My name is Janet. I’m an Applied Philosophy PhD student at the University of Waterloo. I’m an advocate for people with addiction. And I’m a runner.
Running doesn’t quite fit in with the other descriptors. When I meet new people, I get asked about what I do, where I’m from, or what I hope to do after I graduate. Running, by comparison, is something I only talk about with people who know me more personally. Friends and family are the only ones that know, for example, that I got ‘serious’ about running this past year.
Running as a hobby
If professional runners get paid to run and amateur runners pay to run (read: compete), then running is only a hobby for me. I run because I want to, not because I have to. This aligns with how Hannah Arendt describes hobbies in The Human Condition:
Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of ‘making a living’; such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly … The same trend to level down all serious activities to the status of making a living is manifest in present-day labor theories, which almost unanimously define labour as the opposite of play. As a result, all serious activities, irrespective of their fruits, are called labor, and every activity which is not necessary either for the life of the individual or for the life process of society is subsumed under playfulness … not even the ‘work’ of the artist is left; it is dissolved into play and has lost its worldly meaning … From the standpoint of ‘making a living,’ every activity unconnected with labor becomes a ‘hobby’ (pp. 126-128).
Arendt describes hobbies in tracing how the logic of labour bleeds into every aspect of human experience. On Arendt’s account, running is a hobby for me because running doesn’t satisfy the needs of life for me nor the needs of the life process in society (see FN 65 on p. 118 of The Human Condition). I don’t think I’ll ever become a runner, in the sense that running will be my profession. It is something I do for fun, for play.
Yet, there are other reasons to consider myself a runner. And those reasons boil down to my membership in certain running communities.
Running with a purpose
In a previous post, I discussed how my interest in running led to me becoming a vegetarian. I want to extend that thought a bit. Running itself didn’t enlarge my mentality, as Arendt might put it; rather, the community of runners I have found did.
There are many running communities. Some focus on form and speed, others on distance and terrain. Still others talk about running in order to talk about a larger issue.
Take, for example, Fiona Oakes. She’s a vegan ultrarunner who runs with a purpose: to prove that people don’t need animal protein to be a ‘serious athlete.’ And a serious athlete she is. Fiona holds four world records, including the record for being the fastest female to run a marathon on each continent (aggregate time 23hrs 27mins 40seconds). Fiona also ‘runs’ (get it?) Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary in the small village of Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex, England. She has housed hundreds and hundreds of different animals at her place, doing most of the physical labor herself. According to Fiona, that’s her day job.
Due to a health problem in her adolescence, Fiona runs with only one kneecap. She was told she would never be able to run. Yet, she runs anyway. In fact, when she isn’t working with the animals, she runs (ultra) marathons, in all sorts of wild settings, “to promote an ethical vegan lifestyle and to raise awareness of her Sanctuary.” In the documentary, “Running for Good,” Fiona constantly says, “I do it for the animals.” Imagining their pain and suffering, she tells the viewer, gets her through the pain and suffering of running a couple hundred kilometers in a hot desert (or anywhere really in the world, it seems).
A worldly hobby
Arendt might call Fiona’s running a hobby. Fiona clearly isn’t running because her body demands it; but Fiona’s running doesn’t have to be merely a hobby, especially considering that she does it with a political purpose in mind. But Arendt might want to call it labour because it doesn’t fit in with the other categories of life’s activities.
Arendt’s political theories are rooted in the distinction she makes between labor, work, and action. All of these are human activities, and each serves a particular purpose. Labor refers to those things we do for our physical survival, like eating. Work refers to those things we do or make that contribute to the world, like building homes (or making a documentary about running). Action is political. We act, according to Arendt, when we are with others and we pursue some political objective together. In action, speech is important: what we say, how and with whom we say it, can all transform simple words into Arendtian action.
Fiona’s running doesn’t neatly fit into any one of these categories because it seems to combine the categories. For example, her running is a political statement. That she showcases the grueling effort of competing in an ultra endurance event and likens it to the suffering experienced by animals on a truck slated for the slaughterhouse elevates Fiona’s running into something more than just a hobby. Running, for Fiona, isn’t world-less. Running actually gives her a platform into the public realm, a way of talking about and acting (in the Arendtian sense) for the sake of animals.
Native Women Running
Another case to consider is Verna Volker, the founder of Native Women Running. Verna started her running career as a way to lose weight. She’s a mother of four (three when she started running) and running was a way to de-stress.
The beginning of her running career makes it seem like Verna’s running is only a hobby. But it isn’t. She continues to runs because she wants to show the world that not all women and female presenting runners have to look a certain way, “[often] white, thin, often blond, and with flawless skin.” As Verna puts it,
“When I started running, I noticed there was a running community on social media … Runners would post about their running journey through Instagram. One day, when I was scrolling through Instagram, I noticed the lack of visibility of native and indigenous runners. I started doing research on other running-related outlets like running organizations, running industry, running magazines, and so on. I was frustrated with the lack of representation of native and indigenous runners.”
So she changed that. Verna founded Native Women Running, “to encourage and feature Native women runners in the running community on and off the reservation.” To date, she’s helped organize numerous events, including The National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) Virtual Run and the Hoka One One and Project Carbon X2.
Building community
So, Verna runs like Fiona; they’re both professional athletes. But they also use their running to act politically. So, do they run to be free in the Arendtian sense? Or do they run because they’re free to run? After all, not everyone is free (read: fortunate) enough to be able to pursue such a demanding profession.
The value of action, for Arendt, is tied to its origins in plurality. Something counts as action if it is the product of diverse people talking about something and collaborating to make it happen. Native Women Running primarily focuses on creating a safe space for Indigenous women – so, it might not count as Arendtian action even though increasing the visibility of Indigenous women could ultimately lead to more Arendtian action. But I argue otherwise. Verna doesn’t work alone to make Native Women Running successful. She’s got a community with her, even as she tries to grow another, larger one.
Running with Arendt
Sometimes private hobbies can connect us to the public world.
As Bill T. Jones articulates in an Arendt reading group, we need to contextualize Arendt’s writings for today’s world. We can’t relegate hobbies as merely a source of physical pleasure. Many activities we consider a hobby today were once activities forced upon those deemed ‘unworthy’ of freedom. That we have transformed these activities into activities of pleasure is no excuse to forget that.
Indeed, for some folks, hobbies can retain an emphasis on the private. As Verna tells us, to this day, she still finds herself
“in tears [on a long run] because of tragedy that I’ve experienced, losing a lot of loved ones in my life. … Maybe I’m still grieving for that. Maybe I’m still healing from that. And that story is pretty common in Native Women Running—people running for their son or their husband who passed, or running for their aunt or someone who was missing or murdered.”
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Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash