It is time again. Time for the annual moment to reflect and celebrate this very blog/website/experiment. I’m four years into doing this thing I call Electric Cable Car. A lot has changed around me and a lot keeps changing. I will get to some of the changes, but first, a look at what has been and is happening at ECC.

If you’re interested in catching up on what I wrote in previous years, here’s my intro and about page with the full list of all my anniversary posts.

Let’s start with some numbers:

For the full year 2025 I ended up publishing 497 short posts and 39 full articles, but only 13 episodes of my podcast Singletrack – which makes me sad, but that’s for another day. Overall that’s fewer overall posts than the year before, but with my current workload on various other projects – hello TRFF, hello Beast – it’s about as much as I can publish here. This still comes to an average of about 46 posts per month, or 1.5 posts per date, which feels about right.

Traffic in 2025 was up 66% over the previous year. And so far for 2026 I am tracking about 85% growth over 2025. Something seems to be happening, and I hope it’s not all AI crawlers.

And this one is just for fun: Overall I’ve written 423,800 words, resulting in 2,108 full articles, link posts, and podcast announcements since the first day of Electric Cable Car back in 2022.

In 2025 I also launched the ‘ECC Live Ticker’ for several of the longest and most important trail events. I’m still experimenting with it and am trying to find the usefulness and manageability of it all. Others have started offering similar features, which I welcome and wish them luck – it’s hard!

Last month I also pushed the first bigger layout revision on the homepage since ECC first launched. Now, all race results – which have proven popular – are out of the main feed and are neatly tucked on the homepage, for easy access. I really like the way this reorganizes the homepage. I hope you find it as useful as I do. One fun challenge with this is it requires – or invites me rather – to write a very brief highlight of the race results. How do you capture in 20 words or less a weekend of events with thousands of runners and multiple distances? What’s the one story worth featuring there? A fun challenge indeed.

Now with the caretaking taken care of, let’s talk about the artificial elephant in the room.

When I started ECC I had two goals: 1. To build a website that I love to use everyday – I know how to write code and love designing websites, and 2. To give myself a platform to write, which I’d been searching for for years, decades even. I had made several attempts in the past to share my life (how quaint!) to report on a topic – technology (overdone), politics (exhausting) but nothing stuck over all these years. ‘Endurance running, mountain sport, and trail culture’ is a topic broad enough to give me fuel to write here every day. But most importantly I am truly passionate about this area of interest. In some form or another I engage with it daily, professionally and personally. I run, I love the outdoors, mountain culture is my favorite culture.

A couple major things have changed in these past four years I’ve been publishing ECC (and the eight years I’ve been producing Singletrack, plus the additional four years I co-owned The Outdoor Society before that):

First there was the transition to, and then away from social media. The “away from” part we’re still in the midst of it. But the “to” part massively shifted the way people use the internet. Everything became siloed, hard to track and link to. The algorithms – primed to keep us outraged and filled with ads – are ushering in a departure from social media as average users get increasingly frustrated with their inability to keep tabs on their favorite accounts, voices, creators, and yes, brands – the very thing that propelled social media to the forefront of “world wide web” usage for most people.

When I started ECC I wasn’t so much banking on this, I was more just being stubborn and wanting my own website, my domain, my blog as a creative playground. I grew up with the thrill of publishing directly to a place anyone could visit, and I just created it to get that piece back into my life. But since then Twitter has died, Instagram is becoming useless, and everyone is splintered to countless little siloes, from WhatsApp Groups to little Mastodon servers. But aside from people fleeing to various platforms and tools the other things folks rediscovering is the written word. Most social media sites have pivoted to rich media like video, but these take lots of time to create, so people want to go back to basics – they write.

What an incredible time this is for ECC. I get to link to people’s writing again. Yes, there are still podcasts – but they come with transcripts now, and there is still tons and tons of videos on Youtube, but what makes my day, and work here at ECC fun is to be able to link to people’s writing. That’s a big portion of what makes this blog shine and it creates such an incredible ‘system of record’ or ‘log book’ for the trail running world. I link to what someone wrote. I share a sentence or paragraph of what that person published. I give credit (link back) and I track (searchable) conversations, comments, posts and articles. I don’t post every race results, I don’t share every product announcement from a brand, and neither do I post training updates from the elites. But what I post I have a comment on and try to weave into a bigger story of what I believe is important as trail running progresses, evolves, grows and professionalizes.

