Adam Lee chats with Billy Barraclough about his film ‘Fellsman’, part of TRFF’26:

Billy Barraclough has a deep connection with fell running and so he wanted to tell the story in a specific way. Everything came together for him with the production of “Fellsman,” and now he gets to tell the story that honours the style of running and the region that mean so much to him. It was great hearing about why he wanted to tell this story, and I’m excited to share it today!

Sunday we kick off TRFF’26. Get you tickets!

Shane Ohly, Event Director for Ourea Events in a press release:

It is with deep regret that I must announce that Ourea Events has ceased trading and is currently in discussions with professional advisors.

This is incredibly tough news for the UK trail running community. The main reason for the business closure Shane pins at:

The pandemic was followed by BREXIT at the end of 2020, which led to a collapse in international participation, especially among Europeans. At its peak, international participation reached as high as 50% at some events. Additionally, the cost-of-living crisis in 2022 significantly impacted the business because our budgets are set well in advance, and when our costs increased by around 20%, entry fees lagged 12 months behind revised costs.

Ah BREXIT, the gift that keeps on giving for Great Britain. Congratulations for having listened to populist liars and allowed them to get elected to the highest office, only for them to destroy the country and then slink away in silence with pockets full of cash… does that sound familiar to anyone?

Via press email (no direct link, but I guess Instagram):

UTMB World Series today unveils the UTMB Live 2026 calendar, with 10 events held across seven countries broadcast live throughout the season.

The races will be streamed on live.utmb.world and through six official broadcast partners: Le Groupe L’Équipe, DAZN, Eurovision Sport and iQIYI, with two new partners joining the network this year — FloSports in North America and Tencent Sports in China.

Two big announcements here:

1. The calendar of events that will be live-streamed
2. The list of broadcasting partners

First, here’s the list of events:

• Tenerife Bluetrail by UTMB – March 21
• HOKA Ultra-Trail Australia by UTMB – May 16
• HOKA Val d’Aran by UTMB- July 2-4
• Trail Verbier St-Bernard by UTMB – July 11
• Monte Rosa WalserWaeg by UTMB – July 17 – 18
• HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc – August 27 – 30
• Wildstrubel by UTMB – September 12 – 13
• Nice Côte d’Azur by UTMB – September 25 – 26
• HOKA Kodiak Ultra Marathons by UTMB – October 10
• HOKA Chiang Mai Thailand by UTMB – December 4 – 5

Again, just like last year I assume that UTMB’s thinking here is: We broadcast the Finals and Majors and whatever other events are willing to pay for the cost of the broadcast. If races are too small, or can’t find the funding from their tourism or brand partners they will not get the live-stream. Is this disappointing to some, sure, maybe. But calling for UTMB to invest into the live-stream of Western States Golden Ticket races seems… misplaced, to put this mildly? If Western States wants the Golden Ticket events to be broadcasted they should initiate that and maybe ask their Golden Ticket sponsor to help out with paying for this. I don’t believe this is on UTMB to provide.

Secondly, the list of broadcasting partners:

In 2026, four broadcasters renew their partnership with the UTMB World Series:

• Le Groupe L’Équipe (France)
• DAZN (Global, excluding Canada, France and the United States)
• European Broadcasting Union (EBU) via its Eurovision Sport platform (Europe)
• Shinai Sports, China’s leading VOD sports platform via iQIYI Sports (China)

Two new broadcasters join the distribution network this season:

• FloSports (United States) — a leading platform for live and on-demand sports streaming
• Tencent (China) — distributing UTMB World Series content through Tencent Video, Tencent News and Tencent Sports

UTMB LIVE, their live-streaming and tracking platform will continue to broadcast all these events for free. That’s really all the important info anyone needs to read. The above list is just a bunch of distribution partners to help grow the sport and test the waters to see where this could possibly lead in the future.

Race director of Snowdonia by UTMB steps up to the Instagram hot seat to explain the situation:

After months of discussions with local authorities and landowners, environmental protections in some sensitive areas mean the course cannot follow all of its historic sections this year. 

