Chapter 3 Fred Mason Covering Distance, Coming of Age, and Communicating Subculture David Carroll’s Young Adult Sports Novel Ultra

Ultrarunning and Its Literature

Ultrarunning refers to any running event over the marathon distance of 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometres). Races take place over set distances or times, with some events spanning multiple days. Typical race distances in ultrarunning are 50 kilometres, 50 miles, 100 kilometres, and 100 miles, with 200 miles a rare but increasingly popular distance. Some ultrarunning events are based on time instead of distance, with participants running on loop courses over a set period of time—usually twelve or twenty-four hours—aiming for the highest accumulated distance. Multi-day events see participants cover set distances each day, often in extreme environments such as deserts or mountain ranges.

The sport has been around since the early 1970s. Until the 1990s, it was considered quite fringe. Although it still seems extreme to many, the sport has seen real growth since the first decade of the 2000s. Ultrarunning magazine reported that there were only about 339 races in Canada and the United States in 2005 (Quicke 2017); by 2016, this had mushroomed to 1,473. A global study published in 2020 and sponsored by the International Association of Ultrarunners found that the number of yearly participations in ultramarathons increased 345 percent since 2010, with 611,098 people recording a finish at an ultrarunning event over that ten-year period (Ronto 2020). This data does not capture smaller, local or informal “Fat Ass” style events—less organized events in which the athletes are self-supported—that do not publish results to the web.

Magazines such as Ultrarunning (published monthly since 1981) and Marathon & Beyond (published between 1997 and 2015) began printing race results, reporting on current events and personalities in the sport, and publishing stories from ultrarunners themselves mainly because the sport did not receive much coverage in the mainstream press, or even other running-specific media. In my research, I have only been able to find thirteen book-length works about the sport published between 1979 and 2001. This included a guide to the sport (Osler and Dodd 1979), David Horton’s diary of record-setting runs on the Appalachian Trail and across the United States (Horton and Trittipoe 1997), stories of runners trekking or racing across Death Valley (Benyo 1991; Johnson 2001), and a musing on running and evolution from anthropologist and champion ultrarunner Bernd Heinrich (2001). The growth in ultrarunning’s popularity since the early 2000s runs parallel to a growth in popular literature related to the sport over the same period. Dean Karnazes, an elite ultrarunner with a self-promotional streak (leading him, for example, to run on a treadmill suspended over Times Square) wrote his first book, Ultramarathon Man, in 2005; it became a bestseller. After this, there was a surge in autobiographies and memoirs written by ultrarunners, from the elite to the back-of-the-pack (e.g., Ayres 2012; Reed 2006; Zahab 2007). Journalist Christopher McDougall’s 2009 book Born to Run told the story of a trip to Copper Canyon in Mexico, where elite American runners raced with the Tarahumara, an Indigenous group who incorporate ultrarunning-length feats into their religious rituals and who travel by foot (although not necessarily in the ways described by or with the frequency claimed in popular media about them; see Plymire 2006). McDougall’s book stayed at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller lists for fifteen weeks, greatly increasing popular attention to the sport of ultrarunning and serving as a catalyst for the rise of the minimalist running shoe industry. The publishing surge continued: in 2012 alone, as many books on ultrarunning were published as there were in the entire period between 1979 and 2001.

While there are many ultrarunner memoirs, few books target young adults or children. There are four English-language, nonfiction titles aimed at grade school readers, all of which attempt to introduce the sport in different ways. Nate Aaseng’s book Ultramarathons: The World’s Most Punishing Races (1987) provides an overview of eight different races and their inherent challenges, including the Rarahipa, the traditional Tarahumara race featured in McDougall’s Born to Run. Chris Hayhurst’s simply titled book Ultra Marathon Running (2002) serves mostly as a guide to training and participation. Jim Whiting’s Ultra Running with Scott Jurek (2007) explores the sport through the career of Jurek, the elite runner who would later become the star of McDougall’s Born to Run and go on to pen his own memoirs (Jurek 2012, 2018). Running to Extremes: Ray Zahab’s Amazing Ultramarathon Journey (Pitt and Zahab 2011)—also a Canadian grade school nonfiction book, though it is more substantial than the others—explores the early years of Zahab’s transition into ultramarathon running, including racing in the Amazon and across multiple deserts. This book was released to coincide with the launch of youth educational expeditions led by Zahab through his organization Impossible2Possible.

