Indoor versus outdoor running: understanding how recreational exercise comes to inhabit environments through practitioner talk

Starting with a series of perspectives on why and where humans run, this paper considers how running comes to happen in some environments instead of others and how it is experienced thereafter. More specifically, we are interested in the processes by which contemporary recreational running has come to take place either indoors on treadmills or outside on pavements and paths. Running has been recently positioned as an obvious target for those hoping to encourage public health among increasingly time‐pressured populations and running outdoors can often lead to additional benefits. Yet how it is that runners and environments come to coalesce has yet to be examined in any great detail. This paper responds by drawing on theories of how embodied practices spread through society to further an emergent geographical interest in the speech patterns of everyday life. With reference to a project involving accompanied runs and interviews with groups of both indoor and outdoor recreational runners in London, we ask what the subtleties of their running talk tells us about how exercisers become attached to the environments they currently occupy and how they might feasibly be encouraged elsewhere.