Slow learners: Body pedagogics and learning slow ways in sport and physical cultures

Somatic learning, body pedagogics and slow

In-depth engagement with somatic, sensory learning is often required to transform our more familiar ways of doing (fast) sports. This requires learning how to handle the rather different embodied challenges encountered when slowing down. The work of Shilling (2017, 2018, 2022) on ‘body pedagogics’ is particularly insightful in this domain. Shilling employs this term to describe an embodied approach to the acquisition and transmission of occupational, sporting and other culturally structured practices and the embodied outcomes of such learning in emergent habits and techniques. Germane to our purpose, Shilling (2017) identifies a sociological need to analyse physical experiences whilst acknowledging the role of cognition and reflexivity in embodied processes (see also Underman, 2022). The nexus of cognitive and somatic learning was clearly identifiable in our findings, as we portray below. As Shilling further notes, drawing on the writings of Dewey (1922/2002; cited in Shilling, 2022), whilst a literature on body-pedagogic research has explored the reproduction of social and cultural forms, few studies focus on the processes of change occurring when body ‘crises’ result in bodily habits becoming obstructed or challenged. As portrayed below, this notion of a body crisis was found highly applicable in our experiences of disrupted bodily habits engendered by, respectively, a period of sports injury, and by engaging in an unfamiliar aquatic activity.

Following Dewey, Shilling (2017) examines the putative distinction between noetic/conscious and anoetic/pre-conscious knowledge to explore different levels/depths of learning and cultural transmission, identifying the permeability of these ways of knowing. So, whilst ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi, 2009) is often considered resistant to conscious explication, via body pedagogics, the ‘tacit’ can be translated into instructions or prompts to teach neophytes. Further of relevance to our research, for Shilling (2017), the body-pedagogical approach reminds us that however carefully and conscientiously we try to embody certain body techniques, success is never guaranteed. Socialization into new body techniques is always contingent, as we found in our own physical–cultural learning. Finally, and fundamental to our experiences, the body pedagogics approach highlights how, when we internalize certain body techniques, we might find we are changed in ways that cross over into other aspects of our lives.

Before delineating the research projects undertaken, we briefly portray the specific activities at the heart of our studies: countryside walking and sea walking in a group (longe-côte in French ¹ ).

Countryside and sea wanderings

Although there is not scope here to address in detail the vast literature on the salutogenic benefits of ‘green’ and ‘blue’ physical activity, their benefits are well-established (e.g. Allen-Collinson, 2018; Bell et al., 2017), including for those with varied abilities (Cherrington and Brighton, 2024). Here, we consider briefly some key literature on walking in both green and blue spaces. These spaces are often imbricated in our own lived experience, for example, on estuarine and coastal routes that traverse beaches, saltmarshes, mudflats, riverbanks, lakesides and so on.

Walking in the British countryside has been researched from an array of social-scientific perspectives. As Edensor (2000) notes, in the Romantic era in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, walking in the countryside evolved into a practice designed to achieve reflexive awareness of the self, the body and the senses. Such walking provided a slower contrast to new, speedier forms of transport, coinciding with a period of rapid social change (Curry, 1994). Walking as a technique of the body pertains to Mauss’ (1979) notion of habitus and is developed by Bourdieu (1977) in his discussions of habitus. More latterly, the historical and socio-cultural aspects of walking have been portrayed in a collection edited by Ingold and Vergunst (2016), generated by a ‘walking seminar’. Germane to our interest in the senses and learning, for Le Breton (2020: 16–17), walking in nature constitutes a ‘celebration of the body, of the senses, of affectivity’. Also in this vein, Rosa (2018) theorizes walking as a way of reconnecting with our body and with others. Whilst fully cognizant of the importance of the socio-economic, social–structural and social interactional aspects of walking, it is the body-pedagogic and sensory dimensions of this slow form of pedestrianism on which we focus here.

The research on sea-based walking was undertaken in northern France and resonates with an enduring tradition in France and Europe, which links seawater bathing and ‘seasideness’ (Jarratt, 2015) with therapeutic benefits. Indeed, a substantial literature investigates the health and wellbeing benefits of blue spaces generally (e.g. Bell et al., 2017; Britton and Foley, 2020; Olive and Wheaton, 2021). Here, we concentrate on the sensory pleasures and somatic learning in the slow sport of sea walking, also known as aqua rando (hiking in water) or longe-côte (coastal sea walking in a group): walking immersed in seawater, usually up to the chest or neck, pushed and pulled by waves and currents. The aim is not to resist these forces, but rather to be ‘carried along’ (safely) by sea currents.

