Running Cultures

Racing in Time and Space

By: John Bale

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Hardcover | 22 April 2004 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
228 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.75

Hardcover

$564.75

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Running is one of the world's most widely practiced sports and recreations but until now it has intended to elude serious study outside of the natural sciences. John Bale brings the sport into the realm of the humanities by drawing on sources including literature, poetry, film, art and sculpture as well as statistics and training manuals to highlight the tensions, ambiguities and complexities that lie hidden beneath the commonplace notion of running.
The text explores both local and personal, as well as communal and global aspects of running and its practitioners. It examines the streets, tracks and stadiums where athletes run, the races in which they compete, and the running relationships such as exist between the athlete and the coach, between runners and between the athlete and spectator. It discusses the importance of speed and records, how running has been used to symbolise resistance and transgression, and the extent to which it can be associated with a healthy lifestyle.
Running Cultures provides new ways of seeing a familiar sporting phenomenon. it will appeal to both students and researchers with an interest in running in particular, and sport and leisure cultures more generally.

Industry Reviews

"Bale begins by commenting on how running is the first technology of the body that seeks to compress time and space. He then goes on to examine running and its representations through the lens of the humanistic-geographical writer Yi-Fu Tuan. Bale describes the ways of running, for fun, freedom, fitness, achievement, "slowness," records beyond quantification, and running ways, such as within the norms of achievement running, as means of dominance and affection (in Tuan's terms) and as a means of gaining the spectators' gaze. He describes formal and informal running arenas and the human landscapes they create, how athletes live as pets within and without bounds, and how running is both transgression and resistance while also an element in a conscious, good life within space and time." --Reference & Research Book News

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