Cementing Relations within a Sporting Field: Fell Running in the English Lake District and the Acquisition of Existential Capital

Introduction

It’s when you’re out there and you see a magical sunset. I know the other day it was so black, and a crack appeared in the clouds and the sun shone through, and the tarn in Little Langdale, there was a bit of thin white mist hanging over the water, and the sun shone through on that mist and it was just as though that mist was on fire. And it’s times like that when it’s magical. (Joss Naylor ¹ )

On 14 January 2012, the world premiere of a classical composition, written by Maurizio Malagnini, was staged in Kendal, a town which claims to serve as the ‘gateway’ to the English Lake District National Park (LDNP), an area designated to be ‘of outstanding natural beauty’. The piece was commissioned by Richard Wigley, the General Manager of the BBC Philharmonic, in a bid to bring together his two passions: classical music and fell running. Wigley invited Malagnini to visit the UK, and introduced him to runners and the locality, so that they could inspire him to compose a piece that would capture the lived experience of the mountains. This was documented in a BBC Radio 4 programme – The Bob Graham Round: Music Meets the Fells – which ends with the quotation from Joss Naylor cited at the start of this article. The Bob Graham Round is a fell run: a race against the clock. Within 24 hours competitors must cover a distance of 72 miles and scale 42 peaks. Joss Naylor, quoted above, who has completed this and many other more demanding challenges, has farmed in the area all his life. As a child, he experienced the poverty that goes hand-in-hand with tenant farming in this remote part of the UK and yet, throughout his life, he has gained an almost legendary status as a result of his running achievements (Richardson, 2009). Thus we have a curious juxtaposition of classical music and a relatively marginal sport that until recent decades fostered little in the way of cultural capital. Furthermore, there also seems to be a blurring of boundaries whereby people with divergent social backgrounds find that they have something in common. How has a sporting field, whose origins can be traced to the activities of a geographically specific rural, male, working class, come to be populated by men and women whose elitist cultural preferences are rooted in those typical of an urban, upper middle class?

The argument presented here is that there is something inherent to the embodied practice of fell running that cements relations in the sporting field of ‘fell’ that dilutes other aspects of social inequality. My argument is that whereas many sociologists who use the field concept focus on the forces which divide different participants (e.g. Bennett et al. 2009), we also need to register the importance of what they share in common. And to do this, we also need to elaborate an approach to fields which does not see them only in instrumental and calculative ways, but also as sites of value and passion. The pleasure derived from this extreme sport is something understood only by those who participate in it, and the shared empathetic understanding of running on the fells gives rise to a novel form of sociality. My suggestion, therefore, is that there is much to be gained by elaborating a mode of field analysis which is more oriented towards ‘lyrical’ sociology.

Fell Running: From ‘Festive Amusement’ to ‘Sporting Field’

Let me begin by tracing the origins of the field of fell running. Until relatively recently it was virtually unknown beyond the confines of committed enthusiasts living in, or near, rural mountainous regions. But the sport now attracts interest amongst a diversity of social groups. The publication of a book called, Feet in the Clouds: A Tale of Fell-running and Obsession, by the established London journalist Richard Askwith, certainly helped to raise the profile of the sport. Askwith (2004) offers an autobiographical narrative of his experiences of running in the LDNP, and although this is a personal account, he himself represents a new category of Lake District fell runners. They are increasingly likely to be ‘offcomers’ (to use the Cumbrian lexicon), to live in urban locations, and to be from the professional middle classes. Indeed, members of some of the running clubs based in the more touristic ‘South Lakes’ district are as likely to be professionals who have moved to ‘the Lakes’, have second homes, or travel there at weekends for recreation, as they are to be locals, native to the area. Askwith’s widely promoted book stimulated further interest in the sport; since its publication the membership of the English Fell Runner’s Association (FRA), which was founded in 1970, has significantly increased. In 2011 it had 6800 members, with a jump in membership of nearly 2000 after publication of Feet in the Clouds. This compares with a membership of 2000 in 1985, and a steady state membership of around 300 during the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s fell races were few and far between, and formed important opportunities for men (and perhaps their wives and families) for socializing. The male participants were almost all native to the region – Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire – and only in 1977 did the English Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) officially permit women to enter races.