We next delineate the three research projects from which we derive our sensory and somatic learning data. For the purposes of this article, we do not focus specifically on sensory experiences of weather in slow sports, or ‘the intimate bodily co-becomings of weather’ (Wright, 2025), having already analysed weather experiences elsewhere (e.g. Allen-Collinson, 2018).

Slow haptics: touching times

For Rodaway (1994: 48), the haptic experience comprises: ‘a combination of tactile and locomotive properties [which] provides information about the character of objects, surfaces and whole environments as well as our own bodies’. As Parker et al. (2024) further identify, various capacities of sensation related to the human sense of touch span those operating at the dermal level, including perceptions of pressure, vibration and temperature (e.g. Allen-Collinson and Owton, 2015), body motion (kinaesthesia), internal sensing of bodily position in space (proprioception) and a sense of balance (vestibular sense). Highlighting a research lacuna, Ingold (2011) describes how studies of haptic perception have focused primarily on manual touch, with a resultant lack of attention to ‘footwork’. The interplay between body and ground, as sensed by and through the feet, is critical to balance and bodily comportment in many sports, including running (Allen-Collinson and Jackman, 2022) and cycling (Cook and Hockey, 2023). As distance runners, we were well accustomed to fine-grain assessment of the terrain and routes along which we ran, and their overall ‘ground-feel’ (Brown, 2017). In contrast, learning to appreciate the slower, more lingering footwork of walking permitted us to consider factors beyond safety and injury avoidance, previously among our uppermost concerns when running. Walking served to enhance the pleasures of encountering different surfaces, as Jacquelyn recorded when out hill-walking in the Howgill Fells, a range of hills in Northern England:

It has been dry enough recently to allow me to ditch the usual clunky walking boots and opt for my more comfortable trainers, even on the lower fells that are normally far too wet and boggy for such lightweight footwear. Having left the sharp, stony trackway at the base of the fells, I stride off on to the verdant, grass and bracken-covered steeper slopes so beautifully maintained by the sturdy Herdwick and Rough Fell sheep who tend these fells. The short grass is springy to my foot-touch, bouncing me back off the ground to energize my grateful feet – infinitely better than tramping pavements and tarmac. On the descent, it’s all I can do to stop myself bounding and hurtling joyfully down the friendly, rounded contours of the hillside as the vibrant turf bounces me forward. (Study 2)

Whilst we agree with Spiller (2024) that barefoot walking can generate a particularly intense form of human–nature interaction via ‘earthing’, nevertheless, even when shod in trainers, at walking pace, the haptic pleasures of human–earth connection were salient, especially when contrasted with the artificial, hard surfaces of road and pavement.

Haptic pleasures were also evident in Study 1. When out training together as running partners, Jacquelyn and John had previously had little spare energy for learning to develop awareness or enjoyment of the surrounding environment, obliged as we were to focus on the demanding ‘taskscape’ (Ingold, 2000) of running at speed. Ingold (2000: 195) describes the taskscape as ‘the entire ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking’. Gradually, during the slower-paced evening walks, we began increasingly to engage in the body pedagogics of seeing and feeling the changing nature of the landscape, the trees, the flowers, the sky and our very relationship to the world. For decades of pressurized working lives, we had not had the time to appreciate such things. We gradually realized that, despite all the difficulties, something new and valuable might be learnt from not being able to run and from slower movement. Developing our heightened haptic engagement with the environment, we found ourselves reaching out to touch the bark of trees and stone walls, and down to touch delicate woodland flowers and soft, springy moss – a form of ‘touch walking’ as Nätynki et al. (2023) describe. We also learnt to experience more acutely certain elemental haptics (Allen-Collinson and Jackman, 2022), such as the warm skim of springtime wind against skin newly released from winter-warm clothing. In this extract, we describe such elemental haptics whilst alternating walking-and-running as part of our rehabilitation efforts:

Today has been the first day it's just about been warm enough to take the training tights off. Pull on the shorts and the white skin revealed after an autumn and winter hiding. The feel of the air is amazing running down the road, something our skin has not experienced since last year. It's a kind of a caress I guess, the shorts being very short and the breeze moves over the legs, and around the back of the glutes [gluteal muscles]. The skin feels unrestrained, like it's free. ‘Running free’: the meaning is not lost, especially at the end of long working days at a computer. (Study 1)

The above haptic pleasures required learning and re-learning the sensory delights of slower movement through our environment, for this form of engagement did not come pre-reflectively to us. Our running bodies were accustomed to faster-paced movement through the running taskscape. We had deliberatively to learn to refocus sensory attention on the pleasurable sensations of this slower-paced environment immersion.

