We recently connected with Dreama Walton and have shared our conversation below.

Dreama, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

A little over two years ago the cofounder of a meal bar that was sponsoring me reached out to me. His name is Corey and he is the cofounder of sans meal bar and he asked if I would be interested in meeting to Filmmaker’s out of Denver. We talked about not really knowing exactly what they had in mind, but he asked if I would be willing to talk to them for a bit, so he arranged a zoom call and we just started chatting, the Filmmaker’s asked me about my running why people would choose to do such a thing and where I get my motivation from. In learning more about me the decided that if I were willing to work with them, they would like to do a 10 to 12 minute short film… I didn’t really think about it much because I thought it’s just 10 to 12 minutes so what harm could be done? I can bought it would be mostly about my running. But my running story begins a long time ago, my motivations reach back in the past to my sister and they knew that.

About 6mos into the project I asked what the status was, this was a passion project so I knew they were working on it in between paid projects but when they came back with “what would you say if I told you that we would need to wait another year?”…I was surprised….the filmmaker told me that they were turning it into a feature length film. And now we have Dreama Team.

I took a risk, I had no idea who these guys were prior to this project. They could have made anything but what they did make was something we are all very proud of.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have been trail running for years… I found running in high school. I had a little sister who I had to care for after school but when I was 16 she went to live in a foster home and even though I was not happy that she was away from me. It freed up my afternoons and I was living on my own so I decided that I wanted to play a sport but as you can imagine at 16 walking onto any ball sport after never playing organize team sports was a bit of a joke, so I decided to join the track team. At the end of the first season, I had already improved significantly, and I continued running throughout the summer, and I join the cross country team my senior year. I found some thing that made me feel good about myself. I found a sport that I can improve in. After I graduated high school, I entered the US Air Force and continued running. When the war kicked off, I deployed to Baghdad Iraq. I continued running in the green zone even though sometimes the temperatures were very hot. When I returned back to the states after my appointment, I was stationed in Montgomery Alabama where I continued to run, but it wasn’t until I was stationed in Korea when I started to compete again I did some 5K’s 10 K’s and trail run on the weekend, I did my first half marathon in Seoul

After separating from the Air Force, I moved to Germany and it was in Germany that I found many beautiful trails and Ultrarunning. I ran the Athens 2500th hundredth anniversary of the marathon as my first marathon. After returning to the hotel room that evening, I signed up for my first ultra marathon. I signed up for the Davos Swiss Alpine, 78K… Which was about six months after my first marathon, and after running that race, I was hooked, so I’ve been running ultramarathons for the past 14 years and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon :-)

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

My whole life’s journey has been about resilience. When I was 11, my mother left me and my two little sisters, because she decided that she met a man she wanted to leave my father for. I went to school one day, and when I came home, she was gone. My father told me that I would need to help him with my youngest sister, who was born with spina bifida and so that is what I did.

When I was 12, my father met a woman that he moved into our home, and she would eventually become my stepmother, but she did not like me or my little sisters, especially my youngest one. She was abusive and both she and my father were doing and selling drugs, my stepmother had my youngest sister moved out of the home and into a foster home, and when she did that, she informed us that we were all moving from our home state of Florida to Maine. I had never been to Maine and I was 16 and on my way to graduating high school. My stepmother told me that because I was 16 I had no choice but I did have a choice and that choice was to go or stay. I told both she and my father that if they forced me to go, I would have to turn them into the police for their selling of drugs and they allowed me to stay and I ended up getting a travel trailer and parked it outside of my grandparents home and I lived in that until I graduated high school, after high school is when I entered the Air Force, my life could’ve gone a number of ways, but I chose to be resilient and to find my own way in life

Can you open up about how you managed the initial funding?

I recently started a trail running camp for kips. And to fund the camp I started a nonprofit and I have been able to get some donations that allowed me to run my first camp.

Contact Info:

• Website: Dreamateamway.org
• Instagram: DreamaWalton
• Facebook: Dreamawalton
• Linkedin: Dreama walton

Image Credits
Jon Ked