Ultrarunning-related fiction, particularly fiction geared toward young readers, is rarer than nonfiction. The only ultrarunning-related fiction aimed at adults are a survival novel where the ultrarunner uses his abilities to attempt to find help for his family after a plane crash in northern Québec (Essinger 2017) and a postapocalyptic novel in which a group runs from Edinburgh to southern England after a meteorite shower destroys much of the country (Walker 2016). In 2011, Puffin Canada—the publisher that released Pitt and Zahab’s Running to Extremes in the same year—published Just Deserts, a novel by prolific young-adult-fiction writer Eric Walters, written in collaboration with Ray Zahab. The novel features a teen protagonist forced into a desert-crossing trek that becomes a life-changing experience. Walters based the story on his experience of getting lost while on a desert expedition with Zahab. Although Puffin Canada marketed Just Deserts as being connected to Running to Extremes, the latter book specifically focuses on Zahab’s ultramarathon career while the former focuses on an expedition, not on ultrarunning as such. As a piece of fiction that focuses on ultrarunning and that is aimed at young adults, Carroll’s novel Ultra is unique.

Young Adult Sports Novels, the Coming-of-Age Story, and Ultra

Historically, and even today, proponents of youth sport argue that sport teaches young people things like fair play and sportsmanship, and that it contributes to overall character development (Mangan 2000, Messner 2009). Young adult sports novels began to appear in the late 1800s, and for decades they generally mirrored these positive assumptions and depictions of sport (Sherrill 1984). Into the 1950s, young adult sports novels focused on the action on the field rather than the characters’ lives off the field (Crowe 2011), and they typically featured a young, male hero whose unwavering strength of character helped him achieve success in his sport and overcome any challenges from people who wanted to ruin the sanctity of that sport (Oriard 1982). Chip Hilton, the main character of an eponymous book series by Clair Bee from the 1940s and 1950s, is an example of such a hero. He listens to coaches and rises above politics and the influence of gamblers to achieve glory on the field, which readers vicariously experience (Gildea 2013; Sherill 1984). Broader social issues such as race and social class crept into young adult sports novels in the 1950s and 1960s, but the way authors portrayed the hero was much the same (Blair 2009; Sherill 1984). The terrain shifted in the 1970s. Writing specifically about baseball novels for young adults (but with insights applicable to young adult sports novels more broadly), Cheré Blair notes that books of this period are “marked by concerns we associate with adolescence itself,” which include “constructions of identity and the search for self, awakenings and discovery . . . questions of authority and individual autonomy, preoccupations with the body, and unique and even symbiotic relationships to pop culture and the larger cultural landscape” (2009, 191). In other words, rather than focusing on sports action, many young adult novels began to make sport the backdrop to broader issues (Schneider 2011), with most sports novels mapping onto themes already popular in young adult literature more generally, specifically the tropes of the coming-of-age story (Crowe 2011). Indeed, Pamela Carroll and Steven Chandler (2001) suggest that coming of age has been the prevailing theme in young adult sports novels ever since. Ultra certainly falls into this category.

The coming of age for Ultra’s main character Quinn Scheurmann occurs over twenty-four hours during which he runs, and ultimately wins, the fictional Shin-Kicker 100 race. The novel is structured as an interview between Quinn and television host Sydney Watson Walters. This interview format allows for a first-person narrative around the experience of the race while also dipping into other aspects of Quinn’s life in flashbacks. Mileage is signposted in most chapter titles so that readers can keep track of distance gone and remaining in the race narrative. Major events during the race constitute the chapters, including challenges faced at different times, conversations with other racers, interactions with family and volunteers at aid stations, and Quinn’s hallucinations, which help him work through the relationship troubles, developmental crises, and grief at the centre of this coming-of-age story. Quinn’s support crew plays an important role in helping Quinn through both the race and his personal troubles. Thanks to a cellphone he got from his best friend Kneecap (whose real name is never mentioned), Quinn can talk to her, his brother Ollie, and his mother throughout the race. Early on, Kneecap joins Quinn on the racecourse and walks up a mountain with him. They discuss how he’s been depressed, a “fun vampire,” for the last few months (59–66). Over the phone, Quinn tells his brother that since he does not have a pacer—someone who accompanies ultrarunners to offer encouragement and ensure they stay on course—Ollie must tell him jokes and keep up his spirits. At the end, after a storm blows away most of the trail markers, Quinn’s cellphone connection is what allows him to complete the race, with his family and friend coaching him to use the phone’s GPS to navigate to the finish line.

