Negotiating the weather in recreational running: understanding strategies and response to inform public health

This project uses recreational running as an opportunity to deepen knowledge of how exercise practices
respond to different weather conditions. Investigating this in London where access to perceived 'healthy'
environments (clean air, greenspace) can be harder to come by, it will explore how weather is
experienced and managed, and what this means for where, when and how people run in increasingly
urban societies. This is particularly important in respect to climate change where it is thought changing
conditions may influence outdoor activity patterns. Though recreational running is the fastest growing
form of exercise in countries like the UK, little is known about how running practices evolve in response
to weather.
Weather experience in everyday life is still under-researched in geography despite deep-rooted
disciplinary interest in nature-society interactions. Although exercise researchers have begun to
emphasise the beneficial effects of environmental features such as greenery, they have frequently
downplayed the influence of others such as temperature, rainfall, humidity and air. In public health, given
focus on removing barriers to exercise participation, it is also curious that weather and seasons which
clearly influence people exercising, and continuing to do so, remains similarly little explored. This project
seeks to address these issues integrating survey and ethnographic approaches to track a sample of
recreational runners as their running responds to the changing weather of one year.
In doing so, this project will provide vital knowledge of how to encourage exercise practices to develop in
positive and resilient ways as urban societies evolve under climate change.