One event, the Lake District Mountain Trial (LDMT), stands out as pivitol in the sport’s history. It was the first race of its kind, it covers a long distance, the competitors have to register at check points, and they are permitted to navigate their own route between the markers. Indeed, the navigational element is an important aspect of the sport. Established in 1952, it was one of the first events to promote a ‘ladies fell race’ in 1953, albeit over a shorter course. However, women only officially secured AAA sanctioning to run some years later (Smith, 1985). The LDMT remains one of the most important events in the Lake District fell running calendar; the route and the check points are kept secret and announced only at the start of the race. The location is different each year, and so it demands not only a level of fitness, but also knowledge of navigation, and an appreciation of the terrain and weather conditions (LDMTA, 2002). Today, however, there are many more fell races – they vary in length from 5 to 25 miles or more – with runners obliged to register at check points, thus giving them the autonomy of determining their own course throughout the race.

In the early 1950s, even amongst local Lake District folk, fell runners were regarded as slightly fanatical, quirky types who quietly and incidentally pursued their own interest. But the 1950s also saw the beginning of a period of transition. Hitherto, fell races had been staged as part of the annual ‘shows’ that have been held in the bigger market towns and villages of the Lake Counties since the mid-19th century. These festive, agrarian meets brought together the farming community to ‘show’ their produce and livestock, and for the men to participate in sports indigenous to the area such as hound trailing, Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestling, and fell racing. Thus the roots of fell running can be traced to these rural sports, but with the advent of events such as the Mountain Trial, the formation of the FRA, and increasingly formalized relations between the FRA and the AAA, fell running became integrated into what Bourdieu (1978: 822) would refer to as ‘the specific logic of the “sporting field”’, as I elaborate below. This transformation from a rural pursuit to a more established sport was not a smooth one. A particularly contentious issue was the debate between the so called ‘professional’ runners and the amateurs. Those who took part in the ‘guides’ races’ (as they are known) at the annual shows could win cash prizes and, as a result, they were banned by the athletic governing bodies from officially entering amateur fell races. According to the AAA officials, competing in a race which offered an – albeit meagre – cash prize placed a runner in the category of ‘professional athlete’, a status that the middle-class amateurs considered to be ungentlemanly.

This history, which has been reported in detail elsewhere (Smith, 1985), echoes the politics of the emergence of what Bourdieu (1978) calls, a ‘sporting field’. A sporting field is an established ‘field of competition’ which, in turn, is ‘irreducible to a mere ritual game or festive amusement’ (Bourdieu, 1978: 821). The field of sport is distinct from rural games in that it is characterized by ‘a corpus of specific rules and of specialized governing bodies recruited, initially at least, from the “old boys” of the public schools’ (Bourdieu, 1978: 824). Members of the FRA, who were of mixed social backgrounds but predominantly northerners and working class, found the values and ways of the ‘old boys’ who ran the AAA to be snobbish and contentious. The story of these struggles between the middle-class ‘amateurs’, who preached fair play, and the working-class ‘professionals’ were bitter. In fact, the politicking between these classes is illustrative of struggles associated with the formation of a legitimate sporting practice, and would be pertinent for a conventional field analysis, but this is not the main focus of this paper. Attention here is not given to the struggles between amateurs and professionals, the working and middle classes, or rural workers and educated urban-based professionals, but instead the focus is on the embodied practice of fell running itself. The contention here is that a more adequate appreciation of any sporting field, and relations within it, necessitates a grasp of the communal embodied techniques involved in it. These can be passions that are shared between participants and can thus be a means by which the stakes of the field itself are forged.

Bourdieu does of course point out that when seeking to explain the social distribution of sporting preferences, it would be a ‘serious mistake’ (1978: 833) not to apprehend bodily habitus, and more particularly he argues that the study of the sporting field should give ‘thought to the variations in the meaning and function of the different sports among the social classes’ (1978: 834). His thesis is that the intrinsic profits of, and the preferences for, various sports, map onto class habitus, and they are ‘very unequally perceived and appreciated by the different classes (for whom they are, of course, very unequally accessible)’ (Bourdieu, 1978: 835). There is, however, a presumption here and this is that socio-structural patterning shapes these experiential practices and the intrinsic profits for those engaged in them. This is assumed, one could argue, because Bourdieu’s analysis attends to context and objective relations between social positions at the cost of paying sufficient attention to what the body actually does, and how the body-subject is really lived within the field.