The major life crisis that Quinn needs to deal with in his coming of age is the absence of his father, Tom Scheurmann. Tom is a soldier who has been serving in Afghanistan on his third tour. Through most of the book, this absence and the “long shadow” (a chapter title late in the novel) that it casts over Quinn’s life explain Quinn’s withdrawal from friends and his strained relationship with his mother. Tom had a strong influence on Quinn’s decision to take up running, and he is extremely well-loved by the ultrarunning community. He is described as a big guy, muscular, two hundred pounds, and five-foot-eleven—someone who “didn’t look like your typical runner” (13). He is also known as a legendary pacer, not least because he is such a good storyteller. Some of Quinn’s flashbacks show us as much, with Tom describing psychological “trail demons” and telling far-fetched stories as they run and hike together. As race director Bruce puts it, “we always had a good time when he was around” (47).

Quinn and his father had both registered for the race and were supposed to run it together, but when race day arrives, Tom is not there. Late in the race, however, at a remote aid station eighty-three miles and twenty hours into the race, Quinn has a conversation with his father, apparently in person. Tom says he took a late flight home from Afghanistan to be at the race. The conversation is surreal, and Quinn thinks, “You really can’t be here . . . It’s not possible” (137). Quinn’s father offers him advice, but nothing more. It is a volunteer, not Tom, who fixes Quinn’s feet and feeds him. While it’s foreshadowed throughout the novel, it’s only at mile ninety-seven, when Quinn is visiting a trail-side shrine, that we learn Tom was killed in Afghanistan.

In a call with Ollie, Quinn says he cannot finish the race because it hurts too much, and Ollie asks if it hurts “as much as we hurt when Daddy died” (166). At the end of the race, Quinn and his mother have a cathartic argument and collective cry, both about her letting Quinn run the race and about her letting his father go back to Afghanistan. Quinn regrets not having said goodbye to his father, but his mother comforts him, saying, “That’s alright . . . you’re doing it now” (189). Thus, the coming of age in the novel centers around dealing with grief and loss, and the use of sport to process and overcome them. Quinn honours his father’s memory in running the race and unintentionally shares in the local ultrarunning community’s collective grief.

Dead fathers are frequent plot devices in young adult sports novels. In her study of young adult baseball novels, Blair argues that “‘[g]ood’ dads die in the baseball novels of YA lit, and their sons are left with memories of catch” (2009, 207), or in Quinn’s case, memories of running with his father. Common plot device or not, there are certainly ultrarunners who use the sport as a means of coping with all sorts of issues in their lives, including grief (Johnson 2001), addictions (Corbett and England 2018; Engle 2016), and mental health issues (Reese 2021), or as a means to “reset” or manage an otherwise busy life (Whalley 2012). The idea of a race as a journey—an experience that changes the runner—is often voiced in ultrarunning, even by runners repeating a race they have finished before. This idea lines up with research and writing around ultrarunning that discusses spiritual experiences and feelings of being connected to some divine unity through the effortful trek through natural environments (Atkinson 2012; Jones 2005).

Carroll alludes to this kind of experience early in the book when Bruce, the race director, gives the runners instructions at the starting line: “Two minutes from now, you’ll cross this line. And in roughly twenty-four hours, if you’re lucky, you’ll cross it again, only by then you’ll be a totally different person” (5). At another point, another runner, Kara, refers to running in nature as her church, a form of worship (26). Quinn experiences something similar. His race serves as a journey, almost a pilgrimage, that helps him work through his loss and pain by supplanting it with a strenuous physical challenge. As his father tells him in their hallucinated conversation at mile eighty-three, Quinn is journeying down a dark hallway, at the end of which new doors will open (142). He will finish his race, but he will also be able to move on in life.

