Finding Community and a Sense of Place through Recreational Distance Running

This oral history collection documents the experiences and perspectives of recreational distance runners of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels to amplify the sport’s role in place, identity, and community-building for its participants. The runners describe their early memories with running, future goals, and the groups that they run with, touching on themes of camaraderie, support, healthy lifestyles, reaching goals, and mental health. Overall, the collection emphasizes previous research on the more abstract benefits of running: that the sport, particularly in the group setting, accelerates not only personal health but self-actualization, expression, and social fulfillment.

This exhibit includes Interviews, with the full transcripts and sound recordings, Themes, of recurring topics from the interviews, and Resources, providing further access to the subjects mentioned within the interviews as well as local, regional, and national running outlets.

The 10 interviews comprising this collection were collected by Hannah Clark as part of the University of South Carolina Honors College thesis project, More than the Mileage: Finding Community and a Sense of Place through Recreational Distance Running.