Thus far I have argued that fell running underwent a transformation in the second half of the 20th century, from being a ‘game’ associated with the agrarian calendar, a native ‘sport’ of mountain guides, shepherds, and farmers, to becoming a leisure pursuit, enjoyed by men and women, locals and ‘offcomers’, and the working and middle classes. Today, it might even be regarded as an example of what Colin Campbell (2004) refers to as a ‘vicarious experience’ to be consumed by the expanding leisure classes. The social composition of fell runners in terms of their class, gender, and geographical background has shifted in ways that mirror the socio-economic diversification of the area itself. The rural economy still relies on the landscape, but not so much from farming or mining but rather more from income generated through tourism and recreation. Fell running is now one of the many pursuits that is promoted both in terms of its heritage status and as an ‘activity’ marketed to visitors as ‘adventure capital’. One valid, albeit conventional, interpretation of these changes might point to the congruence of fell running with walking, mountaineering and other aesthetic leisure pursuits that are disproportionally enjoyed by the omnivorous middle classes (Bennett et al., 2009) who are prone to take up previously ‘common’ and derided cultural activities. Indeed, that same theoretical orientation might explain Naylor’s growing acclaim in the field in terms of an accumulation of embodied skills and fitness that have come to be valued in sporting and other cultural milieux. However, to account for Naylor’s acclaim purely in terms of physical assets, or as part of the gentrification of working-class sports, would be partial, not least because such explanations rest on an inadequate conceptualization of the body and an over-privileging of structure. This would fit with a Cartesian view of the body. But fell running is a physical act, it involves a consistent interplay between action and perception.

Tulle’s (2008) Bourdieusian study of veteran runners is instructive in this regard. She describes how socio-structural changes have facilitated the potential for older men, and more recently women, to pursue their sport, but crucially her analysis also proposes bodies act as agents of social change, an argument that may feel seem odd to some sociologists. Her empirical exploration into the experiences of veteran elite runners (‘vets’) reveals how, as a group, vets form a social movement that not only makes older runners visible but also provides opportunities for competition within age categories, thus establishing an institutional context where ageing bodies can successfully seek to gain physical competence and symbolic capital. The tyranny of youthful bodies dissipates as some runners even look forward to moving into older age categories precisely because this can generate new opportunities. And this is her crucial point: where the field allows for bodily competence to become normalized, the tensions between ageing and the maintenance of the body may become easier to manage. My aim here therefore is to extend her thesis through an analysis of fell running, but with a greater emphasis on what the body actually does. In so doing I also pursue a ‘carnal sociology’ (Crossley, 1995) in order to explore, navigate and put some empirical ‘flesh’ on to longer-standing debates and tensions in the sociology of the body and cultural sociology.

Corporeal Sociology and Sporting Bodies

This paper reports on an ongoing ethnography undertaken by the author in the English Lake District. The research builds on a tradition of ethnographies of embodiment in the fields of sports such as boxing (Wacquant, 1995, 2004), martial arts (Spencer, 2009), body building (Monaghan, 2001) and circuit training (Crossley, 2004). Conceptually and methodologically, the aim is to undertake a ‘corporeal’ or what Crossley calls a ‘carnal sociology’, an approach he developed from a close reading of Merleau-Ponty whose work, he maintains, ‘provides for the paradigm shift that a carnal sociology of the body entails’ (Crossley, 1995: 60). This gestalt shift involves overcoming mind/body dualisms and comprises a ‘sentient engagement with and openness to the world, which assumes an embodied and cultural form, which draws upon a common social habitus and which is (at least in principle) publicly available, i.e. which manifests as embodied conduct in intermundane spaces’ (1995: 61). Thus the ‘social’ component is rooted in bodily action and, from this viewpoint, a shared grammar of knowledge or understanding is not achieved through language or discourse but is ‘an attribute of meaningful and embodied behaviour’ (1995: 55). Crossley refers to this as practical or ‘existential understanding’ (1995: 54) which is acquired through doing. Crossley thus constructively critiques Bourdieu’s partial conceptualization of embodiment, through the development of a ‘carnal sociology’ that sharpens the focus on ‘what the body does’ (1995: 43).

