Current project: My Last Race

Unlike the Big Running project, which focused on runners themselves, my current study focuses on races.

Some of the questions it address are: Why are races so popular and what makes some races more successful than others? What impact do races have on the environment and economy? What role does race participation have in projecting our identities?

This project will centre on a large scale survey, with supplementary email interviews with a subset of respondents.

Piloting is now underway, with the main data collection phase planned to start during 2020.

Last project: Big Running Project (2016-2019)

This project was conducted at the University of Warwick, with the support of Professor Nickie Charles and Doctor Richard Lampard.

The goals of the study were:

• To describe and map the diversity of ways of doing running in the UK;
• To identify the individual and social factors that influence whether and how people engage in forms of running;
• To explore the roles running can play in people’s lives as a source of identity.

The centrepiece of the study was an online survey, which included 140 questions about running practices and motivations, demographics and other personal information. Thanks to the generosity of the running community, I managed to achieve a sample size of 2,700 respondents.

In order to try to understand how the patterns observed in the data played out or had meaning in people’s lives I also conducted twenty in-depth interviews with a wide variety of runners from across the country.

You can find out more and access key findings here.