For sea-based sports and physical activities, the elemental touch of water can similarly promote feelings of environment connectedness, with a shift from experiencing water as an external element to feeling continuity with ‘lived water’ (Peignist, 2011). Particularly apposite to body–water haptics is the French concept of glisséité (approximating ‘slipperiness’ in English), relating to the texture of water. This human–water haptic relationship is notable in swimming, for example, where the temperature, feel and ‘catch’ of the water are central to performance (Heath and Carter, 2024; McNarry et al., 2021) and to sensory pleasures and dis-pleasures (Evans et al., 2017; Throsby, 2013). In many sea-based sports, along with properties of water, the element of air is also ‘touched’, assessed and responded to, for example, in sea walking, and kitesurfing, where practitioners must engage with learning to attune to water and wind (Campillo and Richard, 2014).

During Florian's initial attempts to sea walk, he noted how the group's coach sought to engage participants in the body pedagogics of learning this new aquatic practice, which, for many, diverged considerably from familiar sea sports. In this didactic form of body pedagogics, the coach verbally and visually instructed participants on various body techniques, such as the best bodily position to maintain balance in the seawater and how to adjust the pace of the walk relative to prevailing weather and water conditions. Importantly, too, Florian had to learn, initially via the coach and then via lived experience, how to sense the glisséité and resistance of the water:

As we made our way towards the seashore, the coach talked to us about the different techniques (crawling, paddling and webbing); I had completely underestimated their precise usefulness for walking in the water. I came to understand that ‘immersion’ here is defined as having the seawater up to a level between the navel and the chest, and this knowledge is in fact a fundamental element of longe-côte. I learnt this rapidly because, when forming a longe (the walking group in the water), this correct level of immersion must be respected collectively to allow propulsion in the water that is efficient for the group and thus to avoid any undue resistance from the water. Rather, we must take advantage of the ‘lift’ as a benefit generated by being in a group. At the end of this session, I realize that to ‘walk correctly’ in the water, you actually have to consider this parameter, which you learn via haptic engagement with the water, between your navel and your chest. It’s a visual cue that you then actually feel as soon as this sensation of lift becomes almost exhilarating for yourself and others. (Study 3)

This instance resonates with Andrews et al. (2024) on how collective action influences speed, and reverberates strongly with Shilling's (2017) observations highlighted earlier regarding the cognitive and the corporeal nexus. Shilling (2017) signals the need for cognitive understanding to develop and translate into new body practices and sensory learning, noting how Mauss (1973) portrays this kind of communicative learning of body techniques as a process of mimesis via watching and copying others’ movements through visual, verbal and other sensory modes. Here, the coach's tacit knowledge must be translated into instructions for the neophyte sea walkers.

In alignment with sensory scholars such as Classen (2005), Paterson (2006) and Potter (2008), we consider the haptic senses embrace wider forms of perception than are often conceptualized in the traditional ‘Western’ sensorium. Kinaesthesia, for example, is the sensation of movement of the body and limbs through space (including aquatic space). The vestibular sense is crucial to most sports and physical cultures, as Florian discovered when learning the body technique of sea walking. Here, balance is strongly shaped by immersion in seawater and firmness of footing on the undulating seabed:

I enter the water. The deeper I go into the sea, the easier it is to move forward … So here I am, walking with the water up to my chest. The important thing is to keep my back submerged, so as not to strain my lower spine. The group is already about 10 m ahead of me. I’m still learning the technique. Swing your right arm forward when you move your left leg forward and vice versa. The beach is relatively uneven. From time to time, I sink into the sort of (seabed) pits we call bâches here on the Côte d'Opale. Suddenly, I’m up to my neck in water; I feel too light; I’m almost floating with a feeling of no longer being in control of anything. I must get closer to the edge to get around the bâche. ‘Put your foot firmly on the sand’, the coach tells me. It’s all about finding the right compromise: get deep enough into the water to lighten your weight, but not too deep … There’s always a little imbalance, because the water is full of sand and anything but clear; I can’t see where I’m putting my foot … I’m constantly trying to adapt my body almost instinctively to the unevenness of the ground, which I can’t see. (Study 3)

As illustrated above, learning to pay acute attention to the haptics of ‘ground-feel’ (Brown, 2017) and buoyancy in the aquatic medium is needed, to help develop a refined vestibular sense and new ways of haptic knowing. As Florian notes above, the senses of vision and touch are brought into play in sea walking, and we next focus on the role of vision in the body pedagogics of slow.

