"Running makes me feel …”: The production of emotion through leisure

ABSTRACT

Using data from twenty ‘running autobiographies' – written or voice-recorded reflections – we examine runners' changing emotional relationship to running during the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the complex, often fluid, and occasionally contradictory ways that leisure pursuits produce emotion, and how emotions shape subjects and communities. Mainstream conceptualisations of amateur running often frame it as a tool with which runners modulate their emotions. For example, running is commonly celebrated as a way of controlling stress or improving mental health. This approach is premised on the interiority of emotion – the idea that emotions reside within the runner. Conversely, our approach is concerned with how the practice of running and the circulation of the running body as an object produces emotion. We argue that understanding why and how people run, and what the running body does hinges on understanding the productive capacities of the running body – not only what emotions they bring into a run – and how, through its circulation, the running body produces social affects and emotions. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Leisure Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)