“I want to understand why people have subjected themselves to feats of endurance that are so challenging and often gruellingly painful. I want to explore how the values and practices of the sport have changed – or not changed – over several centuries. I want to comprehend how the sport has been shaped by moments of social upheaval – such a suburbanisation in the 1950s, or the rise of digital media in the 2000s – and what it can tell us about who we are and the world that we live in. Perhaps most importantly, I want to understand the waxing and waning of the sport – and why participation has grown at very specific historical moments, including dramatic growth and associated commercialisation over the last decade or two.”
In this attractive, readable and balanced book, we find the history of just mountain, ultra and trail running, not a general history of running and running events, which means the author can relax into the subject and really go into the event organisers, events and participants in the sport in (mainly) the UK and US (with some European bits).
Carl Morris is an academic who works across sociology, sport, history, psychology and religion, and apparently also enjoys outdoor pursuits himself. The book wears his academic background lightly, but he also doesn’t insert his own experiences into it, leaving it as a careful history which traces these rugged running sports from the “pedestrianism” of the Victorian era through to the amazing achievements made by women in modern ultrarunning, now often coming first overall, as opposed to just winning the women’s races. All the big names are here, but runner Jasmin Paris and runner and race organiser Gary Cantrell (Lazarus Lake of the Barkley Marathons) are respectively given quite a lot of space.
We open with American ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter racing the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc in 2023 in an attempt to make American ultrarunning history, winning all the big races in one year. The Introduction also explains the choice of nomenclature for the subject / sub-heading of the book and how organisations and industry representatives came together in the 1990s to make sense of the diverse disciplines, which vary, but tend to attract the same or similar competitors. Morris also addresses here the privileged backgrounds of many people who participate, with the lack of diversity “engrained in complex social and cultural inequalities that are historically rooted” (p. 14), and mentions groups trying to change that like the Black Trail Runners. He includes this strand on diversity throughout the book, talking about individuals from the global majority communities who have experienced exclusion and injustice and the stereotyped views of various Mexican Indigenous groups who happen to do a lot of running and get picked up in the media and books from time to time.
Morris is good on the exclusion of women from long-distance running and their pushback against this and eventual triumphs, name-checking many of the early pioneers as well as the modern stars. He also explains the amateur-professional split very clearly and well, and the injustices that brought up for working-class fell runners who had once raced for a cash prize and then were excluded from most competitions. And he’s also clear on the role that the formation of the national parks in the UK and US had in the sport, going into the Kinder Scout Trespass and other activism. There are also detailed explanations of how various now well-known routes and races such as the Ice Age Trail developed, often with gaps in their history then restarting. There’s even a section featuring several other running books! This is all down to the book concentrating on just these aspects of running competition.
Part 1, Fragmented Origins, then looks at the early days of “extreme running”, as MUT running was almost called, with the exploits of pedestrianism, where participants basically walked or race-walked through amazing feats, codified eventually into record attempts, with six-day events common, then moving into walking the long trails that were opened up when particularly America set up its national parks. Meanwhile, in the UK, routes (rounds) around mountainous districts were also formalised with attempts to break records often including support from the current record-holder in a nice touch of the generosity you so often see in long distance and trail running. Part 2, The Running Revolution, covers more modern events, including the massive increase in both race and participant numbers. I was interested to see that the huge increase from the 2010s was largely caused by female and more recreational runners taking part, as I ran an ultramarathon in 2019 myself so must have been part of that.
Presumably as part of his academic training. Morris is very good at drawing parallels between the history of these sports and their current incarnation, noting that “many of those same emotional impulses – the fascination with witnessing personal struggle and humanity stripped back to raw existential emotion – can be found reverberating today” (p. 46) and that the old pastime of gathering at a stadium to watch people running repeated loops of a track has been somewhat replaced by “dot-watching” trackers on participants in challenges via our computers or phones.
The book ends on the conflicting attitudes that arise now in the sport – should it be very commercialised and expensive, with huge fields of participants or concentrated on a “ragtag mountain sport community” running alone, as it used to be? Morris finds room for both and also comments on the increasing internationalism and diversity of the sport, in this detailed and academically supported (the book is supported by black and white illustrated plates, endnoted references and a list of abbreviations) but readable and fascinating book.
Liz Dexter has done an ultramarathon – just the one – and enjoys a gentle trail run. She’s run several half and full marathons and can confirm that nothing has dropped out, as the doctors once predicted for any woman running at all. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Carl Morris – Dirtbag Dreams: A History of Mountain, Ultra and Trail Running (Manchester University Press, 2025) 978-1526190185, 295 pp., ill.
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