However, this bid to refocus analysis on the ‘body-subject’ has attracted criticism. The tensions generated by attempts to overcome body/mind and agency/structure dualisms are carefully considered by Howson and Inglis (2001), who argue that the aspiration to marry concepts rooted in the disciplines of philosophy and sociology ‘was doomed from the start’ (2001: 312), most especially because existential philosophy lacks a sufficient appreciation of the social. Furthermore, Bourdieu’s efforts to make Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology more sociological through the notion of ‘habitus’, they argue, somewhat paradoxically results in a view that privileges structural determinism. Bourdieu, they maintain, tends to emphasize structural factors, speaks of ‘typical’ individuals, and invariably sees socio-cultural change to be contingent upon structural reconfigurations (Howson and Inglis, 2001: 311). Crossley (2001) offers a robust rejoinder to these arguments, claiming that the social infiltrates, rather than determines, action, practice and intention as is evident in the idea of situatedness. ‘If one reads Bourdieu with an eye on Merleau-Ponty his work seems to point to the “situatedness” of human agency, rather than to determinism’ (Crossley, 2001: 324). People’s lives are situated and ‘require a “feel for” (habitus) and “belief in” (illusion) the social field’ (Crossley, 2001: 323). However, Crossley also maintains that Bourdieu fails to pay sufficient attention to the mechanisms by which relations between those who share cultural and other resources within the field interact with one another to generate capital. At a macro-level, empirical work on embodied cultural capital has certainly revealed how ‘different groups and classes cultivate different types of body’ (Bennett et al., 2009), but what these studies gloss over is the nature of relations and commonalities that might be forged within specific fields. Micro level studies and ethnographies of fields that examine how embodied practices are experienced can offer novel insights. Wacquant’s (1995, 2004) study of boxing is one such example.

Although Wacquant (2004) set out to undertake a study of ‘the everyday reality of the black American ghetto’ (p. vi), he also produced an embodied ethnography of boxing. Taking participant observation to the extreme, it could be said that he went native. ‘In the intoxication of immersion’, he reports feeling tempted to drop his professional career and become a boxer (2004: 4). He urges sociologists to ‘restitute this carnal dimension of existence’, in order ‘to capture and to convey the taste and the ache of action, the sound and fury of the social world that the established approaches of the social sciences typically mute when they do not suppress them altogether’ (2004: vii, emphasis added). Wacquant finds that boxing seeps into his soul, and the pugilist ‘is inhabited by the game he inhabits’ (1995: 88). And as one of Wacquant’s participant’s put it, ‘only a fighter would understand’ (Wacquant, 1995: 88). Boxing comes to inhabit the pugilist viscerally; furthermore, Wacquant and his ‘study participants’ come to share an existential appreciation of the game. Wacquant, a white, middle-class, highly educated professional, comes to inhabit and be inhabited by boxing. His passion for boxing is something he has in common with the African Americans who share none of his educational, economic or cultural advantages, and it is also likely that this is an enthusiasm that his advantaged professional peers may find difficult to comprehend. Wacquant therefore points to the need to understand the physical passions of the sporting activity, not reducing it to an instrumental or calculative game. In making the same move, I want to ally my account to the need for a form of ‘lyrical sociology’ which allows us to see the organization of fields as joyful, intense and passionate.

The concept ‘lyrical sociology’, introduced by Andrew Abbott, encourages a passionate engagement of, and an emotional response to, the social world instead of conventional approaches that seek to explain observations through recourse to socio-historical contexts. Abbott’s point of departure is the often cited quotation from William Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, wherein Wordsworth outlines his intellectual project.

The principal object, then proposed in these [studies] was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature … [Urban] life was generally chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are under less restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. (Wordsworth, 1965 [1801]: 446–7, as cited in Abbott, 2007: 71)

Here Abbott replaces ‘poems’ with ‘[studies]’ and ‘rural’ with ‘[urban]’. (Intriguingly, Abbott presumes the urban seems to offer a more authentic appreciation of the social life than does the rural.) He suggests that a ‘lyrical writer aims to tell us of his or her intense reaction to some portion of the social process seen in a moment’ and in so doing ‘gives us congeries of images’ (Abbott, 2007: 75). The aim here, therefore, is to present the embodied experiences of fell running through a close reading of the ‘plainer and more emphatic language’ used by men and women who run on the fells. Having grown up in the English Lake District, and having been a dedicated runner, my reading of the data is invariably partial, but arguably it is this ‘intoxication of immersion’ (Wacquant, 2004: 4), combined with a passionate engagement, that gives rise to an empathetic appreciation of the existential quality of the game.

Accounts of fell running presented below were gathered during an ethnographic study undertaken by the author between 2010 and 2012. Participant and non-participant observation comprised attending races, talking informally with runners, being a member of the FRA, receiving the Association’s quarterly magazine, and attending a FRA course on mountain navigation. In addition, face-to-face in-depth interviews with 14 men and 5 women who live in the Lake District were carried out in the participants’ homes, all of which were audio-recorded and transcribed. All the interviewees have been involved in the sport for at least two decades, with some having run in the fells for over 60 years. All were aged over 55 and the oldest was 83; all were white, British and still running. Some were born in the locality, whilst others had moved into the area but had done so many decades ago. The empirical research was approved by the University of York Research Ethics committee, and all the names of the participants used here are pseudonyms.

