Being there in sport, exercise and health ethnography: reflections from the bouldering apprentice

This article explores what it means to be there in ethnographic research within sport, exercise and health contexts. Drawing upon an eighteen-month ethnography of a bouldering community, we conceptualise being there not merely as physical presence, but as a skilled and intentional approach to conducting ethnography. Through a somatic layered account centred on climbing shoes, we illuminate how corporeal immersion facilitates nuanced, reflexive understandings of subcultural practices, identities and sensory codes. In arguing for an embodied, sensuous and apprenticeship-based approach to fieldwork, we contrast our notion of being there with others forms of ethnography highlighting the epistemic depth offered by sensuous participation over more detached modalities. We caution against the increasing institutional and methodological drift toward convenience-driven approaches and instead advocate for purposeful, context-sensitive engagements with the field. In doing so, we reposition being there as a dynamic mode of knowing: active, emplaced and pedagogical. Ultimately, we call on qualitative researchers to prioritise the how rather than the how long of ethnographic presence and to revalue the sweaty, sticky and, at times, painful pursuit of becoming-with others in this form of inquiry.