Abstract
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.
Keywords
This paper presents findings from interviews with Canadian runners aged 55 and older about their technology use. We invite readers on an imagined run with our research participants which explores 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. Katz and Marshall (2018) argue there is a need for studies investigating how older adults use digital technologies like wearable fitness trackers because these devices extend the pressure placed on older adults to avoid inactivity. Furthermore, Billings and Hardin (2024: 2) identify a gap in the discipline of sport and communication when they write that ‘when compared to discussion of gender, race, ethnicity, ability and nationality, there is a paucity of focus on issues of age within our discipline’ even though these identities are interconnected.
Our paper begins by identifying how wearable technologies reinforce neo-liberal approaches to health and wellbeing – and active aging discourse in particular – which prioritize individual responsibility over collective care. We then show that applying socio-materialist theories and methodologies to the study of older runners’ engagement with technology offers new insight into the embodied and place-based features of this practice. Our findings reveal that participants questioned the idea that their digital self-tracking data accurately measured their physical capacities. They used embodied knowledge and age-grading tables to interpret the data and many also kept manual records of their runs. Additionally, we demonstrate that mundane technologies like running shoes help runners sustain their commitment to the sport later in life. Lastly, we identify how the interplay between technology use, place and life stage shaped how participants experienced pleasure while running.
Ultimately, we argue 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 ran. In making this argument, our research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that identifies alternative ways of understanding aging outside of socio-cultural and biomedical frameworks which suggest there is a right and wrong way to age (see Jeffrey et al., 2022; Peine et al., 2021). 1
Active aging, physical activity and socio-materialism
On a summer evening, I [Fresco] join the 12 participants in this study for a group run. Aged between 55 and 75, participants live in a large metropolitan city in Canada, run consistently for sport or exercise and use fitness-tracking devices such as GPS-enabled watches. Six participants present as female, six present as male and two identify as LGBTQ + .
The imagined run we present in this paper is a compilation of the first author's observations from the runs she took with local clubs and findings from our participant interviews. The imagined run situates the older adults in our study as experts of their experiences and positions them in dialogue with one another. While some participants use Apple watches, most (69%) use Garmin watches, which track metrics including distance, pace, heart rate and
Critical scholarship on wearable devices shows that they intensify neo-liberal framing of health as an individual responsibility by extending the medical gaze beyond clinical settings. This perspective positions people who make healthy lifestyle choices as ideal citizens and stigmatizes those who encounter economic and social barriers to accessing exercise, nutritious food, healthcare and other essential resources (Lupton, 2013, 2014, 2016; Rich and Miah, 2014). Furthermore, the surveillance capabilities of wearable technologies extend biopower and patriarchal power, amplifying societal pressure placed on women to regulate their bodies and conform to normative Western beauty ideals (Sanders, 2017).
Neo-liberal ideas about health and wellness inform the discourse of active aging found in policy and media reports about older adults. This discourse promotes the notion that older adults should be personally responsible for preventing or delaying age-related physical and cognitive decline (see Allain and Marshall, 2017; Dionigi, 2005; Dionigi and Gard, 2018; Gard et al., 2017; Katz, 2000; Pike, 2011; Tulle 2008). Wearable devices extend these ideas into the digital realm (Katz and Marshall, 2018). For instance, Garmin uses readings like heart rate and
As a framework, active aging positions exercise as a key marker of successful aging without recognizing the social, cultural, economic and other barriers to participation (see Allain and Marshall, 2017; Dionigi, 2005; Dionigi and Gard, 2018; Gard et al., 2017; Katz, 2000; Pike, 2011; Tulle 2008). It also reflects Western, bio-medical conceptualizations of aging that prioritize self-sufficiency and marginalizes non-Western perspectives and approaches. For instance, many Indigenous worldviews value the knowledge and leadership of older community members and embrace a holistic understanding of health. Moreover, intergenerational living and care practices common in countries like China, Japan and Korea reflect Confucian values of filial duty and responsibility (see Hillier and Al-Shammaa, 2020; Lamb, 2015; Pace and Greier, 2017).
Older adults use sport – such as ballet, cycling, ice hockey, running, swimming and surfing – to resist age-related social stigmas and creatively navigate active aging discourse (Allain, 2020; Dionigi, 2005; Dionigi, 2017; Dionigi et al., 2010; Jeffrey et al., 2022; Markula et al., 2022; Minello and Nixon, 2017; Pike, 2012; Tulle, 2007; Wheaton, 2017). For instance, Tulle (2007) argues that age-based social expectations can constrain older runners’ agency. However, focusing on older athletes’ embodied experiences – and thereby recognizing that their perceptions of the world emerge through bodily sensations – can transform older adults’ physical, social and symbolic capital. Relying on Bordieu's concept of habitus as the capacity for someone to act within the constraints of their social position, Tulle shows that embodied experiences can lead to a change in older athletes’ habitus.