Representing the Sport of Ultrarunning

In discussing what makes a good sports novel, Horn Book Magazine editor Dean Schneider suggest that “[f]ew sports novels are only about sports; if they are any good, they’re about lots of things in life—family, friends, the street, jock culture, and the like.” He goes on to assert that books that miss the boat have “too much mental drama, not enough play-by-play; nonstop action but weak characterization; or sports lingo misused, revealing a writer who doesn’t really know the game” (2011, 68). Schneider makes the case that the writer of young adult sports fiction needs to find a balance between storytelling and characterization on the one hand and including sports-related action in an accurate way on the other. This appears to be exactly Carroll’s goal in writing Ultra. In his author’s note, Carroll describes how the novel was inspired by his nieces and nephews asking him what ultrarunning was like. Initially, he felt he did not give them very good answers, so he made a point of becoming a better storyteller of his experiences. At the same time, he devoted himself to providing a realistic portrayal of the sport, including the human experience of it and the many unusual aspects of the sport and its subculture. As the stories grew, they became the novel.

Carroll does not shy away from portraying the physical challenge of ultrarunning events and the punishment inflicted on runners’ bodies and minds. As Kara, an elite athlete in the novel who runs much of the race with Quinn, says, “[W]e’re running a hundred miles. Something always hurts” (127). At mile sixty-seven, Quinn describes the pain in his feet as feeling “like I was running on thumbtacks—thumbtacks dipped in acid. It felt like the soles of my feet had been shaved off with a rusty chisel” (128). At the mile eighty-three aid station, a volunteer pops his blisters and seals them with Krazy Glue. Earlier at mile twenty-nine, low on water due to a leaky hydration bladder, Quinn “bonks.” He experiences a loss of time: miles go by in a blip, without his awareness. He has hallucinations quite frequently during the race, and they often serve as a means of advancing the coming-of-age crisis. At one point, Quinn has a conversation with the wind in which it asks him to find his shadow. The wind deposits a pair of camouflage combat pants (his father’s) in front of him, and he later hallucinates that a bear is wearing them. Late in the night, Quinn thinks he has walked out on a broken railway trellis, and from there takes a ride on a singing whale (something associated with one of his father’s stories). He wakes up to find himself on the abandoned railway track at the trail’s edge. And of course, Quinn hallucinates the conversation with his father at the mile eighty-three aid station. Hallucinations are quite common for ultrarunners, especially in the night (Johnson 2001; McDougall 2009), to the point of being something anticipated in races of one hundred miles or more, and later discussed with humour. Carroll attempts to explain the frequency of hallucinations and the somewhat nonchalant attitude to them in a flashback sequence with Quinn’s father. Tom suggests that hallucinations amount to “trail demons” constructed by your mind to get your body to stop when it can, in fact, still keep going (40–41).

Given the pain and suffering described, it may seem ridiculous to have a thirteen-year-old running a hundred-mile race. One competitor in the novel does question whether someone as young as Quinn should run the Shin-Kicker 100, but race director Bruce brushes this concern aside, pointing out who Quinn’s father is and implying that Tom’s experience and respected status is enough to vouch for Quinn’s ability. Robert Lipsyte (2014), some of whose work is considered classic young adult sport literature, offers the criticism that modern sports novels need to deal with player health and moral and ethical questions around sport. Carroll sidesteps this criticism somewhat by giving Quinn what he calls “his superpowers” throughout the novel. In a flashback, we learn that after running a surprisingly long distance with his father at the age of eight, Quinn was tested in a physiology lab. They found that he had a larger-than-average heart and that his body produced very little lactic acid, so he could run almost to exhaustion without feeling any “burn.” This may seem unrealistic, but it has a basis in the literature. Ray Zahab, for example, wrote about having almost no lactate threshold in his 2007 book and media reports on him frequently talk about this surprising aspect of his physiology. So even Quinn’s “superpowers” are physiological possibilities known within the sport, which Carroll borrows for his own purposes.