The second big development, and that has really arrived in the trail running space over the last six month is the adoption of AI.

• AI is being used to write anywhere: this still hard for me to catch sometimes and it’s even harder to comprehend. Why would a person who wants to have their voice heard let AI write for them?
• AI is being used to modify workflows for people. The reliance on existing tools, apps, SAAS offerings, and platforms is shifting and people are building their personal stack of how they navigate their world and the internet.
• AI is heralded as the toolbox to create the next products: this is, so far, much hyped but very little actually field tested.

How do I use AI?

• I don’t use AI to write – doh.
• I don’t use it for research. AI is just too often wrong in the most charming and confident way that I don’t trust it, at all.
• I probably should use it for proof-reading (I know, I know, but I am reluctant as of yet as I don’t want it to change my voice too much.)
• I cautiously use it for small code edits. In the past I searched the web and mostly found the answer to a WordPress PHP problem I had on Stack Overflow or another forum for WordPress developers. These searches I have always relied on when writing code, be it HTML, CSS, Javascript, or PHP, but over the last couple of years online search has gotten so bad, so gummed up, so useless, that it’s been maddening to find the right solutions. When I can’t find the answer on the open web, I use one of the AI tools and sometimes find the answer there. This is a minimal workflow change for me, I essentially just augment the regular web search with an additional AI search if I can’t find the answer in a reasonable time.

This is where I am currently at with my AI usage on ECC. Am I looking at what others are building and wondering if there’s something that I can adopt to help me and ECC? In short: yes, but very very cautiously.

Clearly the AI tools are coming. But I currently hesitate calling them actual solutions. They are tools and how much they can solve still waits to be seen. We’re still overhyping the glitzy interfaces that are being teased. Behind the overly verbose code experiments there’s still a massive task waiting to bring any of these things to life – and turn them into anything resembling a sustainable contribution to our trail media landscape.

As a writer and observer of culture all these changes and developments are my fuel. There’s movement, there’s excitement. People’s are building stuff and I get to report on it – good or bad. This is what makes getting out of bed in the mornings fun. This is what I created Electric Cable Care for, and this is why I’m excited for the coming year.

From our friends at TRFF, Self Care comes a new partnership with Washington State’s premier 100 Mile event Cascade Crest, along with friends of Three Magnets Brewing and sponsor of CC, Speedland:

Cascade Crusher – Pale

Brewed with a new PNW pilsner malt built for hoppy beers, balanced bittering from Magnum, and highlighted with Cascade, Vera, and Dolcita. Expect light pine and floral notes up front, with mango, pear, and cara orange from two standout newer hops.

Get your pre-orders in now and finish your final training weeks on a delicious note.

Open letter to TrailCon via Instagram (and LinkedIn):

We’re disappointed.

[TrailCon] describes itself as a gathering for “all stakeholders of the sport,” a place that “welcomes all voices,” and a platform focused on the future of trail running.

Yet from what has been publicly shared, there appears to be no meaningful Para athlete, disability representation, or other runners from our allied communities within those conversations.

This matters.

My response to the announcement of the full schedule by TrailCon was positive. Which just shows how ones bias allows one to be lazy at times and get blinded. This schedule is very homogeneous. In fact it almost feels like it’s just one brand activation after the other, as if Dbo and team found a way to charge the various brands a concierge fee to conduct their activations in Olympic Valley between Broken Arrow and Western States. But, while this might be cynical and I want to reserve my full judgement until I experience TrailCon myself next months, Zachary Friedley’s point is way more valid and important.

Brand new collab with ‘master of collabs’ The North Face and Sky High Farm – which I had never heard of before but love their logo. Collab done right, right there.

Over the past couple of weeks there’s been plenty of chatter about collabs that missed their launch moment and a lawsuit that maybe should’ve been a collab, so seeing The North Face doing what they do best – I pretty much every single one of their collabs, even the high fashion ones – is just a breath of fresh air.

Also: do visit ‘Sky High Farms Goods‘ and check out who they are and what else they do – so good.