Studies of athletes’ use of wearable technology show that they adopt body-centric strategies to interpret the meaning and significance of their data. Lupton (2018) argues that individuals use embodied knowledge to assess the usefulness of their data. Esmonde (2019) builds on Lupton's work by examining how female runners engage with their digital fitness data, showing that there exists a continuous interrelationship between runners’ bodily sensations and the data they collect. Similarly, Toner et al. (2023) show that elite male runners rely on embodied and somatic knowledge to interpret their self-tracking data and make training decisions. However, these studies overlook the experiences of older adults. By addressing this gap, our work not only contributes to the existing literature but also challenges the myth that older adults are reluctant or unsophisticated users of new technologies.
We situate older adults’ technologically mediated running practices within a broader material context to capture ‘the sensuous interrelationship between body-mind-environment’ (Phoenix and Orr, 2014: 97). In doing so, we recognize emplacement theory's central insight that individuals’ sense of identity and reality emerge through their interactions with the environments in whichthey move and act (see Allain, 2020, Phoenix and Orr, 2014 and Pink 2011). Significantly, we expand beyond a narrow focus on digital devices to also consider how older runners use mundane technologies like running shoes and manually recorded running-related data.
We argue that participants’ bodies were made material and meaningful through their entanglement with the technologies they use, active aging discourse, sensory experiences and the places where they run. In making this argument, we advance a socio-materialist approach to studying the physically active body that positions it as embedded within the material features of the external environment such as terrain, weather conditions and athletic gear (see Newman et al., 2022). This approach situates human bodies as entangled with their environment, meaning that different actants – such as biological matter, discourses and technologies – emerge in relation to one another and are co-constitutive. As Barad (2007: ix) writes: ‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence’. These entangled configurations are not simply inseparable. Rather, they do not pre-exist the moment in which they come together.
Scholars use socio-material theories to conceptualize aging as a continual process of becoming. In this conceptualization, human bodies – comprised of skin, cells, bones and other forms of matter – change over time through their entanglement with a range of discursive and material influences. These influences include narratives that assign meaning to bodily changes, the places where older adults live, work and play, interpersonal relationships and technological devices (Höppner and Urban, 2018; Peine et al., 2021). Jeffery et al. (2022), for instance, show that participating in ballet can create new possibilities for aging by enhancing older dancers’ sensory awareness and capacity to be affected. They write that ‘propositions of aging are being expressed through moving bodies as continually becoming forms that are simultaneously social, physical, mental and material’ (Jeffrey et al., 2022: 7).
A socio-materialist framework also challenges the notion that agency is an exclusively human trait. Instead, it frames agency as distributed across assemblages of people, technologies, discourses and environments. As Cozza (2021: 70) writes, a socio-materialist approach positions agency ‘in relation to socio-material practices rather than associating it exclusively with humans (social model) or nature (bio-medical model)’. This idea is consistent with a broader scholarly effort to, in Frost’s (2016: 10) words, dismantle ‘the idea of humans as a very particular kind of agent, one who is distinct from the field in which he or she acts’.
Diffractive methodology
The runners and I decide on the five-kilometre route a participant has created using the app MapMyRun. We run along the sidewalks of a quiet neighbourhood in a Canadian city. As my muscles warm up, I fall into a rhythm and cadence that is familiar from my time as a competitive middle-distance runner (my research assistant, who is a co-author on this paper, exercises consistently but does not run on a regular basis). One of the participants, Jane, 2 makes a comment that resonates with me as I feel my muscle recall the effort and repetition of training for past races: an athletic therapist once told Jane that ‘all tissue has memory’.
To build trust and rapport with potential participants, the first author ran with three local run clubs. Club coordinators also circulated our recruitment material through e-mail and on social media. Some run club members participated in our study while others shared the first author's contact information with eligible participants who contacted her directly. Additional participants learned about the study from a flyer we posted in a local running store that serves as a meeting point for a run club. Although we recruited participants from across the city, including low-income neighbourhoods, our interviewees were primarily white and middle to upper-class.
