I previously mentioned the app Western States released a few month ago in the lead up to the race. Now with just a few hours before race start it’s worth reminding folks to download the app to follow along. For folks who aren’t wanting to install an app on their phone, or want to view the data in their browser there’s a web view as well. in Some of the data and the way it is displaying it will be quite fascinating to explore during the actual race. This might be a good alternative for folks who don’t want to watch the livestream.

Nutrition brands were a-plenty at TrailCon but I got get the impression that things felt a bit dialed down from the past two years at TrailCon when the onslaught of new hydration brands promoting all kinds of magical numbers and gains felt almost nauseating. Good, let’s be more reasonable, and healthier.

Eoin Comerford, via LinkedIn post:

As a reaction to a packed June calendar, the folks at Switchback Event just announced that next year’s show is moving earlier in the season, running May 22-24.

I had been wondering about this when it was first announced that TRE was spinning out their Switchback event and moving it to June, now it seems TrailCon has won. They keep their date in June – which for them is clearly the only time of the year a conference can work in Olympic Valley.

A panel I had missed at TrailCon was titled ‘How Trail Running’s Top Leaders Think About Growth, Culture, And What’s Next’. It was moderated by Ian MacGregor, CEO of SkratchLabs with panelist Renee Augustine, General Manager Arc’Teryx, Monica DeVreese, CEO at rabbit, and Mark Garonzik, General Manager at ACG.

All the panels were in the blazing heat, so I chose to skip it. But I mainly did because I couldn’t get over the title of the panel “trail running’s top leaders”. ACG has been in the sport for 5 minutes. Arc’Teryx clearly is an outdoor brand, but also barely had a hand in shaping the sport over the last few years. Several of the folks on the panel don’t have any results on UltraSignup themselves. But sure, let’s call the “top leaders of trail running” to discuss our sport.

I was reminded of this panel when scanning LinkedIn this morning – yeah, I can’t help myself. There Ian MacGregor continued the conversation with the following prompt:

We’ve watched a lack of critical thinking decimate the bike industry over the last few years. A lot of great people and brands have been hurt.

Trail running is on an extraordinary run right now. Participation is up. Investment is flowing in. Brands are scaling fast.
…
What is the trail running industry celebrating right now that we might look back on in a few years and realize was actually a warning sign?

So okay, that is indeed a good question worth pondering. A few of the answers in the comments mention the importance of maintaining the trails. In a previous post I mention the need to expand the offerings at TrailCon to entice regular folks to actually show up. Let’s add a “trail work day” to TrailCon, brought to you by ACG. Others speak to the dangers of the recent price increases by brands flirting with the “triathlon consumer” who surely can afford the $300 running shoe. Not sure if brands like ACG and Arc’Teryx are gonna listen. Two comments I’d add:

• The brand’s teenager problem needs to stop – for the good of the sport.
• I am wondering if we’re investing too many of our sports’ dollars into livestreams and broadcasts and that the ROI will just never materialize for the brands and they eventually pull back leaving the new fans behind. We might end up sitting on hundreds of old Starlinks if this gamble doesn’t work out. And then we’ll ask ourselves if our community was really served by this.

One of the panels I went to at TrailCon was titled ‘Balancing Art and Journalism in Creative Storytelling’. It was a good panel overall and I don’t want to call out the panelists, Nick Danielson, Somer Kreisman, Sean Haworth and Aisha McAdams (all photographers) or the moderator Hilary Yang in any ways here, but want to take this as a moment to ask the bigger question for our sport: “Where are the actual journalists?”

What I mean here and the panel somewhat skirted around the issue but never fully addressed it, is that trail running doesn’t have reporters, journalists, and investigators. I saw and chatted with the folks from Outside, Like the Wind, Trailhead Media – the podcasters were busy in their Airbnb’s interviewing athletes. If every shoot is an assignment, if every articles is pre-sold and cleared with the brand partners, and if every published story is an advertorial, then we don’t have journalists we only have an extended contract marketing department. We have hype men and cheerleaders. Maybe I’m naive and sports journalism doesn’t require a bullet proof wall between the fourth estate and the ad department but the much loved on and worried over “culture of trail running” would greatly benefit we’d have some folks actually asking some challenging questions from the big players – the businesses making the big money in our sport – and not just sitting there like puppy dogs waiting for the newest shoe release, or shirt with holes in it.

It can’t be that the only ‘truth tellers’ in our sport are the meme accounts on Instagram, come on.