We’re currently working on an updated route of the UTS 100K to find the best possible balance between protecting our environment and delivering the Alpine-scale mountain experience you expect. We’ll keep you informed very soon.

I kind of thought that might be the reason for the changes. Could UTMB have handled this differently? Is this another communication ‘own goal’? Maybe, probably.

But UTMB is also in a complete ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’ situation here. Trail running is growing, demand for their events is at an all time high, races, especially the historic ones, sell out quickly. If they keep bib numbers at previous levels and not grow their events then folks complaint that it’s impossible to get into their races and get stones. If they keep bib numbers for their current races and buy more races to meet the demand, then folks complaint about monopolies. If they try to increase bib numbers to accommodate the demand then reroutes are necessary in certain situations to protect the environment. From my perspective, as a race director and close watcher of how UTMB operates their events all across the globe the most sensible position is to stay flexible and assume reroutes are a high possibility and happen on a regular basis. Don’t like that? Tough luck. And sure, you can tell me to fuck off here, but I do believe that UTMB’s perspective here is that the only way to avoid lottery upon lottery is to keep the race routes fluid and always sign up with the understanding that the race you sign up for might not have a finalized course until a couple of weeks before race day. Is that great for the runner? Probably not, but that’s a level of flexibility the organization expects from you, just like they expect you to be ready for any weather conditions.

Adam Lee is back with another interview with a filmmaker of TRFF’26:

Milo wants to make sure we link to Born to Adapt, so that’s where we start, and I’m pumped to share our conversation about his film festival entry, We Belong. Milo was a part of the festival last year in 2023, so it was exciting for me to see him involved once again. I enjoy his insightful thoughts on what made the project exciting for him and why he wanted to tell the story.

Slight edit to the quote above. Mile was first featured on TRFF in 2023 with ‘The Reality of Running‘.

In a single week Salomon announces the signing of Tove Alexandersson and Grayson Murphy, two absolute massive signings and incredible athletes.

I am so glad the collective trail media has spend the better part of the winter wondering if Salomon is retreating from trail and relinquishing the space to ACG, because had an orange train.

This is a new one, and sort of exciting to think about. DC Rainmaker with the story (who else!):

Suunto has announced today they’re now allowing anyone to create apps on their watches, even without opening up a partnership account with the company. This allows anybody to download the also newly-available SuuntoPlus Editor extension for Visual Studio, enabling developers to write, test, and publish apps directly to their own watches. Then, if they want to make that available in the larger SuuntoPlus App Store, they can do that.

This is cool and there’s a lot that can be said about the business strategy behind it: bring developers onto the platform with the least amount of friction, they create fun apps, this creates interest by the users, which helps grow the business… iPhone iPhone something something.

But, what I find more interesting is the creative perspective. Could a race director build a custom app? A trail media business? What would a custom app for a watch look like? What would it do? How would it differentiate itself? Oh, what a fun playground to think about.

Adam Lee continues his conversations with the filmmakers of TRFF’26:

Dick’s is a burger joint in Seattle. One of those IYKYK burger chains, and the thought of running a marathon between their 5 locations while consuming something at each one is daunting. Dylan tells us why he wanted to tell this story and how it came together. It’s a silly run, but comes from a deep place of meaning, and it was great to hear more about the project.

Adam, next time you come visit we’ll go and eat some Dick’s.

This year the conference will move to Nashville, Tennessee and will be held from November 5-7, 2026 at the Music City Center in downtown. The conference was recently taken over by UltraSignup with the intention of bringing the conference to a permanent home, in UltraSignup’s hometown. This will give trail runners, and the business ecosphere of our sport a place to gather that’s not ‘mountain west’.

The conference landscape is getting stacked.

Adam Lee of Community Trail Running, media partner of the Trail Running Film Festival and good friends of mine:

I’m always excited to chat with the filmmakers behind the stories we feature during the Trail Running Film Festival. This is a pleasure for me as I get to get excited for festival season and spread the word about what these great creations are all about! We’re starting with “Becky Bates, Not a Running Story”. Scot Proudfoot and Lukas Neemeth joined me and it was great hearing all about it!