Like the participants in other studies on sport and aging (see Gard et al., 2017), our participants occupy relatively privileged social positions. Many are retired or semi-retired and have the time to engage in regular exercise. They are also able to afford the costs associated with participating in sport, including paying for equipment and digital tracking devices, rehabilitation services and race registration fees. Future research can explore how intersectional identity categories like race, class and body size influence older adults’ technologically mediated experiences of running. There is also a need for research that identifies strategies to make running more accessible to older folk. A starting point is acknowledging that public exercise is not equally safe for all. In response to the tragic killing of Ahmaud Arbery while he was out for a run, Alison Mariella Désir (2022) wrote, ‘running as a Black person requires a constant negotiation around what might pose the least harm. What do you do, how do you live, when going outside could get you killed?’ (para. 8).
By including the first author in the imagined run we present in this paper, we recognize that researchers are inseparable from the research process, an insight that is central to Barad’s (2007) concept of diffractive methodology. Barad posits that knowledge is produced from within the research process and affects its outcome, so the researcher is never outside the research but entangled with its material conditions. Barad draws on the field of quantum physics to argue that the research apparatus, which includes researchers themselves, shapes the knowledge produced and is inseparable from the findings. She writes: ‘knowing, thinking, measuring, theorizing and observing are material practices of intra-acting within and as part of the world’ (Barad, 2007: 90). The term diffraction, which in physics describes the way waves bend and spread when encountering an obstacle, highlights that researchers are engaged in material engagements that shape the knowledge produced.
The results of our study were diffracted through the material conditions of our research practice. They include how we recruited participants, the places where we interviewed them, interpersonal dynamics between researchers and participants and pre-existing relationships between members of the running communities we joined. For example, the way we described our study in recruitment materials and our conversations with potential participants framed the parameters of our research. The interview guide, which the first author wrote in consultation with the second author, and the physical and digital settings in which interviews took place, are also components of our research apparatus.
Interviews lasted between 45 min and one hour and were conducted either in person or over Zoom depending on participant preference. Questions covered participants’ exercise history and current running routines, use of fitness-tracking technology and views on social and cultural norms surrounding aging. The first author created opportunities for participants to guide the direction of the conversation by asking follow-up questions based on the information they volunteered, a strategy that facilitated an interactive approach consistent with Rapley’s (2007: 16) recognition that interviews are ‘social encounters’ that co-construct a shared reality. The material conditions of our research also extended beyond the interviews. The first author took notes after each interview, and the second author transcribed the interviews. We met regularly to discuss emerging themes, which informed how the first author coded the interviews and wrote up the results. This collaborative and iterative process unfolded over several months and shaped the analysis we present in this paper.
Findings
Digital data and the ‘truth’ of a body
As I notice my breathing getting more laboured, several runners check their digital watches and adjust their pace in response to the data displayed. Thomas shares that using his Garmin watch while training for a half-marathon helped him realize with satisfaction that he was getting faster: ‘even though I’m not conscious of it, my pace is improving’.
Thomas is motivated to continue to run long distance ‘not to stop the aging process but to…just not age prematurely’. In Thomas’ account, the data he collected while training for a half-marathon was encouraging and revealed an underlying truth about his body that he could only access with the help of his watch. Nate, who has completed half-marathons in the past but now prefers running shorter distances, shared a similar idea to Thomas. He monitors his
Thomas and Nate articulated the following idea commonly found in advertisements for wearable technology: it offers users ‘numerical accuracy, truth and self-knowledge’ (Crawford et al., 2015: 489). For Thomas, tracking his pace enhanced his perception of his running ability. Yet he also recognizes that the data is not always accurate. When he began using a fitness-tracking watch, it occasionally picked up nearby runners’ heart rates. Thomas said: ‘there's a bleeding that happens. You can pick up other people's data accidentally, you know, which can screw it up’.
Hillary stops running, bends over and coughs. When she catches her breath, she explains that her Garmin watch is currently showing an ‘unproductive’ training status. Hillary recognizes that her coughing is ‘why, probably, Garmin's telling me I'm unproductive, but it kind of bummed me out’.
Garmin calculates training status using metrics including
Hillary comes from ‘a very long line of people who die very young’ and began running in her forties. As she nears or surpasses the age at which these relatives died, she feels ‘an increasing sense that, oh, this is right for me…I haven’t had my first heart attack yet’. During our interview, she described two competing internal voices. The one ‘speaking the loudest right now is the one that says, you know, we’re all trying to do the best that we can. We’re all trying to get through our days, live our lives and do the best we can. So, I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone’. However, another voice ‘lives in my head that says, that person keeps complaining about their knees, but they need to lose about 85 pounds. And I wonder if they lost 85 pounds would their knees still hurt them?’ Hillary feels wrong for thinking this way and recognizes that losing weight is not a universally effective way to resolve pain or improve health. For instance, someone may be taking medication that ‘forces them to gain the weight’.