This was a comment made by a well-known race director and industry professional whose name I will keep private here. At a chat we had toward the end of TrailCon they replied to the ongoing challenges in our industry to have shoe brands – which are arguably the companies with the deepest pockets – to play nice together and share the communal space we call trail running. At events, be it races or conferences, brands always demand exclusivity and preferred treatment and while this might sound good in their corporate eco chambers in reality it’s impossible – and counter productive for the community – to pull off.

• Broken Arrow was sponsored by Nike/ACG and over the weekend the valley was painted orange.
• This gave way to On’s sponsorship of TrailCon, which to be fair allowed the ACG booth to stay in the prominent place it had been (I assume) for Broken Arrow. ON covered the welcome happy hour. BROOKS covered the tab for one of the happy hours on Tuesday, ACG picked up the tab on the closing day after the TrailCon awards they sponsor.
• On Wednesday evening as the crane picked up the ARC’TERYX container and everyone cleaned up their booths, HOKA and its team was already in full swing setting up for Western States. I believe the gondola already has a new wrap in anticipation to take spectators up to the escarpment on race day morning.

Yes, our sport needs the money from these brands, and yes, in exchange for these promotional dollars these brands want something in return, – this is all fair and good. But sometimes in conversations with them it does feel like they should behave a bit more like grown-ups and not like bickering teenagers fighting for supremacy in the hallways of their high school.

Tudor wasn’t there with a full booth, hahaha, that would’ve been amazing. But after their announcement from earlier this month I found it fascinating to see someone walking around with branded Tudor hat taking in the scene. Wanting to make sure this wasn’t just a Tudor fan (that would’ve been embarrassing) I spoke with her for a few minutes. She’s indeed from Tudor and was there to explore the trail running scene. For the two days I saw her alongside Fabrice Perrin and the rest of the UTMB crew. She mentioned that Tudor is working several upcoming announcements, including brand activations and meet and greets with their ambassadors. She also said that while there’s not a special edition trail running watch in the works we might see a limited edition watch band to bring their brand story fully to trail.

Given that she was in town alongside the UTMB crew – which could’ve been a happy coincidence – I would wager that Tudor is planning a marketing push in the lead up to the UTMB Finals in Chamonix. How far this might go I don’t know, maybe they’ll have a booth at the UTMB expo, but this feels a bit too pedestrian. What would be more suitable for Tudor is to take over a storefront along the main drag in downtown Chamonix. I also would not be surprised if Tudor is evaluating a bigger partnership with UTMB. Not sure how Suunto feels about this and there’s some messaging to massage, but I can see this coming as early as this year.

Also, no, I did not ask for a review unit.

I’ve just spend 2+ days at TrailCon in Tahoe. I arrived late on Monday, missing a couple of the industry talks, but I got to spend two full days wandering the village, checking out booths and meeting with friends and making new ones.

The sun was out, the village was inviting, the mountains surrounding the valley were gorgeous. Olympic Valley above Lake Tahoe is an incredible place that I always love coming back to. And for trail running to celebrate itself it’s a much better location than any sterile conference center. But it’s also fairly remote and I heard from several vendors that they wished more people would’ve been there – growing pains, I suppose. It’s only the second year of the full TrailCon experience. For the future I wonder if TrailCon should add additional programming to entice the average trail running (the consumer), not just the industry professional to stay for the full week between Broken Arrow and Western States. I know this might sound corny to some folks but morning yoga sessions, trail running clinics, bear watching excursions (for the Euros!) and other activities might help with that.

Over the next few days I’ll be sharing some observations here on Electric Cable Car as I gather my thoughts and notes. Stay tuned.

Here are the runners and community members honored at this year’s TrailCon Awards presented by ACG:

Trail Runners of the Year 2025

• Katie Schide
• Jim Walmsley

• Future Award – Péma Franchi Antelme
• Icon Award – Tove Alexandersson
• Courage Award – Jenn Lichter
• Community Impact Award – Greg Cantrell (Laz)

Hall of Fame

• Megan Kimmel
• John Cappis
• Ian Torrence 
• Darcy Piceu
• Julian Chorier
• Danelle Ballengee
• Nikki Kimball
• Matt Carpenter

PS: Hope I got this all right, I was in attendance and only halfway through thought about writing it all down. If I missed/forgotten anything, please do let me know.

Just like last year fuel company Neversecond prints and distributes an actual physical newspaper around Olympic Valley:

Race week starts with the Trail Times.

Made in collaboration with @runfreetrail, @shapirothehero, @the_subhub_pod, @dan_yell_a, @emkaysulli and @yaboyscottjurek, this free newspaper has everything you need for Broken Arrow Skyrace and Western States week—race previews, feature stories, pop-up info, schedules, and more.

Grab a copy around the Village starting June 18.

