(Linking here to the press area on their website for the UTMB Finals, but the information I gathered is from their press email). Here are some of the highlights:

• 11 – This is the average number of Running Stones held by runners drawn for the UTMB, compared with 7 for the CCC and 5.5 for the OCC.

In 2025 for UTMB you needed (on average) 5.4 stones, in 2024 5.3. So for 2026 this doubled. If you want to see a graph, where the probability is broken down by race and number of stones, UTMB created one for you.

• 2/3 – Two-thirds of runners registered for the draw selected the boost, committing to travel to the Mont-Blanc valleys via a lower-carbon route, without using a car.

This is obviously a new number and has no comparison yet. It’ll be interesting, but I doubt we will ever see any numbers, if anyone get’s kicked out for declaring, but failing to follow through. Like… carbon cheaters?

• 76% of participants are European

Last year’s numbers were 75%.

• Women account for 26% of the field

A nice increase from 20% in 2025, but still not Tarawera – numbers.

And from Isabelle Viseux-Poletti, UTMB France Director:

The draw unfortunately leaves many runners without a bib, and we recognise how legitimate that disappointment is, given the time, energy and hope invested.
…
[F]or regulatory reasons and out of responsibility towards runners, volunteers and the region, the number of race bibs must remain strictly limited and cannot be increased.

So, don’t expect getting a bib for the Finals in Chamonix to get any easier in the coming years.

Keith Dunn, official voice of the Barkley Marathons:

The 2026 Barkley Marathons is over. There are no finishers.

Clearly after Barkley saw five finishers in 2023 Laz and his crew made the course more challenging to create the next impossible course to bite one’s teeth out.

Big event! With finally a (somewhat controversial) prize purse. Six WSER Golden Tickets are on the line in the 100K race. Here are the results for both distances (Times might be slightly different to official times, I took them off the live tracking website):

100K – Full Results

Women:

1. Jennifer Lichter – Montana – 07:57:05 (Golden Ticket)
2. Anne Flower – Colorado – 07:58:15 (Golden Ticket)
3. Tara Dower – Colorado – 08:11:46 (accepted GT at Javelina)
4. Molly Seidel – Arizona – 08:25:13 (Golden Ticket)
5. Abby Hall – Arizona – 08:27:50

Men:

1. Hans Troyer – Georgia – 07:20:00 (Previous Top 10)
2. Anthony Costales – Utah – 07:24:32 (Golden Ticket)
3. Tracen Knopp – Alaska – 07:37:27 (Golden Ticket)
4. Canyon Woodward – North Carolina – 07:42:32 (accepted GT at Javelina)
5. Jordan Bramblett – Arizona – 07:47:25 (Golden Ticket)

50K

Women:

1. Jane Maus – Colorado – 03:47:04
2. Liz O’Connor – Utah – 03:52:30
3. Lindsay Allison – Colorado – 03:55:44

Men:

1. Seth Ruhling – Colorado – 03:16:29
2. Adam Peterman – Montana – 03:18:18
3. Cade Michael – Colorado – 031:8:43

Tarawera by UTMB in New Zealand is the second race of the year for the UTMB World Series and the T102 race the first Golden Ticket race for WSER for the year.

• 3rd Honoka Akiyama and 4th Holly Ransom accepted the Golden Tickets in the Women’s race.
• 2nd Jacob Banta and 3rd Max Yanzick accepted the Golden Tickets in the Men’s race.

