A Story About Running, A Lot

By Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

January is when the gyms overflow with all those new year’s resolution people. For the past few years I’ve been doing this self-challenge of walking kilometres to match the year. In other words, in 2014, I’ll be walking 2,014 kms. This works out to about 5.1 kms a day, which isn’t overwhelming, but the key is consistency. Many of those kilometres are done on my tread desk as I write. I post my progress as Facebook updates and started a Facebook group called Walking 2014km in 2014. Most years, a lot of people join in for the challenge in January but have mostly dropped out by February. This year we had a record number of people keep on walking right to the end, although only two made it to 2013 kms – me – and Johanna Bertin. This amazing woman lives in New Brunswick and she blew through 2013 kms within months. By the end of the year she had walked the equivalent of 2457 kms, bicycled 526 kms and lost 25 pounds. In 2014 she’s setting herself a biking goal and a walking goal. I’m still plodding along at 5.1 kms a day.

I told Johanna that she should read Ultra, by David Carroll (Scholastic Canada). She did, and found it inspiring.

Ultra is a novel about a kid who runs a 100 mile long ultra-marathon – it means running for 24 hours straight. This mind-boggling feat is not pure fantasy. The author, David Carroll, is an ultra-marathoner himself and has run more than one 100 mile race.

Had Ultra just been about a kid who runs in a long race, it would have been a one trick pony, but it’s more than that. The book is an approachable and funny story that will appeal to boys, sports nuts and others who wouldn’t normally pick up a book, but there is enough nuance for even the most seasoned book lover. And the story packs an unexpected emotional wallop. I’m still thinking about it.

David Carroll kindly agreed to answer some questions.

You are an ultra-marathoner. Are you nuts? How did this come about?

The marathon was my gateway drug.  After I ran my first one, I felt so good, I decided to run the extra 5 kms to get home.  On the way, I decided to take a detour through High Park in Toronto.  By the time I got home I’d logged 55 kms or so, which put me into ultra-marathon territory.  It made me wonder: how far can my body go?

The bigger leap came a couple of years later, when a woman named Nancy Thomson took me running on mountain trails in the Yukon. Nancy founded the Yukon Gold Ultra Race and she led me along narrow footpaths atop terrifying bluffs – at terrifying speeds. We ran over a mountain she called “Dick Cheney Hill” (so named because it was incredibly evil and painful). I’d always thought it was dangerous to run on uneven ground, but Nancy taught me about proprioception… the mind’s ability to read the landscape, and send millions of messages to all the teeny tiny muscles in the feet and around the ankles…  It’s actually healthier to run on trails, rather than on undemanding flat pavement, which allows many of your muscles to atrophy from disuse.

In any event, Nancy got me hooked on trail running, and in ultras.  The “Kara” character in the book is based on her.

Had you considered writing this as adult fiction?

No, Ultra was always a story for kids.  The seed of the book was planted back in 2008, when I was training for my first 100-miler.  I would disappear into the forest for six or eight or even ten hour training runs. My nephew Quinn thought this was insane, and he peppered me with all sorts of questions. I’d tell him about the bears and wolves and coyotes I ran into, and the nasty weather I sloshed through, and the weird hallucinations I experienced. After a while, I wrote the stories down, and turned them into a little book. I have forty-odd nieces and nephews, and I thought I’d give them the book as a Christmas present. It was supposed to be a short story, maybe twenty pages.  But it grew and grew, and at a certain point I thought: why not try to get this published for real?

How much of Quinn (the main character) is in you?

I share Quinn’s determination. Once I get an idea into my head, I’ll stick with it, no matter how much it hurts. That’s why I can run 100 miles in one go. Also, I love being outside, and I’m okay with being alone sometimes. I’m a bit of an introvert, and I think Quinn is too.

Also, like Quinn, I was a bit of an outsider when I was young. I had terrible hand-eye coordination, and I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life. I always got picked last for sports teams, so I dropped gym class at the first opportunity. If you’d told me back then that one day I’d be running 100 mile races, I’d have chucked an Adidas bag at your head!

You did a really nice job with the secondary characters, in particular, The Dirt Eater. Which one was the most difficult to write? Why?

