Running with an ‘other’: landscape negotiation and inter-relationality in canicross

In this auto-ethnographic narration, I tell the story of learning to run with an ‘other’, my canine companion ‘A’. Together we have built a routine, a conjoined habitus, connected by equipmental prosthetics and a shared history of the landscapes we have traversed. In drawing on the experiences of our journey from beginners to amateur competitors through a series of ethnographic insights, I seek to highlight the importance of thinking about significant others in sport and leisure activities. The article highlights shifts in human and dog perception, behavior and attitude to running landscapes and concludes by arguing that, by being attentive to the influence and action of ‘others’ in sporting contexts, we are able to discover a plethora of new and exciting calibrations of how landscape negotiation takes place, and indeed, what it may mean in terms of troubling traditionally defined categorizations of sporting/leisure experience, presence and responsibility.