From their press email:

TrailCon, presented by On, today released the complete schedule for its 2026 edition, revealing three days of programming that bring together the biggest names in trail running, endurance sports, and outdoor culture for an unprecedented gathering at Palisades Tahoe, California. The event runs June 22–24 and is free and open to the public.

I’m a bit bummed to miss the first few hours on Monday – I’ll be only flying into Reno that afternoon. I had been under the impression that the first day was going to be a sort of optional. But I’m most excited about the ‘Lowa Dry-Athalon’ on Tuesday afternoon:

Developed in partnership with the U.S. Biathlon, the Dry-Athlon reimagines the classic biathlon format for the trail running world—swapping snow for singletrack and skis for trail shoes.

The event invites all attendees to compete in teams of four in a high-energy relay that tests both speed on the trail and composure at the shooting range—using laser rifles, with no live ammunition or real weapons involved.

What a fun “activation” to bring to this event. Love it.

I previously linked to Sam King’s blog ‘The Trail Ledger’ and now we’re back with another juicy “article” ‘The Toll Road to the Start Line‘. In it Sam “writes” the following paragraph:

Amer Sports, which owns Salomon as well as the UTMB brand, built a global racing circuit whose qualifying structure systematically directs runners toward races that pay licensing fees back to Amer Sports. The runner chasing UTMB entry is, in aggregate, a customer of an Amer Sports product ecosystem. Their training shoe purchases, their gear, and now their qualifying race entry fees all flow, at various removes, through the same corporate architecture.

Of course this is all complete horseshit and if you take a step back and look at the full article you quickly the entire thing is just AI slop – and that’s the kindest way of describing it.

In the comments Brian Metzler tries to correct Sam to which he gives just single word reply:

Fascinating!

His one word replies can mean two things: Either Sam’s genuinely fascinated to learn this fact – because he didn’t do any research himself for the article, or it’s the classic, dismissive “fascinating” as in “I don’t give a fuck about facts”. Which one you think is it?

The article has several other offensive “inaccuracies” like calling Olympic Valley Squaw Valley, but it’s not worth digging in further.

But my favorite part of the thing is the disclosures at the bottom of the article:

A Note on Data:
…
Amer Sports’ ownership of the UTMB brand and Salomon is documented through public corporate disclosures

The confidence at which these AI tools lie and at which the publishers share their findings lies is just breathtaking.

I guess Brian and I can add ‘AI fact checker’ to your resumes now – sigh.

This one is less significant and a change back to how it was in the past:

This year at Hardrock, we are headed back to Grouse Gulch!

Shifting back to our routes (pun intended), the Animas Forks Aid Station is moving back to the Grouse Gulch Aid Station. This shortens the course by about a half mile, adjusts the distances between aid stations before and after Grouse Gulch slightly, and updates crew movements.

The website has the the updated course including GPX file.

Big news from Chamonix for the upcoming OCC race at the UTMB Finals this coming summer. (This seems to be a permanent change – not just a one off):

OCC 2026: the course is evolving 

This year, the OCC is reinventing its high-altitude section with a brand-new route between Col de Balme and Col des Posettes. 

What’s new: 
– A new high point: Tête de Balme (2,321 m) 
– More trails on the Swiss side
– The climb to La Flégère has been removed from the course 

The 2026 course is now 60 km with 3,500 m of elevation gain.

A speculation as to why the changes needed to be made from French Reference Trail (auto-translated):

According to information circulating in the Chamonix trail community, tensions have arisen between the UTMB organization and the consorts of La Flégère and Lognan, collective owners of the land concerned. These landowners would have toughened their conditions of access to the passage, complicated negotiations for the 2026 edition. A reality that the organization has not officially commented on in detail, but which would partly explain this choice of alternative route.

This all gives us plenty to speculate and compare GPX profiles in the coming days. But I want to make a couple of quick points before processing it more:

• Changing somewhat historic routes will always leave the super fans in a bit of a pickle as it makes comparing past times now more difficult or even moot.
• If UTMB is able to separate the routes for UTMB, CCC, OCC in big section onto their own trails this leaves the trails with fewer total runners – which is great for the environment – or would allow them to let more runners into the specific races.
• Now I want to run OCC again, time to get more stones!