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

TMiler 163KM (100M – 4 Stones) – Full Results

Women:

1. Devon YANKO – USA – 19:58:28
2. Hannah MCRAE – Australia – 20:25:45
3. Sarah PARKINS – Australia – 21:34:06

Men:

1. Simon COCHRANE – New Zealand – 16:26:17
2. Yutaro YOKOUCHI – Japan – 17:28:05
3. Takumi SAWAYANAGI – Japan – 17:59:50

T102 103KM (100K – 3 Stones) – Full Results

Women:

1. Ruth CROFT – New Zealand – 08:41:11
2. Caitlin FIELDER – New Zealand – 08:45:34
3. Honoka AKIYAMA – Japan – 09:00:24

Men:

1. Daniel JONES – New Zealand – 07:31:27
2. Jacob BANTA – USA – 07:57:39

3. Max YANZICK – New Zealand – 08:01:56

T50 52KM (50K – 2 Stones) – Full Results

Women:

1. Robyn LESH – USA – 04:05:35
2. Jemima COOPER – Great Britain – 04:12:31
3. Julia ANDERSON – Australia – 04:19:37

Men:

1. Samuel MACAULAY – New Zealand – 03:36:23
2. Charles HAMILTON – Australia – 03:38:23
3. Sam ROUT – New Zealand – 03:41:02

T21 23KM (20K – 1 Stone) – Full Results

Women:

1. Katie LOWERY – Great Britain – 01:38:58
2. Lydia ODONNELL – New Zealand – 01:40:05
3. Katinka VON ELSNER-WELLSTEED – Australia – 01:46:21

Men:

1. David VERNON – Great Britain – 01:25:28
2. Michael SUTTON – New Zealand – 01:25:39
3. Nathan PEARCE – Australia – 01:28:19

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

• TMiler Starters: 508. DNF: 203 + Finishers: 305. Women 82 (27%), Men 223 (XX).
• T102 Starters: 938. DNF: 163 + Finishers: 775. Women 283 (37%), Men 492 (XX).
• T50 Starters: 1,787. DNF: 47 + Finishers: 1,740. Women 875 (50%), Men 865 (50%).
• T21 Starters: 1,301. DNF: 16 + Finishers: 1,285. Women 765 (60%), Men 520 (40%).
• T14 Starters: 221. DNF: 0 + Finishers: 221. Women 144 (65%), Men 77 (35%).

The 2026 edition of Tarawera by UTMB saw a total 4,755 starters and 4,326 finishers. The event saw an increase in starter numbers of 28% over last year, partially due to the addition of the newly created T14 race. 2,149 (50%) women and 2,177 (50%) men reached the finish line and earned collectively 8310 UTMB Stones. For the first time in the history of the UTMB World Series an event had 50/50 gender parity across the five events combined. Wow.

Next up the UTMB World Series travels to Mexico for Puerto Vallarta on 5-7 March and to Taiwan for Xtrail Kenting on 6-08 March 2026.

Episode 342 with Krissi Polentz:

On the eve of one of America’s largest ultra trail race, the Black Canyon Ultras, Mountain Outpost announces another new initiative: ‘Race Purse’- a crowdfunding platform for prize purses for elite runners. In recent months Black Canyon, and Aravaipa have gotten under increased scrutiny for not offering any prize money at all. This new project, seemingly outsourcing the solution created lots of chatter online and Krissi is joining me to try to make sense of it all.

LINKS

• Krissi on Singletrack
• Krissi on Instagram
• Race Purse by Mountain Outpost
• On Electric Cable Car: Black Canyon Ultras Prize Money
• On Electric Cable Car: Jamil Coury is the most powerful person in Trail Running

Tom Hooper setup a webpage linking the live feeds (embedding the Youtube videos) for the Black Canyon races in one convenient place. This is something I have been thinking about – and working on in various ways – as this seems to be one of the missing pieces in our trail media landscape. Essentially everyone just posts their feeds on Youtube and announces it on Instagram. But these posts are hard to find and link to – unless you’re constantly on these platforms and the algorithms have figured you out and serve you well.

• Mountain Outpost, the de-facto live streaming provider in the US has its own website and schedule of events, but it hasn’t been updated for 2026.
• The official Black Canyon website has a link to a livestream on their homepage, but it links to the 2024 Black Canyon 60K Livestream.
• Freetrail did a whole week of live Youtube videos, but the last entry on their homepage is from January 12th about their TROY awards.