Recollections of Fell Running

Wordsworth is perhaps most famous for the images he invoked when reflecting on his wanderings around the fells and lakes which, to use his words, he ‘recollected in tranquillity’ (1801: cited by Abbott, 2007: 72). Accounts of running articulated during the qualitative interviews reported on here, may not have such rhythmic qualities, but they do arguably have elements of the poetic. Take for example this woman’s recollections of running in the annual Fairfield Horseshoe race.

I mean last week when we did this relay, you’ve got a long hard slog on the leg we were doing. From Patterdale, you go up St Sunday Crag, and then you go over Fairfield, Hart Crag, back down to Ullswater. And fortunately on the last leg the rain had stopped. But we set off in cloud, and halfway, or three quarters of the way up St Sunday Crag we met an inversion so we got above the cloud. So we had beautiful conditions; you could see various peaks popping through the clouds, so it was really atmospheric. And so because we were going uphill and going as fast as we could, we do have the opportunity to look around. You know, as long as you’re not talking you’re sort of looking around, you could look around, that was very good. And you know, we’d cover the tops looking above all this cloud below us, and then we had to descend back into it from Hart Crag. (Yvonne, age 55–60)

Thus we see that participation does not just involve the race itself, but the images endure. The landscape permeates the senses. Significantly, the run is also a shared experience; ‘we’ ran, ‘we’ looked around, and ‘we’ saw the peaks and the inversion. The experience also serves as a personal resource, because the landscape infiltrates the psyche; the scenery is etched on the senses and can be retrieved for good effect. The pleasure is visceral. Fell runners enjoy how their bodies feel after a demanding excursion. As a runner commented in passing, with a mug of tea in hand after a fell run: ‘It feels so good. I just can’t explain it.’ Attempts to explain ‘it’ would risk sounding trite. As one long established runner, with an impressive track record in local races, puts it:

I don’t have the education to put it in to words. How do you put it into words? I don’t know, it’s … as you get older you probably get more appreciation of the scenery, and the element that you can do it. But I’m not clever enough to put it into words about what you … yeah … feel good factor, there’s nothing feels as good after if you’ve had a hard training run, you finish and you’re tired. But later, half an hour after you’ve had a shower and a change and you’ve had a brew, that’s the time when you often get the feel good factor. (Vernon, age 70–75)

The running in the moment is also good. This is shown by a lengthy account from one of the early pioneers who, in spite of a whole catalogue of injuries, still regularly runs:

It’s the feeling sort of like being earlated [elated] or whatever the word is. You know I would niver have the time to train, but there would be the odd days if say a Mountain Trial was coming up. Maybe a good half day out, I’d set off in’t morning and I’d be running well, you know. No cares, nothing to bother us and run up maybe to Hart Crag mebe three hours and I’d just have maybe one drink, a sup from a stream or something before Grisedale tarn, and I’d get on top of Fairfield or Hart Crag and I’d stop and have a Mars bar and I’d look around and I’d think: How lucky I am to do this. And I’d trot back home, in three hours like you know, not the same way – perhaps over Brown and Pike Crag and cut off Yewbarrow. And it’s just … when you’re running down of’t top of Lingmell and you think to yourself this is magic. And it was ’cos your feet hadn’t dropped, you were running perfect, your legs hadn’t stiffened up, you hadn’t tired. You know and you have a la’l [little] wash in the beck [stream] when you get back. And you know it niver took anything out of you, you were running so relaxed you covered all that distance in that little time. It was just a feeling you know, that someone had given you something that you couldn’t give to anyone else. It was just as though you know other people could have set off wid you but they wouldn’t come back, not at that pace like. It was just sort of an evolution that sort of going through your system and it was sort of so enjoyable and earlating sort thing and you know your body was sort of fit and it was taking nothing out of you whether you were running up hill or running down hill. It was just a magic feeling that you couldn’t really express to anyone like, you know. (Jack, age 70–75)

In this quote Jack alludes to ‘something’ that he has ‘been given’, a unique personal quality that he possesses but cannot ‘give’ to anyone else. He gives a description of relaxed and comfortable running, a sense of the solitary and a sense of being at ease. Although these are the words of what Wordsworth would call the ‘common man’, they capture the lyrical quality of his engagement with the mountains. Others like Vernon, cited above, speaking in plainer language, point to the experiential profits derived from the ‘taste and ache of the action’ (Wacquant, 2004). Jack’s account reveals a relaxed run, a comfortable few hours, without the bother of everyday worries, stresses or stains. Yet running does of course require effort, stamina and concentration, and putting one foot in front of the other and covering such distance in the landscape does combine a brute determination together with skill.