From folks who know the route and area a bit better than me:

Some are saying that the new high point and trails selected in Switzerland are a really nice addition, but missing on the iconic climb to La Flégère – while “just” a boring ski hill – is a bummer.

Press release I missed back in January of this year:

Näak, the Canadian sports nutrition company founded in 2016 with a mission to create healthy and sustainable sports nutrition, without making any compromises to performance, has signed a four-year contract extension with world-renowned trail-running series UTMB. Beyond continuing the partnership with UTMB, Näak is leveling up its sponsorship to the Official Premier Partner tier.

Good news for Näak, bad news for runners who don’t like Näak. Does anyone actually LOVE Näak products and use it as their main nutrition even when not forced to at an UTMB aid station?

I mean the real news is that Kilian wrote a blog post about his Zegama race:

The climbing felt okay, but the flats and downhills were a different story. By the time I reached Sancti Spiritu, I realized that because the second half of the race is mostly non-technical flats and descents, I wouldn’t be able to race at full tilt.

And I guess the real real news is that Kilian is injured with just a few weeks before Western States:

But once the noise passed, I knew it was time to listen to what my body had been trying to say for weeks, and get my knee properly checked.

But what I care about is that he too can’t resist the temptation to join the nazi-infested VC toy. Gross and sad. Kilian did not share this blog post on his actual blog.

Side note: Who’s keeping track on the all star lineup for Western States elites who are actually all battling injuries at the moment? (My experiment from a few months ago has ended – the Substack version of ECC is deleted.)

Via press email:

A new UTMB World Series adventure is set to unfold in the Vietnamese highlands as Vietnam Highlands Trail by UTMB® debuts in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, from January 8–10, 2027. 

Held under the patronage of the Vietnam People’s Public Security Sports Association and the Lam Dong Provincial People’s Committee, and co-organized by Nexus Sport Events, this new event marks the arrival of the UTMB World Series circuit in Vietnam with the ambition of becoming a benchmark trail running event in the region.

This is the first new event for the 2027 calendar, and it will take the earliest spot on the calendar – previously the year kicked off with the Arc of Attrition. The official events page lists a 100K, 50K, 20K and a couple shorter distances – registration is opening soon.

The UTMB World Series continues its expansion in Asia.

ECC’S UTMB World Series Calendar is updated.

Pulled the info from the Wikipedia page.

The spectacle was founded by Australian businessman Aron D’Souza:

He was, together with billionaire Peter Thiel, involved in the 2013 Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit, which led to Gawker filing for bankruptcy.

The quote already mentioned megalomaniac, tech billionaire, and antichrist lecturer Peter Thiel.

And the investor behind it:

In February 2025, businessman Donald Trump Jr. said that his venture fund 1789 Capital would be involved in an investment round, saying “The Enhanced Games represent the future – real competition, real freedom, and real records being smashed. This is about excellence, innovation, and American dominance on the world stage – something the MAGA movement is all about.”^[53][54] Others include Saudi prince Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud,^[55] and cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

What a fantastic group of human beings – only the best.

The whole thing was propped up to market and sell supplements.

“Cocaine and heroin will not be allowed” according to Aron D’Souza, yeah, right.

Oh, and barely any records were actually broken this weekend… maybe they should’ve allowed cocaine after all.

Fueled by AI vibe-coding, another phenomenon this year’s Cocodona has surfaced is the arrival of the ‘text-based live ticker’ for trail races promising minute by minute updates. Josh Rosenthal from Borderlands teased a beta of his interpretation of this. As he puts it is:

This prototype was built almost entirely with modern AI tooling.

LoC is functional right now. It is not race-ready.

LoC stands for ‘Live on Course’ and promises:

People positioned throughout the course submit short field reports in real time about athlete condition, tactical shifts, weather, crew behavior, atmosphere, emotional moments, and developing race situations.

The system is designed around human moderation, verification, editorial judgment, and routing before information reaches commentators or viewers.

In the beginning of trail race media it was iRunFar that began covering trail race via posts shared on Twitter. For a long time this was the only way the fans at home could stay somewhat up to date with what was happening live on the course. This labor of love that iRunFar poured themselves into got crushed by the demise of Twitter and the incoming promise of better coverage via YouTube livestreams and Instagram reels. Twitter is still cooked and won’t be coming back as a tool to share information and gather a community, the Instagram algorithm has become unusable, and yet the livestreams haven’t proven to provide the access to information as superfans had hoped for. The livestreams capture the community and share the vibe, but often the actual race updates are getting lots amidst the casual banter about what shoes the runners wear and what food someone might eats at the next aid station.