Back to Hooper’s solution here: I wish he’d include links to live tracking, not just streaming – which is always the thing I am looking for when during a long ultra when I want to see who’s in the lead – or DNF’ed and don’t want to sift through endless livestream banter.

Way earlier in the year than usual the Barkley Marathons kicked off this morning – happy Valentine’s Day, I suppose.

The Resources section on the website: barkley.ferrett.io has a bunch of useful links to stay up to date, especially for folks who don’t want to log into the shit hole Twitter/X, which still hasn’t been replaced as the official communication platform.

PS: There’s a rumor floating around that Kilian Jornet might be running Barkley this year. This obviously would be massive news. I immediately shared it when I thought I had enough confirmed information about it, but it might not actually be the case… I will try to get to the bottom of this.

Yet another Mountain Outpost/Aravaipa/Jamil project, and the second vibe-coded platform aimed at entertaining spectators/fans of the sport that’s dropped this week. This one has a bit of an ‘impressum‘ at least:

Race Purse – by Mountain Outpost

Turn live hype into real support. 100% of contributions go to athletes. This is crowdfunding, not gambling.

The second project needing to explain itself that it’s definitely not gambling. But what it is, is Aravaipa’s acknowledgement that prize money at one of America’s biggest (the biggest?) and one of the highest grossing trail races, managed by the world’s second largest trail running events organizations (after UTMB) might be high time. Folks have been asking for prize purses for Aravaipa events, but especially at Black Canyon years now.

What does Race Purse do?

Race Purse lets fans contribute in real time to increase the athlete fund for select endurance events.

So, the prize money (mostly) comes from the fans.

It’s easy to armchair quarterback (look at me being inspired by the Super Bowl and adding a second football reference in as many posts) and spend Jamil’s money, but to me this is beyond the question of how money should be spend, but rather a matter of: ‘Just because you can “vibe-code” this, doesn’t mean you should’.

When people say ‘AI will influence and inspire every segment of our lives’ maybe this is what they are talking about. None of these platforms would exist without AI-supported coding and development. These tools are early stage startup project – playgrounds if you will. They don’t give us any indication as to ‘what the future will bring’ so it’s too early to claim that ‘this will change everything’. But something does seem afoot and that seems to have jumped the shark. You’re welcome for all the idioms today.

From the founder/vibe coder Simeon Griggs:

Trail Market’s a trail-specific fantasy prediction market and an experiment as something with a lower barrier to entry than trying to pick a podium or top 10. No homework.

There’s no ambition to turn it into an actual gambling platform—just some fun to add to the discussion.

After being inundated with dozens of gamblings ads during the Super Bowl this past weekend project like these sort of sits on a questionable trajectory. Looking at ‘Trail.Market‘ solely from a “fun” angle and not wanting to immediately slip down that proverbial slippery slope, efforts like these are also a sign that the ‘spectator side’ of our participatory sport is growing. And clearly, a new generation of fans engage with the sport they love and follow in a different way. So, maybe this is (part of) the future?

I don’t want to spend too much ink on rehashing the conversation around the question of pacers for elite runners at Western States and the accompanying Golden Ticket races, but, I wanted to post a quick recap and some observations:

• Kilian Jornet kicked this convo off after last year’s WSER when he posted on his blog wondering how much support a racer should be getting and how to level the playing field.
• Jim Walmsley mentioned in interviews and in comments to the PTRA that he thinks that WSER should be run without pacers (again, that’s for the elites competing for the win.)
• On more general terms it’s reasonable to consider a larger conversation on how to unify rules and regulations for a sport that continues to grow toward more professionalization.
• UTMB’s focus and arguments around limits for crew for runners have been rooted in environmental concerns and transportation access challenges.
• These concerns aren’t something that WSER had to address – yet, but if we’ve seen how crew sizes have ballooned over the last few years I wonder when this trend will force WSER’s hand.
• WSER also doesn’t have prize money – yet. So, one could make the argument that the push to professionalize this race via a conversation around pacers seems to be pushing on the wrong lever.
• Of course, it’s absolutely valid to point out and stay committed to the history of the event, the reason on why pacers where initially required/considered/allowed and how this is part of the tradition of this event, and ultra distance races in the US in general.