This recognition – that people are doing the best they can and that it is wrong to judge people based on body size– subtly recognizes a common critique of active aging discourse. Specifically, this discourse overlooks the social determinants of health and risks marginalizing individuals who face economic, physical and social barriers to engaging in physical activity (see Allain and Marshall, 2017; Dionigi, 2005; Dionigi 2017; Dionigi and Gard, 2018; Gard et al., 2017; Katz, 2000; Pike, 2011; Tulle 2008). Hillary's reflections also point to a broader topic: how to interpret the meaning of a body. She wonders if it is appropriate to, in Murray's words, (2009: 78) read ‘Visible bodily markers (such as fat flesh)…in ways that position subjects on either the ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ side of the normal/pathological binary equation’. Put another way, Hillary questions whether it is possible to determine the ‘truth’ of a body based on the presence or absence of fat flesh. Her struggle reveals that both digital data and visible bodily markers are subjective ways of interpreting a person's health and a flawed way to assess their commitment to living a health-conscious lifestyle.
Embodied, emplaced and data-informed knowledge
Maya is not wearing her Garmin watch on the run. She explains: ‘I also sometimes just leave the Garmin at home and just go by the rate of exertion…you can just get too hung up on looking at the Garmin. What's my pace? What's this? What's that? So sometimes I just leave it and just go, you know, by the feel of it’.
Previously a half-marathon runner, Maya now runs shorter distances for exercise. She believes that is important to ‘set up examples for people around you’ and hopes that her children and grandchildren will see her running and think ‘Well, if she could do it, I can do it as well’. When Maya runs without her Garmin watch, she gauges her exertion based on the feel of her body. Similarly, Frederick explained that he uses a non-digital metric to determine his effort: ‘I won’t say I never check the pace, but it's not that important. I’m not racing these days. I run at a speed I can talk. That's the standard message around paces. Where you can keep a pace where you can talk. That is speaking to how much oxygen you’re getting’. While Garmin watches calculate oxygen levels using the
Kimberly described a time when she used her emplaced knowledge to interpret her Garmin watch's readings. A long-time runner who has completed half-marathons, she recalled running on a day when the air quality was poor due to nearby wildfires: ‘I found myself breathing hard, like, having this dryness and shortness of breath…my breathing was more ragged than it should be based on what my heart rate is telling me’. In this situation, Kimberly assessed her level of exertion using her digital heart rate reading in conjunction with her physical sensations and knowledge of the poor air conditions.
Sean similarly uses his embodied knowledge to assess the accuracy of his heart rate data. Garmin classifies a user's heart rate into five zones depending on exertion and Sean compares these classifications to how his body feels. He said: ‘After the run I'll look at it and sort of confirm, when did it hit zone 5? Where was I? Did I really feel that way? Yes. I think so. You know, if it jives. Maybe my zone 5 on the watch really isn't zone 5, maybe it's higher, it's lower. I'm double checking’. Sean developed this approach to assessing his exertion before he began digitally tracking his workouts. As a younger runner, his coach challenged him to run one mile at a consistent pace. By repeating this activity every week, Sean developed an internal sense of how it felt to run a six-minute mile. When he began using a digital fitness-tracking watch, he compared its readings with how his body felt. Sometimes he would check his watch and observe ‘the watch is wrong today because I know I’m right’. In these instances, Sean trusted his embodied knowledge more than his device's digital data.
Performance metrics
Sean recently ran the Boston marathon and shares that he competes against himself by comparing his current performance with past race times, commenting ‘I’m motivated to beat my younger self’. William encourages those runners who are ‘really obsessed with performance’ to age grade their results because many get discouraged when their race times decline: ‘I can show them on the age graded tables…actually they are the holding or maybe even improving’.
William, who has loved running since childhood and has ‘never not run’, believes that people should manage the physical decline that accompanies aging by exercising. He also believes that older runners’ performance will inevitably decrease over time, resulting in slower race times: ‘I look at the results that I was posting just 5 years ago. The decline that you get is not linear as you get older, and you can see that with the world records…the decline gets deeper and steeper, and it's hard not to look back at where you were and get frustrated that you can't do what you were doing just a few years ago’.
