Running, my Garmin and me

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami, suggests that running ‘makes for a lot of good memories’ (2009: 178). For me, running is about keeping fit, challenging myself to go longer, and be stronger and faster. When I run, I am totally immersed in maintaining a set pace, conquering terrain and everything demanded of a runner’s body. So how do I remember my runs? If I am so focused on the act of running, where do I retrieve the memories from?

In this presentation, I explore the relationship between the embodied experience of running and its recollection through data. These data are fed from my body into a Garmin sports watch and displayed in a smartphone app in a cyclical process, where data reawakens, challenges and reinforces memories that may otherwise exist only within the human body. In reflecting on my running and the data it generates, I consider whether I am ‘offloading […] phenomenology onto technology (Dyens 2012: 77) and explore whether humans have become dependent on machines to engage with the world.