‘The watch is wrong today’: Older Canadians’ technologically mediated experiences of running

This paper presents findings of interviews with Canadians runners aged 55 and older about their technology use. We explore how they use technology to navigate socio-cultural and bio-medical conceptualizations of aging as an unwanted process of decline. In doing so, we respond to a recognized gap in research on the intersection of aging, sport and the quantified body. Using a socio-materialist framework, we show that participants’ understandings of their physical capacities were co-produced with their digital devices, data, running shoes, active aging discourse, sensory experiences, gendered domestic and professional roles and the physical environments in which they run. Participants questioned the idea that the data they collected was an objective and accurate measure of their physical capacities. Additionally, some used sports gear to adapt to age-related changes in their bodies and others avoided using digital devices when they detracted from the pleasure of running. We argue that conceptualizing older runners’ technology use as part of an assemblage of agentic matter creates new possibilities for physically active older adults outside of limiting socio-cultural and biomedical ways of defining the right and wrong way to age. By making this argument, we contribute to research on the following topics: sport-related wearable technology; the sensory features of physical activity; and the intersection of pleasure, aging and physical activity.