Several participants compared their performance unfavourably with younger runners in their community. These comparisons demonstrate that intergenerational running practices share a similarity with performance metrics, as both practices make perceived age-related performance decline visible. Frederick is a longtime member of an LGBTQ + inclusive run club and appreciates the friendly community feel of the club but finds it can be challenging to keep up with younger members. The demographic make-up of the group changed several years ago when it developed a social media presence and although Frederick welcomes everyone, he finds that younger run club members ‘are getting faster and stronger and I’m not. In a few short periods of time, I can go from showing people new routes to being at the back of the pack keeping up with them. Mentally, intellectually, I know it's good, but it's a challenge’. Lana had a similar experience running a marathon with her daughter. Although it was ‘kind of fun’ to participate in this shared activity, her daughter was in excellent shape and ‘did not have to train as much as I did which, you know, kind of makes you pissed off at the time’.
William coaches several of the older runners in his club and uses age grading tables to highlight their accomplishments: ‘I age grade a lot of our results within the club, for example. So that our youngsters within the club can get a sense of how extraordinary some of our Masters runners are’. To age grade results, William uses a formula developed by the World Masters Athletics to compare a runner's posted time with the top performing athletes in their age and gender demographic bracket (Mateo, 2022). Thus, a person could post a slower marathon time at age 65 compared to age 60 but still improve their ranking within their demographic. William believes that age grading can help older runners re-engage with the sport, although he added, ‘I think the biggest driver is definitely the sense of community’.
William's insights show that age grading results can improve older runners’ perception of their bodies’ capabilities and enhance how they are perceived within their running community. Age grading tables thus offer an alternative to digital metrics like Garmin's fitness age metric which, as we argued earlier, can perpetuate active aging discourse. Age grading can also foster a more inclusive running community that recognizes and values older athletes’ accomplishments.
Manually recorded data
As the run progresses, the group begins to spread out. Lana shares that she feels ‘injuries and stuff like that so much more’ now compared to when she was younger. She adds ‘your body does slow down, no matter how good you are to it, and it's very frustrating’. Frederick similarly comments: ‘I hate when I’m injured, as we all are sometimes. It takes longer to come back’ now compared to when he was younger. Hillary can relate, noting that an injury prevented her from achieving her goal of running a marathon.
Hillary supplements the digital data she collects from her Garmin watch with the information she manually records in her running journal. A friend encouraged her to keep a journal because ‘the Garmin is going to give you information, but then you’re also going to have other information’. During our interview, Hillary opened to an entry recording her goal of running a marathon. Later, she added the word ‘nope’ with a big exclamation mark when an injury prevented her from continuing her training. Hillary commented that re-reading the entry ‘takes me back to what I was feeling when I wrote that down’. Much like her emotional response to her Garmin's ‘unproductive’ status (i.e., she was ‘bummed out’), Hillary was emotionally impacted by her journal entries.
Some of her running journal entries help remind Hillary that her body is resilient. She turned to an entry describing her first run after recovering from a broken foot. Although it details the pain she felt, Hillary was now able to put the experience into perspective by recognizing that her body eventually healed. She explained: ‘I can see as I chart it along and finding the pain gone’. Just as William uses age grading formulas to highlight older runners’ accomplishments, Hillary uses manually tracked data to visualize her running progress and stay committed to the sport. Thus, reviewing her journal entries enables Hillary to recognize that her body can effectively recover from injury. Moreover, the journal's format, which makes it possible for Hillary to revisit entries months later, contrasts with the immediate feedback from her Garmin watch, such as the ‘unproductive training status’ she generated during a run. Hillary's experiences show that manually recorded data has the potential to encourage older runners like Lana and Frederick, who have had negative experiences with injuries, to perceive their bodies’ capacity to recover in more positive ways.
In addition to keeping a journal, Hillary tracks the distance she runs in each pair of shoes using an Excel file. She stops wearing a pair after running approximately 400 kilometres in them because the cushioning wears down over time and running in unsupportive shoes can lead to pain or injury. Because she wears different shoes based on the length and terrain of a run, Hillary finds it easier to track the distance covered by a pair of shoes in Excel than on her Garmin watch. In a similar vein, when Kimberly began running in her mid-forties, she created an Excel file to track the weather conditions, what she wore and how she felt during each run (e.g., whether she felt too hot or cold). This information helped Kimberly dress appropriately and avoid the rookie mistake of being overdressed. By recording the dynamic interplay between her body, clothing and weather conditions, Kimberly was able to record emplaced features of her running experience that digital metrics like pace and heartrate cannot fully capture.
