Under Armour has teamed up with Canadian Running to produce the Under Armour Diversity Series—an exclusive feature content series designed to highlight and promote individuals and organizations who have demonstrated a commitment to grow the sport of running, support those who are underrepresented and help others. The series features stories and podcasts highlighting these extraordinary Canadians who are making a difference in their communities and on the national running scene.
Dione Mason is busy, and she has been since we last spoke to her for the Under Armour Diversity Series back in 2023. And since then, she’s only been speeding up. Between work and school, she’s also training for her biggest challenge yet: running several legs of a 650-km ultramarathon that runs from Toronto to Montreal with Team UltraBlack. The race takes place on Oct. 29, and while the distances she’ll run for each leg aren’t ultra-distance, she’ll have to do several legs over the course of the day, and the mental as well as physical prep has been intense. Still, she’s no stranger to intensity: she’s run everything from 5Ks to marathons, and all of that pales in comparison to her other job as the race director for Toronto’s Carnival Run, which heads into its 10th, and likely final, year in 2026.
Mason was featured in this series in 2023, and since then, she hasn’t stopped running. On the contrary, her efforts have only ratcheted up as she’s added school and more work to her schedule, but she has also carved out time to run with Ultra Black, the team we profiled in May 2025. Work—teaching award-winning fitness classes—has decreased slightly, thanks to her full-time school schedule at the University of Toronto, where she’s doing a double major in psychology and anthropology. But she still teaches at least 10 classes every week. “It’s always a struggle and arranging different things, trying to make life work,” she admits. That hasn’t stopped her from training for the ultra in any spare time that she has, and documenting the inspiring journey on her Instagram as she goes.
When we spoke, the run was just under three weeks away. “I’m excited and less terrified now than I was,” she says. “I still can’t believe I’m doing this. What’s going to happen? How is it going to work out? But the training itself has been going well. We’ve had some great meetings as a team to get us prepared logistically.”
The relay component adds a lot of new layers to race day. “We’re all running different legs, so you need to be ‘on’ when you’re running, and then you need to rest, while also helping out the other runners and getting ready to run again. Sometimes, we’ll be on the bike to support someone running, sometimes we’ll be driving the RV—we’re all taking turns doing different things to support each other.”
Luckily, teaching several fitness classes a day, with periods of downtime in between and the need to be “on” during class, then recover and reset, has given Mason the tools she’ll need for this kind of race. As soon as she saw the relay UltraBlack was doing come through her Instagram feed, she knew she wanted to be a part of it. “I reached out, saying I’d love to hear more about what they were doing and asked how I could get involved. My goal has always been to work within the Black community and beyond to help people get more active, so I thought what they were doing was awesome.”
One of the ways Mason has inspired her community is with the Toronto Carnival Run. In 2016, when it began, it was Canada’s only Black-led, Caribbean-inspired, sanctioned running event, and while it’s been an incredible journey, Mason is candid that it will likely end after the 2026 race unless she can secure more funding.
“It’s still a struggle to keep going, because the biggest thing is really just getting financial support,” she explains. “People don’t realize that Carnival Run has been running pretty much on just registration dollars and my own personal money. I’ve tried so many different things, but unless we figure something out, I have to announce that after next year, I cannot continue to do it.”
She’s been running on motivation alone for the last decade: “To me, when I see people’s emotional reactions at the race—when they come over to me afterwards, when I see the kids in the kids race cross the line, and I see the tears of joy because moms and dads are so proud of them—that’s what has kept me going,” she says. “The expression on people’s faces and how they feel afterward, that’s made it all worth it.”
The run has evolved over the years to become even more inclusive. “This year, the theme that I had for the Carnival Run was ‘all abilities,’” she says. “All abilities can be successful. So on the front of the T-shirt, I had an adaptive athlete. I had somebody come to me in tears, saying she’s never seen herself featured like that.”
The Carnival Run is in support of The Simunye Foundation, which Mason also founded. The initial goal with the foundation was to build an arts and cultural centre that would speak to the history and excellence of the Black community in Canada. That’s still on the to-do list, but Mason has also shifted to a virtual model to get started. “I’ve realized with the monies I’ve been able to raise, what’s more accessible is being able to at least have a virtual plan to demonstrate the history and texture of the African diaspora in Canada,” she explains. “I think it’s so important that we celebrate our Canadian culture that also involves Black Canadians, and have a place where people can observe that history, as well as celebrate the culture that blends so well within our Canadian culture as a whole.”
Since the pandemic, when Mason—like many others—reassessed her life and decided to go back to school, her goals have come into clearer focus. “Now, my goal is to be a registered psychotherapist,” she says. “I still want to work with people on the physical aspect of health, but I can also help with the mental side. Most people are somewhat aware of how mental health is tied to physical fitness. But as I’ve done these deep dives into neuroplasticity, I’ve been amazed to realize just how much physical activity impacts our brain.”
Will she stop teaching classes when she graduates? Hard to say—Mason has tried the corporate career in the past, and that’s actually how she got started running, as part of a company’s 5K. But the more she ran and moved her body, the more she realized that corporate culture didn’t light her up. ”
With the ultra relay only days away, Mason is in the final prep stages. But what does success in such a long race, with such a strong team, look like? “I think success, for me, looks like camaraderie. It looks like discovery, opening doors within myself,” she says. “It’s knowing that this is a huge feat. I’ve never done a relay like this before, and knowing that I can rediscover a certain part of myself or learn something about myself, that would be successful to me. The mileage is great, but really this is about rediscovering and becoming, adding another layer of my self-discovery.”