I love when Adam does these interviews. It’s such a great way to get excited for the upcoming tour and such a cool way to give the filmmakers a platform to share their ‘why’ behind these incredible stories.

Sunday, March 15th, 2026 the tour kicks off in my hometown Olympia, Washington with a screening at the historic Capitol Theater. Being able to see the project I worked on for the past six+ month on their incredible 4K screen always brings tears to my eyes. Cannot wait!

Xtrail Kenting by UTMB brought the UTMB World Series for the first time to Taiwan’s Hengchun Peninsula. This is the third event in the UTMB World Series of this year. (Puerto Vallarta had to be rescheduled for later in the season due the civil unrest in Mexico.) I’m sure I’m gonna lose track here very quickly as the season unfolds and the number of events increases.

For full results visit the UTMB website, below the top runners by race:

XTRAIL 100K 98KM (100K – 3 Stones) – Full Results

Women:

1. Natalia MASTROTA – Italy – 12:29:09
2. Shi Jing HOU – Chinese Taipei – 12:42:37
3. Anonymous – Individual Neutral Athletes – 13:39:36 (who should this be?!)

Men:

1. Kok Wai TSE – Hong Kong – 09:24:56
2. Jantaraboon KIANGCHAIPAIPHANA – Thailand – 09:39:06
3. Ryan WHELAN – GBR – 09:42:04

XTRAIL 50K 50KM (50K – 2 Stones) – Full Results

Women:

1. Kanako EDAMOTO – Japan – 05:19:33
2. Vanja CNOPS – Belgium – 05:31:58
3. Kaede HAYASHI – Japan – 06:01:53

Men:

1. Rui UEDA – Japan – 04:06:55
2. Koken OGASAWARA – Japan – 04:25:20
3. Hiroyuki KAWACHI – Japan – 04:39:53

XTRAIL 25K 26KM (20K – 1 Stone) – Full Results

Women:

1. 佩倫 吳 – Chinese Taipei – 02:26:32
2. Helene JURAMY – France – 02:36:02
3. Mong Lei LIU – Chinese Taipei – 02:45:56

Men:

1. Ronan LLYR – Irland – 02:07:56
2. Rodrigue HAUWAERTS – Belgium – 02:09:37
3. Meng Yu HSIEH – Chinese Taipei – 02:10:01

Below are the overall numbers for this year’s Event:

• XTRAIL 100K Starters: 387. DNF: 45 + Finishers: 342. Women 70 (20%), Men 272 (80%).
• XTRAIL 50K Starters: 741. DNF: 45 + Finishers: 696. Women 204 (29%), Men 492 (71%).
• XTRAIL 25K Starters: 1,087. DNF: 17 + Finishers: 1,070. Women 403 (38%), Men 667 (62%).
• XTRAIL 10K Starters: 355. DNF: 1 + Finishers: 354. Women 185 (52%), Men 169 (48%).

For the 2026 edition Xtrail Kenting by UTMB saw a total 2,570 starters and 2,462 finishers. 862 (25%) women and 1,600 (65%) men reached the finish line and earned collectively 3,488 UTMB Stones.

Next up the UTMB World Series travels to Mainland China for War Horse Ultra-Trail Xiamen on 14-15 March 2026.

This week we race L.B.A. Park. Join us for our Little Backyard Adventure races in Olympia, Washington. Checked out the course yesterday (Strava File of the Week, or what?), and while there are a couple of muddy spots – in the same place as every year, overall the trails look amazing and the forest inviting.

Come on and join us this weekend!

This year the conversation about the “business side” of UTMB week seems to almost kick off ahead of the stories around the runners. Well, Kilian is confirmed, I guess that’s all we needed to know.

But Matt Trappe highlights a post by Fabrice Perrin on LinkedIn calling brands who aren’t the official sponsors of an event ‘parasitic’ – which I believe he changed the wording since the original post. But the sentiment remains using words to describe the brand’s effort as: ‘toxic, malignant,  opportunistic, dishonest” (mind you, those are all the English words from the auto-translation tool LinkedIn provides).