Running shoes as mundane technology
We turn off the paved road and onto a path winding through a ravine. While my shoes cushioned my feet as they made contact with the pavement, now they yield to the softer ground. Claire pauses and explains that her foot has gone numb. She believes this numbness is caused by age-related changes in her body and is searching for a shoe that will help prevent it: ‘As we age, things will happen like…the fats sort of will redistribute or maybe there's a nerve that kind of comes along the top of the foot’. Jane shares that she keeps the idea that ‘all tissue has memory’ in mind when purchasing new running shoes. She views her body as ‘a legacy, decades of activity. And you’ve got to figure [out] how you’re going to work with that’.
In the above statements, Claire and Jane do not pathologize age-related changes in their bodies but instead suggest that wearing the right pair of running shoes can help them manage new and uncomfortable sensations. In this regard, their shoes function as mundane technologies whose use has become so deeply integrated into their everyday life that they hardly recognize them as technologies. As mundane technologies, running shoes cushion wearers’ feet from hard surfaces (see Michaels, 2006). They offer an affordance, or capacity to enable action, which is especially important for older adults whose bodies are, in Jane's words, ‘a legacy, decades of activity’. Specifically, running shoes afford running later in life by enabling older runners to adapt to physiological changes that can accompany aging.
Selecting the right pair of running shoes contributes to Jane's sophisticated approach to navigating a neo-liberal climate in which ‘older people may be expected or made to feel obligated to take responsibility for their health by making certain leisure and lifestyle choices, regardless of their socio-economic, cultural or personal circumstances’ (Gard et al., 2017: 256; see also Allain and Marshall, 2017). A former varsity rower, Jane initially ran for ‘out of season training…And then it kind of became a habit as well’. She stays active because she does not want to face mobility challenges later in life and believes that ‘if I don’t work on my functionality now, down the line, there will be challenges’.
Significantly, Jane also acknowledges that social determinants of health limit people's ability to stay physically active later in life. This perspective sets her apart from the participants in Gard et al. (2017) and Allain and Marshall’s (2017) studies, who expressed negative and stigmatizing attitudes about people who are inactive later in life without recognizing that structural barriers can limit participation. Specifically, Jane recognizes that gendered expectations and norms can make it harder for some people to begin or maintain physical activity. She walks her dog with a neighbour who is more than a decade older than her and has physical limitations. Jane says, ‘I don’t want that for her, either, but I definitely don’t want that for me’. Jane speculates that, as a woman from a certain generation, her neighbour was not encouraged to be physically active: ‘the sum total of her life experience[s] have brought her to this point’.
Frederick's experiences with running shoes bear out Michaels (2006) insight that shoes mediate the wearer's relationship with the environment. Frederick wears different shoes depending on the terrain of his route, a practice that demonstrates how the user, technology and environment interact in dynamic and interconnected ways. Frederick prefers a shoe with minimal cushioning when he runs on trails but ‘if I’m running on roads…I feel it more in my feet than my ankles the next day, so I like a certain amount of cushioning’. He also recognizes that selecting the right running shoe depends on the individual wearer. Frederick commented: ‘I can recognize people from a distance long before I can recognize their facial features by their running style and it's as unique as a fingerprint almost. And I think that speaks a lot to what shoe works for you…how you land, how you move, the shape of your foot’.
Jane and Frederick's insights provide a necessary caution against conceptualizing running shoes as technologies that can solve the so-called ‘problem’ of aging (see Peine et al., 2021). Rather, they show that the affordances of running shoes emerge in relation to social practices and relations as well as material and environmental factors. Frederick also avoided fetishizing running shoes and brands by expressing scepticism about the ability of a pair of shoes to significantly improve athletic performance. Frederick believes ‘you can’t buy your way’ into becoming a strong athlete and dislikes what he described as the Nike mentality. The company partnered with elite runners attempting to run a marathon in under two hours: ‘the shoes, you know, were supposed to be a big part of that [goal] and that does not resonate with me’. Similarly, Jane observed that sometimes people prioritize wearing a particular brand over how well a shoe fits. They will say ‘oh, I wear this brand, or I wear that brand…but if the shoe does not fit you well…it's probably not a good purchase’. William described himself as ‘an outlier when it comes to my opinion on footwear’. He believes that highly structured and supportive shoes are not always the best option for runners and compared wearing them to ‘putting a cast on your arm’. He added: ‘You need strong feet for running and you need conditioning for that as well’.
