conceptulisations of the body: First, runners attempt to build up the capacity of the body by cultivating healthy body and exploring the potentials of their body; second, through marathon running, practitioners reclaim the autonomy of the body that was thwarted by the programmatic lifestyles and social norms in the city
Summary
Running has gradually become an important inquiry to public health researchers and policymakers since the late 1970s given its health-promoted benefits [1,2]. Over the past one decade or so, scholars have shown growing interests in exploring the cultures of distance running and how they relate to the issues of health and wellbeing [3,4,5,6,7] This cultural approach to running studies pay attention to the ways in which healthy lifestyles are produced and maintained through running cultures and practices [6,8]. Some scholars have noted that space/place matters in health studies because some places (e.g., therapeutic landscape) have health-promoted effects but because space conditions and mediates people’s practices of health making [9,10] This is the case in running, an inherently spatial practice that calls upon the body to move across/through spaces [4]. The market-oriented and neoliberal reforms in China have released people from the constraints of collectivist ideologies, which instead enables individuals’
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