The kicker: included is a massive infographic (without artistic attribution by the way – AI slob maybe even) that labels Olympic Valley as Squaw Valley. What a massive faux pas and huge embarrassment. When you’re called out by Ann Trason in the comments of your Instagram announcement about it then you know you fucked up.

TrailFans (no attribution or byline) asks on their blog “Why are trail runners so obsessed with Western States?” and why this might be a worthwhile question, albeit a pretty basic one, what sticks out to me is neither the question or the answer but the AI markdown formatting that was left in the article that was posted. Rookie mistake.

Another question Trailfans asked: “Is Broken Arrow 23k the biggest prize purse in trail running?” To which one could briefly use any search engine to search for “UTMB prize purse” and learn that in fact the Broken Arrow 23K is indeed not the biggest prize purse in trail running. The winner of the Broken Arrow 23K gets an astonishing amount of cash, but when looking at the distribution to tenth place, one quickly realizes that giving $100 isn’t actually that much.

Martin Biela built a tool that tracks week-over-week movement in the UTMB Index Top 100. From his introductory blog post:

I’ve been having fun with data ever since I watched Moneyball in 2011. And I think Germany has built the coolest fantasy manager out there for football — Kickbase. Once you’ve spent a season comparing market values, point multipliers and starting-eleven probabilities, you don’t watch the Bundesliga the same way again.

I’ve was invited to play Kickbase last Bundesliga season and I sucked at it. So, I might not be the target audience for this amount of data, but here’s what Martin says ‘The Ascent’, which lives on uphillnotes.com is and does:

The Ascent is a live view of the UTMB Index Top 100. Two date pulldowns, a Top 10 table, movers, country and continent splits. You pick two weeks and see at a glance who climbed, who fell, who’s new in the Top 100, who dropped out.
…
Index runs on the most contemporary calculation in the sport: expected score instead of plain averages, a stability score, heavier weighting of performances on similar course profiles, a clear recency bias. If I’m going to read movement across weeks, I want to read it on the best available data — and that’s the new Index.

Another massively ambitious tech tool that’s coming for trail. But man, I wish the AI user interfaces would be a bit more diverse and not look all the same – I suppose these designs AI churns out are the WordPress themes our generation of builders fought against. But I don’t want to be a complainer, I’ve been asking for more data, with the hope for our media to tell better stories that are based not just on gut – and personal friendship – but on the accessibility and visualization of data points that define our sport. At a glance it seems these tools currently are just reinforcing what we already tool, but I shall be patient and understand that take time to get the data injected to build up the historical context. For example at this point – today – the tool lists global runners and German runners, no other country is broken down. And we can see that Martin Nilsson was the biggest Index number climber, but we can’t click on his name to see what race he ran, or what made the points jump. It’ll be interesting to see how this will evolve and I am looking forward for someone to take ‘The Ascent’ tool and find that gem of a storyline we’ve been missing.

A friendly – and almost annual – reminder that there are three massive trail running events that are happening in the coming weekends in the Alps. While America’s eyes, and the trail media’s, and mine this year are on Broken Arrow and Western States, Europe is embracing the mountains trails melted out by the early summer sun:

• 18 – 20 June 2026: The Zugspitz Ultratrail in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. For the first time a UTMB event and Germany’s largest ultra event with over 5,000 participants for the seven different distances.
• 24 – 28 June 2026: Lavaredo Ultra Trail in Cortina d’Ampezzo with over 5,300 starters (2025 numbers) for the five distances.
• 25 – 28 June 2026: Mont-Blanc Marathon in Chamonix has 10,000 runners over eight distances. Everyone outside Chamonix talks about UTMB week, but Mont-Blanc Marathon is basically on par in terms of frenzied activity in the valley.

These three events are just a couple hundred miles apart from each other, one in Germany on the Northern side of the Alps, one in Italy on the Southern side, and one in France, on the southeastern side. All three in breathtaking locations – Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Chamonix are all previous host locations of the Winter Olympics. Lavaredo, which I ran last year and is an absolutely incredible event with races in the most beautiful location = the Dolomites but this event will always be in competition for global trail media attention. Garmisch’s Zugspitz is finding itself in the same place now. Chamonix does need no introduction. All three events would be talked about and covered, if they’d happen on a weekend with no competition for attention. All three events are the biggest in their respective countries and regions and proof that while trail running is global sports media is largely regional and limited.

Francesco Puppi is thinking out loud ahead of his 100 mile debut at Western States:

I struggle with the idea that a 100m race may be more of an adventure than a competitive feat.
…
I’m not an athlete who does it just for the feeling of adventure, of being in the wild, or for the connection with nature.
…
For Western States, I’ve had to lean more into the outdoor side of the sport in order to survive and enjoy my preparation.