I’m so glad you liked the Dirt Eater, because he was the hardest one to write. Originally, the book didn’t even have a villain. The villain was the trail itself, and all of those awful “surprises” that rise up in Quinn’s path. At some point my agent (the brilliant Scott Waxman in NYC) gave the manuscript to his kids to read. They thought a bad guy would help ratchet up the tension. Good call.

The media interview as a framing device was an interesting choice. Can you tell me how that came about?

I had a problem with this book. Namely, my main character had been traumatized, but he wasn’t able to talk about his trauma. He wasn’t going to reveal his secrets voluntarily, so I needed some way to extract that information. Putting him on a live TV show, facing an Oprah-like character helped with that.

The interview format also solved another problem. It saved me from the fact that “running talk” is brutally boring! When we runners get together, we talk endlessly about lactate threshold, Vh2 max, shoes, tempo runs, intervals, negative splits, carbo-loading, blah blah blah. Oh my God, it’s appalling. And yet, I needed to get inject some of that information into the book. The interviewer helped me to tease that information out of Quinn without slowing the action down too much.

Finally, putting Quinn on TV helped amplify his fame, and underlined the sense that he’d done something truly extraordinary.

What’s been the response of readers? Parents? Alarmists?

Shockingly positive!  I expected some blowback to the idea of a kid running 100 miles. After all, it’s an extreme activity. Running three or four times a week is an excellent lifestyle choice.  Running for twenty-four hours straight through a bear-infested forest? Not so much.

I took great pains not to glamorize the sport. This wasn’t hard, since there’s little glamour attached to the sport in the first place. The reality is, the average ultra-runner goes at an average speed of four, maybe four-and-a-half miles per hour. So it’s not about running fast, it’s simply about enduring.

What I’ve come to learn is that there are kids who are interested in and capable of doing these kinds of epic endurance events. Twelve-year-old Tyler Heggie ran the length of Prince Edward Island – from tip to tip – over eight days this past summer. A couple of summers ago, Annalese Carr became the youngest person ever to swim across Lake Ontario.  I’ve run fifty-milers alongside sixteen-year-olds before. So it’s not like kids are incapable of these sorts of events.

Still, I always tell people – this sport is NOT for everyone. But if you’ve done the necessary training, and if you’ve got the approval of your family doctor and the support of your family, and most of all, if you really love running, then yeah, you might want to think about trying an ultra.  There truly is nothing as beautiful as running through a forest all night long. But no way would I ever push anyone to do it.

What aspect of being a writer drives you nuts?

Coming up with names for my characters.  I’m endlessly changing them.  They never feel right.

What is your writing routine? How long did it take you to write Ultra?

I spent four years on Ultra.  I wrote the first draft in a month-long fevered dream back in 2008.  Then I re-wrote it thirteen times. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever done, a hundred times harder than running 100 miles.

I have a full time writing/producing gig at the CBC, so I usually write 2 hours in the pre-dawn hours, then another 2 hours at night. I also try to write one full day every weekend. No, I don’t have a social life and yes, it’s a bit of a problem. On the bright side, I run sixty miles a week. I come up with a lot of good dialogue on the trail.

What are you working on now?

A middle grade novel about a fourteen-year-old boy who loves mountain biking, but is slowly losing his vision to a degenerative disease called Stargardt’s. I know – bummer. Until, on summer holiday, he finds a secret place in the mountains where time doesn’t pass, which means he can stave off the progression of the disease. So there’s magic involved. But in order to hold time hostage, he must sacrifice his friendships. So he has to choose between his vision and his social relationships. Hooboy!

What message do you hope a reader gets from Ultra?

Two things. First, I hope they’ll just have fun with it because it’s a ripping adventure.  It’s got bears, hallucinations, mountain climbing, tornadoes, villains, funny jokes, a 100-mile long trail, and a shrine where Quinn deposits a deep, dark family secret.

On a more serious note, I hope the book will inspire kids to chase after their passions, whether they’re into running or playing guitar or baking or writing computer code or whatever. The finish line is out there somewhere; all we have to do is stick with it, and enjoy the ride.