For Cocodona this year several folks vibe-coded dashboards promising updates in ticker form, all running into the same issue: to provide updates you gotta actually be awake, online and locked in to collect and share the information – not an easy task.

Back ins 2024 after Cocodona and for the second anniversary of Electric Cable Car I wrote:

I’ll be in Silverton for Hardrock 100 this year. First time for me and I’m stoked. How will I cover the event for Electric Cable Car? Stay tuned! But it won’t be the usual “here are a bunch of interviews with athletes” format. I’m working on a new and unique angle – hope you’ll enjoy what I’m cooking up.

The Hardrock media coverage will be a test case for what I am trying to do for Chamonix during UTMB week. I’ll be there and I am working on a strategy for this week that’s informed by what experiences I gain covering Hardrock while also acknowledging that I won’t be arriving in the Alps with a team of people and a truck full of gear. Heck, I still gotta run OCC too, right?

The results of this test: it’s fucking hard. If you’re on the ground at an event it’s just so incredibly challenging to find time to pull yourself away to posts updates. If you’re remote you’re relying on other accounts to drop that info, and everything you do will be second hand. Then last year for Cocodona I made another attempt. I tried myself on providing this service and launched ECC Live, a ticker, leaderboard and human-curated collection of updates from the race. The only AI code on the page was the race clock I added. I’ve learned some valuable lessons, retooled it for the WMTRC in the fall of 2025 and tried this again for Cocodona this year.

The updated results: It’s still fucking hard, it’s still a human problem foremost, to gather the information and share it in a timely fashion – AI can’t help with that (yet).

Trail doesn’t have an ESPN, or Kicker (German soccer website), or whatever your favorite sports app is you visit to get your real time updates of your favorite team/athlete/sport.

• The YouTube livestreams are fun, but unsuitable for information sharing.
• The Instagram algorithm is dead for timely information.
• The live trackers are too spotty and unreliable to be the only source of truth.
• The race directors are too busy organizing an actual event to update their race websites during race weekend with links and information to results.

But, what all these live tickers that springing up tell me is that there’s something ‘there’. Someone is going to crack this, and at some point in the very near future. What a fun time to be in trail media.

This year’s Salomon Golden Trail World Series has gotten a lot of ‘sighs’ and question marks before it even kicked off. Now we’re two races down – from a total of eight (including the Finals) – and folks just sort of feel ‘ho hum’ about it all. Yes, the races changed – but even Zegama – which is Zegama after all! wasn’t the barn burner one would’ve expected (even with Kilian on the starting line).

• Is the lineup of elite runners this year not inspiring folks to follow the Series?
• Is the lack of US race location turning folks off from caring about the series all together?
• Is the strategic decision to move the livestream behind a paywall resulting in a drop in engagement?

A few thoughts on this:

• Race viewership and engagement dramatically increases with good storylines around who’s racing. This can’t be discounted. And is something that’s somewhat out of the hands of the events organizers. Only somewhat though, cause if you’re not creating a compelling product to watch than maybe you’re also not attracting a field of athletes worth following. But athletes do get injured and drop from a race last minute and some storylines you can’t predict or manufacture beforehand – as hard as you might want to.
• Maybe the numbers aren’t as bad as I think they are, it’s just my US media bubble makes me not see the full picture.
• I can see why GTWS would want to partner with a broadcaster rather than just put all their races on YouTube. YouTube isn’t your partner, they are just a platform offering you distribution in exchange for you following their rules – which is not a bad thing, but a partner they are not. My guess is that GTWS is looking for a partner that can help them take the product GTWS to a new level of professionalism in how it is presented to the audience. Having their races shown on the same channel as more established sports can be considered a positive for potential sponsors and brands encouraging their athletes to compete at GTWS races as well as of course the athletes themselves.

