Dirtbag Dreams: A History of Mountain, Ultra and Trail Running with Carl Morris (Sunday Conversation)

Singletrack

Finn Melanson

Sports, Wilderness, Ultramarathon, Sports News, Trail Running, Running, Ultra Running, News, Mountain Running, Ultrarunning

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2026

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Carl Morris, author of "Dirtbag Dreams: A History of Mountain, Ultra and Trail Running," joins the show to discuss the past, present, and future of our community. Partners: Precision Fuel and Hydration - use code SINGLETRACK at checkout for 15% off your next orderNorda - check out the 005: the lightest, fastest, most stable trail racing shoe ever madeRaide - Making equipment for efficient human-powered movement in the mountains Janji - premium trail running apparelMomentous - use code ...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back or welcome to the Single Trek podcast. I'm your host, Finn Melanson, and in this edition of our Sunday conversation, we are talking with Carl Morris, a sociologist, historian, and social psychologist over at the University of Lancashire. Carl is also a passionate fell, an ultra runner, who recently published a book. It's called Dirtbag Dreams,
0:21.3	and it traces the development of a mountain ultra and trail running in North America and the
0:25.7	United Kingdom over the past 200 years. It's a fantastic historical accounting of our world.
0:31.2	I really enjoyed it and figured it was worth reaching out to Carl for a conversation that you
0:35.9	would probably get a lot out of.
0:37.9	So that's the gist of it.
0:38.7	We spend about 90 minutes talking about pedestrianism, trans cons, early trail races like
0:44.7	Mount Wilson, Mount Baker, and the dipsy, the impact of the Kennedy administration on ultra-running,
0:51.3	how Western states influenced the modern era of our sport, and what to make
0:56.0	of what's happening today in order to get a sense for what the future might hold.
1:01.2	Carl Morris, it is a pleasure. It's an honor to have you on the single track podcast. How are you doing
1:06.5	today? I'm great, Finn. Yeah. How are you? I'm doing good.
1:11.6	It's 8 a.m. over here in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we have a relative newborn.
1:16.6	She's 20 months old, and I didn't sleep much last day, but I told you, I told you pre-recording.
1:20.6	I am so excited for this conversation, so I got a cup of coffee, and I'm locked in.
1:25.6	Great.
1:26.6	Okay. Okay. Coming into this book, and this kind of predates
1:32.6	the book, I mean, I've just always wondered like how, like, whether and how often the values of our
1:39.3	sport are changing. Yeah. And how often that has happened over the centuries, at least in the modern version of this sport.
1:46.4	And while we're trying to grapple with increased professionalism in our world today, it's
1:51.9	fascinating for me to learn that we've already been here before. This was the predominant system
1:57.5	in the sport in the second half of the 18th century. So I have a lot of questions
	...

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