Matt responds:

You heard it here first but I think the UTMB “ambush” crackdown is coming much harder this year.
…
Also, there’s that word again – “parasitic”. It’s been used too often in running lately and it’s not a good look for us.

Fabrice added an addendum to his posts that seems to be backpedaling some of his harsher stances:

I’m not talking about brands present in Chamonix / in a territory that activate adjacent (community runs, pop-ups, useful services, content): this is normal and often positive.

What I’m aiming for is a specific behavior: deliberately creating a confusion of affiliation (“you’re a partner/official”) via wording, visual codes, proximity or “look-alike” installations, or use of protected trademarks/properties.

In other words: adjacent = ok; Ambiguity of affiliation = not ok.

My comment to his initial post:

I understand your point of view from an organizer perspective, but also: fans/visitors love the diversity and effort by many brands offering activations/events and ways to connect and celebrate the sport. The competition is healthy and exciting.

I try to keep an open mind here. Clearly the Winter Olympics were more closely watched by Europeans than our stateside counterparts but some of the learnings from these events seem off to me. I would love to know examples where the general public got confused by the wrongful brand association and how that in turn created a negative side effects – for the public, mind you. Do the event organizers potentially miss out on revenue? Or get contractual push back from their brand partners? Sure, there are ramifications, and I don’t want to discount those. But especially in the example of the Winter Olympics, neither the IOC or any of these global brand partners are in any situation where I would feel the need to jump up and protect their precious brands values they created for themselves.

Via last week’s press email:

UTMB® World Series and Laboratoire SVR, an innovative dermatological brand specialising in sensitive skin care, today announce a three-year partnership. This strategic collaboration marks an important step for both organisations: Laboratoire SVR strengthens its commitment to sports sponsorship and confirms its ambition to become the dermatological reference for athletes, while UTMB World Series continues to enhance the support provided to runners across its global circuit.

Matt Walsh on this announcement on Trail Mix:

A dermatology partner signals a shift toward more specialised performance and lifestyle categories, the kind typically seen in larger endurance sports such as cycling and triathlon.

UTMB keeps finding interesting ways of expanding their list of partners that feel almost non-endemic but still are tight closely to the overall experience and story UTMB is telling.

Julie E. Greene reporting for local news Herald-Mail:

Organizers of the JFK 50 Mile ultramarathon are considering moving the race to Frederick County due to the lack of financial support from Washington County government for this year’s event, co-race director Mike Spinnler said.

This is not just a conversation around a course alteration, like we’ve seen at Snowdonia, but the event would move counties, essentially creating a very different event:

The Frederick County route has been a backup route for the JFK 50 Mile for years in case some kind of issue cropped up with the Washington County route.

If the race moves to Frederick County, the proposed route would have participants use the same stretch of the Appalachian Trail and then go to the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park towpath, exiting the towpath at Lock 29. Instead of heading west on the towpath, runners would go east for 16.7 miles and then make a U-turn to come back up the towpath for 9.5 miles. Then they would take back roads for about 5 1/2 miles to finish the race by Brunswick High.

This is a tough place for an event with such history. Runners want to run the same trails, compete at the same history event to create equal competition.

As to where the money they race org asked for comes from:

“Hotel-motel tax (revenue) was intended to kick-start things. It was never meant to be a long-term financial support,” Barr said. “I think, in light of all the budgetary restraints and pushback from the state — everything that we’re obligated to, we’re turning every page over and looking for every dollar we can find to support the community.”

This is a common sentiment in US local politics and a classic example of how Euro races are different. In the Alps the economics around tourism are part of a long term thinking. Here in the US tourism dollar generating businesses are seen just as another single unit without considering the larger impact the event has on the community. I bet the same politicians would roll out the red carpet if some mega corp chain store would ask for tax breaks to open their first drive thru in the county.