The last point I want to make here is the obvious comparison between the huge hit Cocodona was and the sort of tepid response to the kickoff to the GTWS so far. Many have argued (Greg Vollet being one of them) that trail needs a television friendly model – tighter course, shorter races. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe, what the Cocodona phenomena is showing us is that watching really long trail races is actually what works in this new paradigm of esports and video game livestreams. Sometimes ultra distance race livestreams do feel like watching paint dry, but there seems to be something ‘there’ that is connecting with people more so than a trail race that is short and feels professionally manufactured to fit into a traditional sport broadcast? For one: a 2 hour livestream is over before I get back from my weekend run, but a multi-day race I can dip in and out through the day as my schedule allows and it can feel like connecting with friends over a shared experience rather than just listening to pro commentators bark results at you.

Where there is a clear comparison is that in both instances – GTWS and Cocodona – the actual livestream/broadcast product is part of a bigger play. For Salomon, owner of the Golden Trail World Series – and their national series’, these races series are a marketing play. In the instance of Cocodona, Aravaipa owns the race and the streaming provider Mountain Outpost, which is also contracted to provide live-streaming capabilities for WSER and Hardrock livestreams and 30+ other races just this year alone. In both cases the livestream itself might not have to ‘pay for itself’ and become sustainable. They are seen as tools to grow the sport and grow the brands and businesses behind it, even if the investment into equipment, man-power and other expenses aren’t directly recouped.

Mountain Outpost takes their (well-deserved) victory lap:

1.4 million views.
 43,000 peak live viewers. 
130,000 live chat messages.
 126 hours on mic.
 2,100+ miles on the road.



I wonder what the gas prices are in Arizona.

To give these numbers a comparison, here’s what UTMB shared after their Finals in 2025:

In 2025, L’Équipe Group raised the bar with unprecedented coverage. For the first time, from Thursday 28 to Saturday 30 August, nearly 20 hours of live action were broadcast free-to-air on la chaîne L’Équipe.

This extensive coverage attracted more than 5.7 million cumulative viewers for the three UTMB World Series Finals (OCC, CCC^®, UTMB^®), with a peak audience of 633,000 as the men’s race leaders completed the UTMB on Saturday afternoon (ranked 4th among national channels and 1st on TNT). This new record underlines the growing public appetite for a sport that continues to expand (4.1 million viewers in 2024).

In parallel, more than 46 hours of live content (UTMB^® Live production by UTMB Group teams) was streamed via L’Équipe Live, the TV section of L’Équipe website and app.

Note: This is copied from the UTMB press email. I took out their bolding and added my own.

If we see this type of growth and demand for the sport I wonder how this will develop throughout the rest of this year and beyond. Western States has a stellar field of athletes – which should take the viewership for this broadcast – also managed by Mountain Outpost – to new heights. UTMB hasn’t been making big splashes as it comes to innovations for their Final. I wonder if they have something up their sleeve for this year.

A side note:  Zac Marion, director and producer of the Mountain Outpost livestreams was just on Freetrail to share a behind-the-scenes look of what it takes to pull off the monumental effort of the Cocodona Livestream – what an incredible project.

Announced via Instagram:

ASICS Trail presents the Base Camp in Chamonix.

The new dedicated place for our athletes to reach their performance peak.

The brands, and athletes “buy in” to Chamonix and UTMB is getting more and more elaborate. What in previous year’s might’ve started in early August with a prolonged ‘basecamp and final training block’ in the Chamonix area is now turning into an all summer long investment and focus.

It will be interesting to see if this investment bears fruit.

As a side note: I am posting this on Memorial Day here in the US which is the long weekend where historically the Western States Training Camp is happening. Traditionally the event has been the community gathering and preparation for WSER just a month out. One thing that has made Training Camp special has always been the ‘rubbing of shoulders’ with elite athletes that show up to train along with the community on the course, with aid stations support and shuttle service. This year it’s been reported that the elite athletes increasingly have been opting for their own training – distraction free and not showing up at the official Training Camp.

Picking up here a personal report from Anna Simonsson-Søndenå on Instagram after hearing and seeing several mentions on my feed about this race:

Multiple-incident accident at the Transylvania 100 mountain marathon competition. Mountain rescue teams were required to intervene in 15 cases, three of which were more serious. All injured persons have been stabilized. The presence of a bear was also reported on a hiking section, but the animal was driven away before it could attack anyone.