Embodied Skills

As Askwith (2004) points out, at first sight there is nothing obviously complicated about running, although it does get trickier when you have to negotiate rough ground, scree, bog, ice, wet rock, wind, rain, mist, heat, sun, darkness, snow and cold. It gets trickier still when you have to navigate terrain with a mosaic of paths, or sometimes ground where there are no paths at all. You have to learn how to run uphill, and you have to learn how to run downhill. Often runners tend to be better at one rather than the other. The good ones can do both. Articulating what may become intuitive skills is not easy. Nevertheless, a piece submitted to a local magazine in 1956 in response to a controversy associated with the Lake District Mountain Trial makes an impressive attempt.

A fell runner makes a multitude of decisions on the way down. Is it better to swerve to the right or to the left, or more advantageous to leap over? If jumping over, is it safe to land with both feet or one? If one, is it to be the left or right? If it is both, or one or the other, can he afford to risk full body weight, which is often disastrous on wet rock, or should he flick with one foot to a more sound position? So it goes on, provided he can spare a moment to look where he is going! Such decisions can only be determined by what lies ahead, for this governs his current actions. A harrier on his own ‘midden’ ² has no such concerns; speed is to him everything; his muscles are tuned and strengthened for it; his lungs and heart and blood are, by continual practice, geared for it. (Hand, 1956: 442–3)

This captures something important and distinctive to fell running, when it is compared to long distance road running, or driving a car, or walking, or typing on a keyboard. In all these instances of mundane routinized actions, the materiality of the body and the senses are indivisible. Furthermore, the body can disappear (Leder, 1990) from view. Describing such everyday embodied conduct Crossley (1995: 48) notes that:

… perception is integrated with and inseparable from our other bodily modes of practical engagement. Action and perception intertwine and mutually inform each other in the context of a single project: e.g. the footballer is moved into action by the opening that she sees (without any reflective process taking place).

Fell running, however, is different. As Hand’s account communicates, when on the fells the runner is constantly vigilant, and continually undertakes a ‘reflective process’. In a phenomenological sense therefore the body – as Leder (1990) puts it – dys-appears; it demands attention, necessitates bodily awareness, and a reflective process does take place. Thus the sensorial and existential appreciation of the act is sharpened. This, in concert with the spectacle and magic of the landscape, serves to affirm the intensity and meaningfulness of the action.

Decisions made during a training run or in races are often impromptu and yet they also rely on a culmination of experience and knowledge. The running body is agile and possesses an analytical confidence necessary to complete a race. The challenges of a run or race are immediate and pressing, and so the runners’ personal concerns and life’s troubles recede from view. Lack of attention to the route, the weather, or the terrain would be risky. It is utterly absorbing, and this is part of the appeal, because one is removed from the normal routine demands of everyday life; it is a form of intoxication that transports the runner (literally and metaphorically) to another place. The unique and individual nature of every run and every step requires an embodied awareness which, even when unpleasant (pain, fatigue, cold, exhaustion and so on), appears to give rise to an embodied affirmation of pleasure that is difficult to articulate, but herein lies the significance. This affirmation is acquired through an action that relies on existential understanding which I will provocatively call existential capital. This existential quality generates a resource that yields a profit for the individual and cements the sociality of the runners.

Existential Capital, Boundaries and Social Fields

It may seem perverse for me to coin the concept of existential capital, as this does not obviously seem to involve forms of exploitation or exclusion within a field, the usual foci of field analysis. However, following the lead of Savage et al. (2005), if we see capitals as permitting forms of accumulation, then the existential aspects of fell running create the shared intensity and passion which are necessary for the field itself to gain its definition and identity. Through the concept of existential capital, we can thus see fields as passionately defined, in ways which challenge the instrumentalism of conventional modes of field analysis.