What a fascinating perspective, and I am not being snarky here.

For one, we rarely ever get elite athletes giving us a personal brain dump ahead of a big race. Usually they are locked in and might tease us with sharing their training volume or number of gels consumed, but that’s all we get – until after. Secondly, MY understanding has always been that Western States is considered the most “track and cross country” type race there is, so him feeling like this is an outdoor adventure is surprising, especially for an elite runner who’s planning on finishing before nightfall. Usually it’s the US runners, after having raced “California carpet races” who are struggling to adapt to “really mountain races” of the Alps like UTMB. Euro runners struggle to adapt to WSER too, but for different reasons. Francesco has raced – and won – CCC already. Is WSER – for an elite – really that much more “outdoorsy” than CCC?

Episode 348 with Zach Hauer:

Just ahead of “Tahoe Week”, where we’ll meet in person, I chat with Open Fuel co-founder Zach Hauer about marketing an outdoor brand in today’s business and media landscape. We chat about AI, ROI, high carb slushies, plogging and how in the end this all just has to make sense.

Links

• TrailCon Plog: Open Fuel + Dera
• Open Fuel
• Open Fuel on Instagram
• Zach Hauer on Instagram

The Steep Stuff podcast with my buddy James Lauriello is partnering with the US Skyrunning National Series to provide exclusive media coverage for the 4 race series:

We’re excited to announce our official media partner for the 2026 season of the Merrell Skyrunner® US National Series: @steepstuff_pod Bringing stories, athletes, and the spirit of Skyrunning to the community with host @jameslauriello!

Make sure to catch the lates episode of The Steep Stuff podcast: ‘Inside the 2026 Merrell Skyrunner U.S. National Series‘ with guests Eti Rodriguez (Managing Director, Skyrunner World Series), Ben Stark (Brand Manager, Merrell), and Louis Down (Media and Communications, Skyrunner) for a roundtable on what the new Merrell Skyrunner U.S. National Series is, why the timing finally makes sense, and how this season can grow a real skyrunning fan base in the United States.

Getting excited over here!

Side note: Join us for Beast of Big Creek – we still got a couple of bibs left!

Bram Ribbers writes (auto-translated via my browser):

Sometimes you just need a push. A good book can help, a new shoe sometimes too, but little works as well as a running movie that makes you think afterwards: forward, still a round.

Last week we were at the Brooks Trail Running Film Festival in Maastricht. A few beautiful short trail films were played there, including Becky Bates, Not a Running Story and Dipsea Generations.

Always appreciate the positive press for TRFF. If you’re in Tahoe next week be sure to catch us in Truckee on Thursday evening for an evening hosted by Scott Jurek and presented by Brooks – get your FREE tickets.

Will be on the official Nike Youtube account.

ACG partnered with the Broken Arrow Skyrace to help independent trail races do what they do: bring communities together and convince otherwise sane people to run straight up a mountain.

Will be fun to see what they’ll pull of here. And worth reading the whole summary under the Youtube video block. Nike does have some great writers – each page, for each race Ascent, 23K, 46K has a slightly different version of it. All a great.

This voice, and it’s not swagger, it’s some sort of self-deprecating snark, has been missing in the trail running space. I’m here for it.

On a side note: I just watched an interview with a German national team soccer player and he was asked about his cleats and pronounced Nike like Mike – cause that’s how most Germans think it is pronounced.

Local News King 5 reports:

Trails on Mt. Si are closed while authorities track down a black bear that attacked a group of teenagers Tuesday afternoon.
…
State Fish and Wildlife Department officials are currently hunting the bear with guns, according to officials.

Black bear attacks are rare – like they NEVER happen – unless it involves a mama bear protecting their cubs.

… the group of teens accidentally got too close to the bear’s cubs, which prompted the aggressive behavior. 

That’ll do. Glad this one ended without more serious consequences.

The Skyrunning Federation on Instagram with the news:

We have received the very sad news that top skyrunner Megan Kimmel has passed away. We’d like to remember her and share some of her amazing successes with you.
…
An extraordinary athlete and true skyrunner whose legacy will live on.

And iRunFar with an obituary by Meghan Hicks:

A beloved off-road runner, backcountry skier, hiker, dog mom, entrepreneur, free spirit, family member, and friend, Megan brought joy to the lives of so many. Her loss is felt throughout the world, from those she raced with in the far reaches of the globe to those she shared her home with in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. While most people will know Megan as a world-class runner, she was much more than that.

What a loss for the trail running world. Sending condolences to her family and friends who knew her.