This is never a great look for a race organization. If one person gets in trouble it’s an accident, if many people need to get rescued on the same stretch of the trail it feels negligent by the race organizers. In a situation like this you either postpone the race, properly mark and secure the course with ropes and S&R on site to help people traverse the questionable sections, or warn runners up front of what is to expected on race day. As trail running is going in popularity the last option is increasingly a challenging proposition as runners don’t read race manuals or think they can skip the mandatory gear. Just look at the behavior of some of the elite runners at UTMB these past couple of years for examples of this.

Alex, German YouTuber takes on the “business side” of the UTMB World Series in one of those ‘outrage porn/explainer videos’. These shows all are manufactured to get the “outrageous point” across in the first 3 min, then cut to an ad – so the host can make money off the outrage – just to end with a wimpy “well, things are nuanced and both sides of the story are reasonable and worth considering”.

But the reason why I am linking to it here is because he’s another voice just so casually dropping the whole “Whistler kerfuffle” as a done deal and he mentions this, boldly and wrongly as if UTMB pushed Gary out of a business opportunity. Not sure why this is so pervasive in Germany especially, but it’s something I need to investigate further. Of course it fits the narrative of “big business doing bad things to little guys”, and wrong information travels further and stick longer than the truth, especially on the internet. And maybe the further one is removed from the actual story – geographically speaking in this scenario- the harder it is to get to the actual story, aka the truth, and maybe one doesn’t even care to get to the full story as it wouldn’t fit their preconceived narrative?

Well, as a fellow German I am kind of embarrassed by this odd trend, to be honest.

Grace Cook went to the Satisfy x adidas activation and has some thoughts on the explosive aftermath:

Runners turned into high school mean girls this week, unleashing a Burn Book of public criticism against Satisfy, the small but very influential French running brand. The trigger? Its collaboration with Adidas, which was unveiled at a private launch party in the Sonoran desert in Arizona last weekend. I was one of the very few to attend.

It’s a really great post summarizing her experience in the Arizona desert and putting the event into the context of how fashion and sports brands launch new products, build hype and activate the public to buy their stuff.

The one quibble I have with it is her analogy of the ‘bullying mean girls’ is that Satisfy isn’t the poor beleaguered wallflower. They are a luxury company whose CEO keeps getting into cat fights online. A VC funded brand built on trying to be ‘cool’ while charging $300 for a cotton t-shirt with holes. “Oh, who will stand up for the little guy” isn’t the rallying cry that will resonate with a brand that’s build on an air of exclusivity and “too cool for school” attitude. Yes, they aren’t Nike, but they are also partnering with adidas on this collab. Over the past few years Satisfy has to be the darling of the running world. Business experts extolled their strategy of going ‘upmarket’, and influencers in both the fashion and running world loved to show off their affluence and edginess by wearing their gear. Now the brand is experiencing a bit of headwind and mockery, I’d say a good punk rocker should feel right at home with this.

Sabrina Little for iRunFar ponders the ethics around doping for non-professional runners:

This is another reason why we should maintain consistent moral norms across non-professional and professional racing: Professional runners do not just materialize from thin air. They are introduced to the sport and mentored through the running community at large. If that community has a cavalier attitude toward drugs, or is broadly complicit in illicit supplementation, this makes compunctions around drugs less acute at all levels of the sport.

This article is in response to the ‘Cam vs. Sage‘ saga that’s been swirling around the social media channels and has resulted in a official complaint with USADA.

For me the issue with doping is that this is one of these subjects that does have an effect on the community. If you’re just a solo runner, outdoorsman, and bow hunter, and you like to put things into your body, be my guest, I couldn’t care less. But as an influencer who’s build an empire inspiring others to ‘keep hammering’ or what ever you do, you’re not just a random amateur. You’ve build and you’re representing a community and that is part of your business strategy. Be transparent and don’t be like the ‘Liver King‘. But, and this is not “gatekeep-y”, once you start participating officially sanctioned events, and you bring all the attention of your social media community with you, you do need to submit yourself to the ‘rules of the game’ that exists. And that doesn’t matter if these rules are basic trail etiquette, mandatory gear, or doping regulations. Carving out exceptions is what erodes community and creates division and that is something worth standing up to.