Slow motion visuals

As noted earlier, Shilling (2022) argues that whilst much body-pedagogic research has explored the reproduction of social and cultural forms, few studies focus on the processes of change occurring when ‘body crises’ result in bodily habits becoming obstructed or challenged. For Jacquelyn and John, a sporting-body crisis was provoked when incurring long-term running injuries. These injuries meant the temporary suspension of running, to be replaced for a time by the slower walking mode. We thus learnt new ways of walking the countryside previously traversed at higher speed and increasingly came to appreciate the sensory pleasures of this mode of embodied environmental engagement. Our walking mode ranged from initially marching and striding (as best we could) over pre-planned routes, including urban parkland, to incorporating wandering, roaming movements, particularly in more spontaneous, ‘unfolding’ walks in the wider countryside.

For Martínková et al. (2022), slow movement highlights new aspects of experiencing, including our relationship with the environment, as ‘slow’ often involves immersion in an activity. This observation was apposite for we runners, who usually had to focus visual attention firmly frontwards and downwards to the terrain we traversed, to run as safely as possible by avoiding obstacles and hazards. With walking, we incrementally learnt to permit our visual attention to wander more freely, to shift upwards and outward, immersing ourselves in a broader environment. We also learnt over time, as the injury process lengthened, how to appreciate the visual compensations of walking. Once the pervasive gloom of winter abated and the evenings began to lengthen, our post-work walks took us around local parks and countryside, and we began to learn to see and appreciate the surroundings. In some cases, we even slowed down to a standstill to immerse ourselves in these newly found visual pleasures:

I suppose running is primarily about movement and here we are this evening, not moving, but standing stock still. We were walking around the park doing our circuits as usual when we came through the trees and there was this brilliant sky, with all sorts of wonderful cloud formations and colours. So, we just stood there and watched it for 5 min, watched it change, saying, ‘look at that bit’ and ‘do you see that orange?’ And when we finished looking, and plodded on again, we felt we gained from it. (Study 1)

Learning to allow ourselves to slow down, to stop and gaze, did not come easily to two disciplined, committed, long-term runners, however. When first commencing the walking, it was initially conceptualized as a poor, attenuated form of exercise in contrast to running, and we tended to march briskly, head down, monitoring footfall. Our running had never been undertaken for pleasure, for relaxation or even primarily for health and wellbeing. Rather, it was for training purposes, to produce a disciplined running-body that could be relied upon to ‘endure’ and perform at a certain level, albeit one declining with age and the demands of sedentary, academic work (Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2016). Therefore, the idea of taking pleasure in running was most strange, even anathema. Only as the weeks and then months went by and we grew accustomed to the idea of a slow, long-term rehabilitation process did we learn to embrace ‘slowness’. A ‘body crisis’ (Shilling, 2022) similarly accosted Jacquelyn, when she had to give up her 5-day-weekly running due to the aftermath of COVID-19. Suffering the respiratory challenges provoked by long COVID, she opted to take up countryside walking. Gradually, she began to engage in self-learning and re-learning how to move more slowly and with appreciation through the countryside.

For Florian, a neophyte practitioner of sea walking, an analogous body crisis (Shilling, 2022) was engendered when first attempting a sea-based activity completely unfamiliar to him. In alignment with body-pedagogical perspectives, this demanded cognitive and corporeal learning:

Usually, surfing has taught me to control the space where the waves break by lying on my board in the open sea. With longe-côte, the approach is more complex. We walk on the sand towards the sea, which is descending at the time of today's session … At ebb tide, the current flows from east to west along this beach. And today, the wind is typically north-easterly … We’re at mid-tide, when the currents are strongest … Here I’m reliving my first surfing lessons, when I had to learn above all to master the ‘discipline of the wave’. This involves understanding a wave space where the swell from the open sea meets the continental shelf, transforming these waves into breaking waves. So, it’s the space between the edge of the beach and the breaking wave furthest from the foreshore that I now have to [visually] reconfigure in my brain, because I’m much closer to the edge than when surfing … This in-between area has no fixed limits and the elements, whether water or wind, are in constant motion … This requires us to understand the swell and adapt our movements to the breaking waves. As in surfing previously, today I’ve been learning praxis skills linked to anticipating the swell so that I can walk in the water: assessing the lines of force on the beach, mentally mapping the precise areas where the waves will break. (Study 3)

Here, Florian is learning new ways of visually evaluating (Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2006) the seascape, differing markedly from his familiar ways of visually assessing key marine elements, such as the direction of wind, tide and currents, wave types and distancing. Rather than visualizing the ‘affordance’ (Gibson, 1977; Toner et al., 2025) of waves for surfing opportunities, Florian is visualizing the same factors, but for their very different affordances vis-à-vis the slower movement of sea walking.