Place-based pleasure
I notice the earthy scent of the soil beneath my feet and sunbeams filtering through gaps in the trees. The peaceful sound of water flowing in a nearby stream is suddenly interrupted by the beeping of Kimberly's watch which alerts her to a fluctuation in her heart rate. She is annoyed by the sound and comments that it is disrupting her ability to enjoy the run: ‘after a while I just say, okay, shut up’.
Kimberly's experience illustrates how runners’ technology use can affect their capacity to find pleasure in running. We are reminded of Allain’s (2020) argument that committing to exercise because it is pleasurable can challenge active aging discourse, which suggests older adults should prevent physical and cognitive decline by exercising. During our interviews, participants described how their technology use, alongside broader socio-cultural and emplaced practices, affected their ability to experience sensual and immersive pleasure. Sensual pleasure arises when an athlete's experience of smell, sound, touch and other sensations deepen their connection to their environment. Immersive pleasure arises when an athlete becomes so deeply focused on an activity that they experience a temporary escape from everyday concerns or worries (Phoenix and Orr, 2014).
Claire shared that her capacity to experience sensual pleasure while running was enhanced later in life. She began running in law school to relieve stress and continued to run in her 40s while raising children full time. At this busy time in her life, Claire maintained a fast pace and compared her runs to the movement of a high-speed train. Now that her children are grown and her daily routines have shifted, Claire runs at a slower pace and has noticed a change in her focus: as one's ‘domestic patterns change, then the energy levels change and your focus changes’. She no longer listens to music while running because she wants to ‘listen to nature’ such as water running. Similarly, Nate limits the technology he uses during runs because he does not want it to interfere with his ability to chat with others or enjoy ‘the sound of the birds’. Jane finds that running with her dog deepens her connection to nature. She likes running with him because ‘I like that company…And it's fun to be out in the woods and be sniffing, chasing squirrels, like, it just seems like a quality experience for both of us’.
The immersive pleasure of running has also helped Claire manage the transition to a different life stage. Her children recently moved out of the house and Claire is grappling with a ‘shift in what my role in the family has been and what it is becoming’. She appreciates that the ‘meditative’ aspects of physical exercise help her cope with this transition. Lana, a retired trial lawyer, also values the emotional benefits of running. She recalled times in the past when the demands of her job interfered with her capacity to experience the immersive pleasure of running. Lana ‘could not relax enough to run’ when she was working on a hearing because ‘my brain was too consumed with what I was doing to actually relax’. She added: ‘sometimes I was just too stressed to actually get a release from’ running.
I wait for Winston who has fallen behind. He shares that when he is separated from a group of runners with no music or conversation to occupy his mind, he sometimes struggles with intrusive thoughts. In those moments, a song lyric loops in his head: ‘this is why we don’t leave the house’. The rhythm of the song, he says, is ‘the perfect cadence for running…And so my brain is just, like, running that on a loop’.
Winston recalled being ‘picked last for sports’ in his youth and came to ‘hate sports’, although he also recognizes that ‘this is not the universal experience for queer men’. Winston carried his dislike for sports into adulthood but began running to improve his health and has since completed several half-marathons. He runs with an LGBTQ + inclusive club and appreciates the social aspect of club running, which helps him maintain a quick pace and can distract him from intrusive thoughts. However, the club's evening meetups do not always align with his preferred time to run. Now retired, Winston prefers to train in the early afternoon and can find himself at loose ends in the hours before the evening meetup time.
Winston described the mental benefits of running with others when he shared what he thinks about on a group run: ‘this is helping me. I’m going faster, it's taking my mind off stuff’. However, Winston lives with obsessive compulsive disorder and sometimes negative and repetitive thoughts intrude on his runs. Although physical activity has been shown to improve mental health, running has only helped him ‘to a minor degree. I wish it was this magic potion’. When he finds himself running alone without music, Winston confronts the limits of how much pleasure he can derive from this activity.
Discussion: Running assemblages
The sun is beginning to set as we exit the ravine and reach the end of our run. I am grateful to the runners who have generously and insightfully shared details about their technologically mediated experiences with running later in life.
This imagined run has highlighted the key themes that emerged from our research into older adults’ technologically mediated running practices. First, participants contested the notion that digital data reveals a ‘truth’ about their aging bodies. They used quantified metrics, in conjunction with embodied knowledge, to assess their physical capacities. Many also used mundane technologies like running shoes to creatively navigate age-related physiological changes. Additionally, the conditions that enabled participants to experience place-based pleasures of running include their use of technology, life stage and mental health.