[The] JFK 50 Mile could have an economic impact of about $1.5 million based on 1,300 people spending three days here for the event.

Those are estimated numbers, and without a study behind hit, but clearly these dollars generated don’t just go to the race organization, but to the businesses in the region benefiting from tourism. Further the event supports local nonprofits:

The JFK 50 Mile website lists over 40 charities the race supports. Many of them are youth cross country and track programs. The list includes other local charities as well as others like the C&O Canal Trust, The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, The V Foundation, The Special Forces Foundation and the Wounded Warrior Project.

If this event is forced to move it, it’ll hurt the community in many ways not captured in a spreadsheet.

Hannes Namberger wore this jacket at this weekend’s Transgrancanaria race. First off all: Congrats Hannes for a stellar 2nd place.

But here’s why this jacket is cool and the first piece of interesting gear I have seen in quite a while (Part of the reason is that it’s not gear made for trail running but skimo racing): The jacket has a zipper expanding along the full backside allowing the jacket to expand and to be worn OVER the vest/race pack and still allowing for access to the gear stashed in the pack.

This jacket features a special secret at the back: A long zipper can create room for your pack when needed. That means you can simply wear the jacket over the backpack and do not have to spend valuable time taking it off first. Via the open zipper you then also have quick access to for example crampons or to attach your skis.

It seems to offer very low water resistance and is really only meant for skimo races as a wind breaker, but I believe this idea could be improved on and optimized for trail running?

I need to investigate this further, and would love to test one sometime.

Popular (only) indie running print magazine from the UK will soon publish/print/ship their magazine from Colorado for the US market. Most of the stories will be the same with a few US specific stories added for each edition.

Starting date for the US edition: April 1.

Merrell Andes Mountain Skyrace in Santiago, Chile takes the Skyrunner World Series to its highest race on their annual circuit, high up into the Andes mountains in South America.

Jose Manuel Quispe Mallma from Peru wins the men’s race and is now two for two in the series. Morgan Elliot from the US comes in third for a second time in as many races.

In the women’s race Rosalia Zegarra from Peru takes the win and improves her standings from third in the first race of the series. Lina El Kott Helander is second after her fifth place finish in the Carrera 4 Refugios event in Argentina a couple of weeks ago.

Find all Skyrunning coverage on my dedicated page.

Here are the current rankings and below are your top podium finishers:

Andes Mountain Marathon 42KM +3650m

Women:

1. Rosalia Zegarra – Peru – 7:41:20
2. Lina El Kott Helander – Sweden – 8:10:42
3. Ana María Pineda – Colombia – 8:17:02
4. Paola Morales – Colombia – 8:58:18
5. Júlia Garriga – Spain – 8:58:19

Men:

1. Jose Manuel Quispe Mallma – Peru – 6:03:03
2. Fran Muñoz – Peru – 6:14:26
3. Morgan Elliot – USA – 6:22:13
4. Weston Hill – New Zealand – 6:39:56
5. Luis Ovalle – Colombia – 6:41:05

Watch the race recap video here.

Next up the Skyrunner World Series travels to Spain for the Acantilados Del Norte on 14 March, 2026.

Via email press release:

The pioneering Women’s Health Programme will advance the safety, well-being and long-term participation of female athletes in ultra-endurance trail running. As women’s participation continues to rise worldwide, this initiative addresses a critical need for research and medical support tailored specifically to female athletes competing in extreme endurance environments. 

The programme created by Ultra Sports Science and bloomUp, and supported by HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc, is a one-of-a-kind pilot project bringing together leading medical experts, researchers and elite athletes.  

Ultra Sports Science is a recipient of UTMB’s charity bib program.

We have been giving UTMB a lot of crap late as they often appear to operate very corporate and sluggish, but quietly they do a lot of small things right and it’s worth pointing out when they do.

Yours truly on a new-ish podcast covering ultramarathon and trail running with stories from the back of the pack at your local race to the biggest podiums around the world. Had a super fun time chatting about story telling and the upcoming global tour of the Trail Running Film Festival.