We noted above how the data revealed an experience of being transported quite literarily to another world – beyond the social. And yet, at the same time, the intensely unique and individual nature of the extreme bodily state paradoxically forms the basis of a sociality; it is virtually impossible for non-runner others to gain an empathetic appreciation of the experience. As we noted above, runners say, ‘it feels so good, I can’t explain it’. The fell run is a solitary pursuit but it also concretizes a connection, as runners sometimes comment, echoing Wacquant’s boxer cited above, ‘only a runner could understand’. Thus the gains and resources associated with, and inherent to, this existential experience work in very particular ways within this field. The existential experience has a bearing on wellbeing and appears to generate a resource in the form of an embodied reassurance rooted in the connection between the corporeal self and the landscape. It also provides a connection between runners who are able to speak to each other about their common passion and empathize with each other should their opportunity to run be hindered through injury. To give up running may seem a trivial matter to those outside the field of fell. But within the field, there would be no shame in feeling bereft by the loss. Thus this mode of experience has consequences for social relations within the field and gives clues to the unlikely social connections pertaining between Askwith (a London journalist), Wigley (a manager of a classical orchestra) and Naylor (a rural hill famer).

Earlier in this paper we commented on Bourdieu’s (1984) observation that preferences for, and the profits of, sport are socially patterned.

It can easily be shown that the different classes do not agree on the profits expected from sport, be they specific physical profits, such as effects on the external body, like slimness, elegance or visible muscles, and on the internal body, like health or relaxation; or extrinsic profits, such as the social relationships a sport may facilitate, or possible economic and social advantages. (1984: 211)

We noted too that empirical evidence substantiates this view, and there is indeed a congruence between social background and rates of participation of sports (Bennett et al., 2009: 155–60). Furthermore, various forms of body maintenance and exercise can facilitate socio-economic advantage. Such findings support the view that there are structural antecedents to engagement with sporting practices. The data analysed in this paper, however, unearth intrinsic profits whose extrinsic values are those of personal fulfilment and a mode of sociality that transcends social differences and struggles internal to the field, and these profits and gains found in the shared passions define the stakes of the field. From the data in hand, we can see that there is something inherent to fell running, in and of itself, that serves to precipitate shifts in the relations between different socio-economic and cultural groups. The attractor is the existential capital derived from the intensity of a sentient bodily awareness associated with running on topographically tricky ground, in spectacular landscapes, and in adverse or conducive weather conditions. Because the experience is so deeply personal, it can only be shared and appreciated by others who have done it. This echoes Wacquant’s account of boxing, where he writes about the intensity of the practical desire for boxing which he came to share with the men he studied. Desire is not, however, as Crossley (2001) would suggest, a desire for recognition, or to accumulate any kind of exchange value. It is a desire for something more carnal than that.

We have seen in the accounts of fell running that existential understanding forged out of ‘doing’ and ‘being’ in a unique landscape is now enjoyed not only by men native to the area, but it also appears to have ensnared those who bring with them a diversity of cultural preferences. The participation of these offcomers has bestowed the sport with a degree of cultural cachet. This is most especially enacted by those like Askwith, who act as cultural intermediaries (Featherstone, 1991), and who promote and evangelize fell running by writing books and producing music. Offcomers too elevate the cultural and even symbolic capital of the sport. Such developments are not invariably welcomed by those long established within the field, not least because the fells can only tolerate limited numbers of participants. These changes are also occurring in concert with the shifting socio-economic fortunes of the locality, as the Lake District National Park becomes valued, experienced and populated by the middle classes. But these observations are in line with a conventional sociological account, and although they harbour some validity, they are at odds with the thesis of this paper. Instead, I have argued, and the data substantiates, the claim that fell running inhabits and is inhabited by the body and it is the ‘magical’ quality (see the opening quotation) that strengthens relations within fields. A lyrical engagement with those ‘magical’ moments of being in fells reveals the salience of agentic action, affects and effects. In the history of the LDMT, one of the veteran participants of the race observes:

I like to think of this and a small number of other events as defining moments in my own life. So much gets forgotten but the Mountain Trial will be with me forever. And it’s still there now, waiting to cast its spell on a new generation. (LDMTA, 2002: 15)

The spell has been cast on the new generation of offcomers who, like this veteran, have also experienced ‘the calf muscles screaming on the uphill bits, and the thighs on the downhill’ (LDMTA, 2002: 14). Cultural intermediaries are shifting the nature of cultural capital of the field, but it is the existential capital that remains the transcendent force.

