Embodied strategic coupling: highland bodies, global production networks, and the 2026 TCS London Marathon

Elite distance running concentrates value in bodies formed in a few highland geographies, yet firms and institutions elsewhere control how that value is recognised and rewarded. This article asks how value is created, enhanced and captured in elite marathon running, and what the case reveals about the limits of global production network (GPN) theory. Reading the 2026 TCS London Marathon as a paradigmatic case, it advances the concept of embodied strategic coupling, a reformulation of strategic coupling in which the regional asset is a social field’s capacity to form bodily capital, and the bodily capital it forms is the mobile product through which value is realised. The substitutability premise of strategic coupling fails for this asset, because firms substitute among athletes and among highland fields but have not formed equivalent capacity inside programmes of their own. The formed body travels while the field that forms it does not. Firm and field therefore depend on each other, and capture proceeds through positioning at the interfaces between training, competitive and commercial fields rather than through control of production. The article specifies a two-scale temporal fix spanning athletic careers and the intergenerational reproduction of highland fields, imports bodily capital, feminist social-reproduction theory and sport mobilities into GPN analysis, and shows through the two podiums how equal placement awards coexist with unequal calculated totals under time-bonus rules. It contributes a reformulated concept to political-economic geography and, to sport geography, an account of how sporting mobilities connect bodily formation to uneven recognition and reward.