The Anthropology of Sport:

An Analysis of “long-distance running” as a Collaborative Process, from the Perspective of Movement Form Theory

Abstract

  Since the 20th century, long-distance running, such as marathons, has been the subject of scientific experiments to determine the limits of human endurance, changing the meaning of human running. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the human body has transformed the form of running, in collaboration with sports science and various technologies, through long-distance running as a sport. I especially focused on the process of making running shoes, such as “Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4%” and “Nike Air Zoom Alphafly Next%,” which Nike has released since 2017. In the making of running shoes, various actors, including athletes, scientists, experimental instruments, data, and the environment, collaborate with each other and generate an unknown running form. To understand the relationship between sports and technology, this paper suggests not a conceptual update for the human body, but rather a methodological one to analyze the hybridity of the sporting body.