In addition to capturing the prevalent sense of the “journey” experience in ultrarunning, and the willing acceptance of pain and distress by its participants, Carroll’s novel displays some of the unique demographic aspects of ultrarunning related to age and gender. For example, a fair number of the supporting and side characters competing in the race are older than some might expect for those participating in extreme athletic endeavors. At the beginning of the race, Quinn runs with a group of grey-haired men who discuss their bowel movements (which is a frequent topic of conversation in the ultrarunning community). At mile thirty-eight, Quinn meets a runner named Kern Gregory, whom he perceives to be the age of a grandpa. Kern confirms his age when the pair discuss Kara, who looks to be in her forties; Kern says she’s young enough to be a girl to him. A recurring character who Quinn calls “the Dirt Eater” because the back of his shirt reads “Eat my dirt” is also described as an older man with gray, wispy hair. Elite ultrarunners often tend to be in their thirties or forties. Demographic analysis shows that the average ultrarunner, elite or not, is in their forties, and that they tend not to lose much in pace as they age (Ronto 2020). There is a well-worn mythos in the sport that the younger runners are not yet tough enough to be successful. Only in recent years, as the sport has become more popular and commercialized, have elite runners in their twenties risen to prominence in the sport (David and Leheka 2013).

Carroll’s choice to place Kara among the elite runners also accurately reflects a gender-related trend in the sport. In conversation with Quinn, Kara reveals she was the outright winner of the race the previous year. In Quinn’s race, Kara ultimately places second despite getting lost and running extra miles at different times. While only making up a small number of the overall participants in ultrarunning, women tend to perform well relative to the overall field, and it is common for women to win major hundred-mile races outright (Harris 2012; McDougall 2009; Reed 2006). At distances of two hundred kilometers and above (admittedly, a small number of races), women consistently and collectively outperform men (Ronto 2020). Having a woman character contending to win the race might seem odd to the uninitiated, but it is an accepted part of the sport. In my own experience, male ultrarunners are much less worried about “getting beaten by a woman” than men running shorter distances, likely because it happens so often.

Carroll also includes many scenes and sections of dialogue that depict the deep levels of social support among ultrarunners, showing the sense of community that exists in the sport across typical social boundaries of age and gender, and how it enables runners to get through the physical challenges of the race. Quinn describes the scene at one large aid station to Sydney Watson Walters, the television host, and emphasizes the amazing volunteers. The aid station features pounding music, dozens of people cheering for the runners, all kinds of food, and volunteers checking on the runners to see if they are okay and if they need anything. Quinn later talks about all the gross things volunteers cheerfully put up with from sometimes cranky runners, including sweat, vomit, blood, blisters, and all kinds of other body fluids. Many times in the novel, characters help each other, even when they are among the leaders. For instance, Kara runs with Quinn frequently during the race, engaging in friendly conversation and offering advice that helps Quinn overcome problems. Near the end, Quinn finds Kara disoriented, and they walk-run together to the finish. Kern Gregory also offers crucial assistance to Quinn during the race. When Quinn runs out of water at mile twenty-nine and bonks, Kern offers him his water and helps him refill his supply using the water purifier in his pack. Kern then runs with Quinn for an hour and a half, until they get to the next aid station, so that he can keep an eye on him. Qualitative and ethnographic research studies point to this sense of community as something that continues to draw runners back to these races again and again, despite the pain and suffering (David and Leheka 2013; Harris 2012; Quicke 2017). As someone who participates in the sport myself, I have personally seen injured runners show up to volunteer or crew for people when they would rather be running; pacers run over the marathon distance to keep their runners going, with no individual reward for themselves; and runners sacrifice personal goals to stick with and help someone else finish. I have even seen runners sacrifice their race, for which they had likely trained for months, to assist others or ensure that someone in trouble gets safely out of a wilderness environment. Carroll gives an accurate depiction of how ultrarunners see themselves as a community.

While Carroll follows the genre conventions of young adult sports novels in providing a standard coming-of-age story, including the trope of the dead father, his focus on the sport of ultrarunning is something new for the genre. While ultrarunning is growing in terms of the number of races and participants, there is little media about it, and it is still generally seen as a fringe sport. By writing an engaging young adult novel, Carroll likely does more to promote interest in the sport among young readers than earlier writers of overviews or how-to guides. The novel’s strength lies in Carroll’s insider perspective from running many such races himself, which he uses to render for young people a realistic picture of the sport and its subculture, including the acceptance of pain, the journey and its spiritual elements, the social support, and the community, all of which combine to bring people back to the sport on an ongoing basis, despite its extremes. Although it is a somewhat generic coming-of-age story, Ultra gives readers a realistic picture of what goes into this lesser-known sport of ultrarunning, and what the athletes get out of it.

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