Based on these findings, we argue that older adults’ running experiences coalesced around an assemblage of human and more-than-human elements including data, active aging discourses, running gear, people, animals, landscapes and sounds. Participants’ perception of their bodies’ capabilities and limitations, as well as their capacity to experience pleasure while running, emerged through their entanglement with the features of this assemblage. Agency, which we define as the capacity to enact a change within a system or setting, was distributed across the assemblage (Bennett, 2010; Cozza, 2021; Wanka and Gillis, 2021). The data participants in our study gathered, the running shoes they wore, their domestic and professional responsibilities and active aging discourse all shaped their actions and perceptions of their bodies’ capabilities. These elements were agentic in the sense that they had the capacity to ‘amplify, redirect, inspire, undercut and make possible or impossible human activities’ (Frost, 2016: 10).
Conceptualizing older runners’ technology use as part of an assemblage of agentic matter opens new possibilities for physically active older adults in ways that exceed limiting socio-cultural and biomedical models that define aging bodies as in decline. By making this argument, we contribute to research on aging and physical activity in two ways, identified in the paragraphs that follow.
Sport-related wearable technology
The older adults in our study used embodied, sensory and emplaced knowledge to challenge the notion that their bodies were deficient. They questioned the so-called ‘truth’ of tools like Garmin's fitness age calculations, which can reinforce social and biological standards of what older adults’ bodies should look like and how they should exercise (see Crawford et al., 2015; Katz and Marshall, 2018). While scholars have examined how athletes use body-centric strategies to interpret their digital data, none centre the experiences and perspectives of older adults (see Esmonde, 2019, Toner et al. 2023). Our research contributes to this literature by identifying the potential for older athletes’ emplaced knowledge to disrupt the potential for digital data collection to reinforce active aging discourse.
We also show that sport and media scholars should not overlook the significance of non-digital technologies. Like digital data, which Lupton (2018: 6) argues can ‘shape people's embodied responses and actions, their sense of selfhood and their relationships with other people and with other things’, participants’ running shoes and manually recorded data influenced their perceptions of their bodies’ capabilities. These mundane technologies and non-digital tracking strategies have the potential to improve how older athletes understand their bodies, construct their identities and relate to their peers.
Sensory experiences, pleasure and sport
Participants’ sensory experiences of running emerged through their intra-action with digital and mundane technologies, as well as the environments in which they ran. Sensations – such as the flow of breath through their nose and throat, the pressure of shoes on their feet, the sounds of their surroundings and the texture of the terrain – were the outcome of the place-based and technologically mediated features of their running practices. This finding contributes to research on the sensory features of sport-related embodied practices by showing that participants used sensory awareness to adapt to age-related bodily changes without pathologizing these changes, and to navigate transitions in life stage as well as domestic/professional responsibilities (see also Allen-Collinson and Hockey, 2010: 330).
Like the participants in Allain (2020) and Phoenix and Orr’s (2014) studies, the older runners in our study derived sensual and immersive pleasure from running. Our findings support Allain's (2020: 7) argument that research drawing ‘attention to the pleasure of being old disrupts neoliberal approaches to aging, especially those that see the old as a burden on the young’. The need to disrupt these approaches has been well documented. Pike (2011) argues that policy and media reports construct a moral panic over the perceived strain on social services and the economy posed by a growing older population. These publications position older adults who do not remain physically active as ‘folk devils’.
We build on Allain (2020) important insight about the disruptive potential of pleasure by showing that participants’ capacity to derive pleasure from running was undercut or, alternatively, made possible by their entanglement with a variety of human and more-than-human elements. These include digital self-tracking devices, portable audio players, domestic and professional roles, relationships with people and animals and the places runs occurred.
Conclusion
Our interviews with older adults about their technologically mediated running practices reveal that their perceptions of their bodies and physical capabilities are co-created with their digitally and manually recorded data. Moreover, their technology use is embedded within the place-based, sensory, material and social features of their running practices. In making this argument, we identify how older runners resist cultural, biomedical and technological practices that frame their bodies as deficient.
One limitation of this study is the lack of demographic diversity. Most of our participants are white and middle to upper-class and all are between the ages of 55 and 75. Future research should explore how the technologically mediated experiences of older runners, especially those over the age of 75, are shaped by intersectional identities including race, class and body size. The growth of inclusive sport organizations such as UltraBlack Running, Slow AF and Black Girls Run! suggests that such research is not only necessary but also increasingly feasible.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Minor Research Grant, York University, Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.