This existential experience is constitutive of what Shilling (1993), extending Bourdieu’s notion of embodied capital, would call physical capital. But there are important differences. Existential capital accrues value that is not obviously exchanged for financial reward or symbolic status. It does not hold the same currency as other forms of embodied or physical capital such as manners, strength, beauty, accent, demeanour, or skill with a ball. Existential capital has an immediate, fluid and yet enduring quality created within the process of running. The gains therefore are quite abstracted and intrinsic, the very values that Sayer (1999) argues tend to be neglected or dismissed by Bourdieu. Sayer points out that Bourdieu ‘resists acknowledging non-instrumental action’ (1999: 409), and therefore gains that are ‘valued for their own sake rather than as a means which (unconsciously?) bring the actor some kind of advantage or at least defend their position in the social field are not taken into account’ (Sayer, 1999: 407). Existential capital involves not status, monetary reward, or a ‘healthy’ body, but comprises intrinsic values appreciated for their own sake. We have seen in the data that the gains are primarily the embodied residues of the ‘magic’ that forms the basis of the sociality of the field. To be sure, fell running may also harbour symbolic, cultural, economic and social capital within and beyond the field, but these are only part of the story. What is fostered is camaraderie amongst those who have a shared existential understanding and who can form solidarity with others for whom running is ‘in their blood’.

There is a risk of simply inventing yet another notion of capital. Bennett et al. (2009) point to Bourdieu’s tendency to do so in an ‘ad hoc’ way (2009: 258). Nevertheless, they do find additional forms of cultural capital – such as ‘technical, emotional, national and subcultural’ – to be useful and necessary for the analysis of social fields. The idea of existential capital is novel in that it captures a mode of embodied experience hitherto unrecognized – not least because existing concepts such as emotional or physical embodied capital both reflect and reinforce a Cartesian view of the body. Existential capital by contrast rests on an integrated conceptualization of the material human subject. Furthermore, existing forms of embodied capital tend to pay insufficient attention to the fleshy reality of body techniques. Consequently, the preferences or profits of sporting bodies appear to neatly map on to social hierarchies whereas the picture – certainly in relation to fell running – is more fluid. There may be a more complex dialectic between the existential profits and the changing social participation of the sport.

The argument crafted in this paper is swayed by my enthusiasm for the sport. And although obvious, it is perhaps important to add a qualification. There is no suggestion that running on the fells will invariably give rise to profits and existential gains. There is no inevitability that it will be enjoyed. Some people could probably think of nothing worse than trudging over the hills in all weathers, have no desire to take part, and even if they did would hate the whole experience. Then there is nostalgia. There is a view of fell running ‘as was’, with hardened locals, pioneers who scaled the fells without the benefit of modern technology in the form of running shoes and weather resistant clothing, which is very appealing. And then again, references to the communality and social capital gained from participation in the sport risk glossing over the history of the field which, we noted above, has been riven with factions and disputes. There are tensions both between working class, ‘professional’ runners and middle class amateur participants, and also between those with a background in orienteering and the purist fell runners, and also again within running clubs whose members favour keeping the membership limited to certain types of running and those who welcome ‘a diversity of running forms (road, track, cross country, orienteering, etc.).

However, a carnal sociology and a passionate engagement are not designed to produce a neutral and objective account of fell running in the Lake counties. Instead, the raison d’etre of my argument is about restoring the body, or rather the material embodied subject, to the study of cultural fields. In so doing I have indicated a novel, and one might hope useful, notion of capital. The empirical data support the thesis; within the context of the bare-forked semi-nakedness of bodies that are exposed to the elements of the mountains, social differences begin to slip away. Lining up at the start of a race, wearing only a club vest and shorts, ‘nithered’ (to use Cumbrian dialect) by the cold, it is difficult to determine – or indeed care about – the social background of one’s companions. The ‘taste and ache of the action’ is what counts. It is perhaps for this reason that Wacquant, when undertaking participant observation, became so absorbed in the personal ‘profit’ of his game that it led him to consider dropping his academic career in favour of a pugilist way of life. The argument presented in this paper is that, despite the increasingly diverse socio-economic backgrounds of the participants in the sporting field of fell, running within the context of a particular locality gives rise to a shared passion that is distinctive to the field and confirms its identity. The data reported in this article reveal that the magic, memories, skills, frailties, dangers, pain and fun associated with the embodied practice of fell running permeate the body, and yield a profit which I have captured in the notion of existential capital. This mode of capital comprises visceral pleasures, corporeal resources and a novel form of sociality. An epistemological approach combining ‘corporeal’ (Crossley, 1995) and ‘lyrical’ (Abbott, 2007) sociologies informed the analysis and resulted in an interpretation of the field that focused on shared passions rather than ongoing struggles. Indeed, the notion of existential capital is proposed as a means of capturing the phenomenological gains that are understood by those who practise the sport. In so doing, this case study reveals that there is conceptual mileage in undertaking field analysis that examines what binds embodied agents, in order to complement exploration of social hierarchy and difference, and most especially to gain a better grasp of what is experienced as distinctive within a social field.