So, clearly to some this is a hot button issue. In the end not something that can be enforced by public opinion but certainly worth an open and civil debate.

My take

• To make the argument that if you want to call yourself elite and compete for the win at WSER you should be forgoing pacers I find the wrong approach to this conversation. Athletes have proven time and time again that to gain an edge they will resort of every available tool to them. I also don’t think this is a tenable argument that WSER could make. It would split the field between elites and amateurs (even more than it already is) and that is sort go against the spirit of the sport.

The PTRA has raised environmental concerns in regards to UTMB before. Why not use the same approach with WSER? Lobby for a limited and reasonable crew size for each runner. That keeps the playing field the same for every runner.

If a leveling up and professionalization across the biggest races around the world is the goal, why not raise the issue of prize money – and the lack thereof as the main issue for elite runners participating at the biggest American races?

• Of course, any organization imposing limits to how much help a runner can get on course needs to be committed to provide a certain amount of support themselves. A pacer keeps a runner safe, a big crew with ice buckets requires WSER to provide less ice themselves. But, can the monkey be put back in the bag and kiddie pools filled with ice and a team of 20 for each runner be considered over the limit? Will WSER want to take that stand?

But, if WSER chooses to stay conservative in its handling of the inevitable demands that come with the continued growth in our sport what I see is going to happen – and what has already happened in some ways – is that brands with the deepest pockets will distort the competitive landscape and create a spectacle on top of the actual historic event WSER is putting on. And I’d be worried that that I’d loose control of the narrative.

So, my suggestion is, rather than going after the runners and disallow them a pacer, or split the field in elites and amateurs, I would take the route of limiting crew access, number of vehicles deployed per runner, and crew per person per aid station. Maybe that’s not a novel idea, it’s just what UTMB had to do and chose to do in the narrow valleys around Mont Blanc, but maybe taking exactly the same approach here and speaking to it from the same angle – one of environmental concern is the right take to align our global sport and pull into the same direction without rocking the boat too much.

Announced today, registration is open on UltraSignup:

The Broken Arrow Skyrace today announced two new youth distances for 2026. Presented in partnership with ACG (All Conditions Gear), a Nike brand designed for athletes who seek the challenge, adventure, and connection of thriving in the wild, the 2026 edition of the Broken Arrow Skyrace will now feature two youth races on the high-alpine trails of Palisades Tahoe: the U-20, the Eagle, and a U-14 race called the Kestrel. 

Trail Futures NTN (Nike Trail Nationals) are youth national championship-caliber events, scheduled for Friday, June 19th, 2026. Designed to encourage the development of the next generation of up-and-coming trail runners, Trail Futures NTN is the ultimate youth mountain running experience.

ACG, the gift that keeps on giving.

Jessy Carveth for Marathon Handbook:

Now it’s returning in a scaled-down format, but with a clear purpose: connect the U.S. trail scene back into the global skyrunning pipeline.
…
The Washington race, Beast of Big Creek, will be pulling double duty. It’s part of the U.S. national series, but it will also serve as the only U.S. stop on the Merrell Skyrunner World Series global calendar.

Let’s go!

Eszter Horanyi for iRunFar:

After a seven-year hiatus, the Skyrunner USA Series returns in 2026 with a four-race series stretching from Alaska to New York. While the Skyrunner World Series — which in 2026 comprises 19 races around the world, including the SkyMasters series final — has been a long-standing fixture on the global circuit, this is the first time since 2019 that the U.S. has hosted a national series.

And the first time since 2018 that the Skyrunner World Series will have a stop in the US.

How can it be anything but:

@austinjklapman logged his Super Bowl halftime show performance with Bad Bunny. 

Perfection.

Austin recorded the activity with an Apple Watch Ultra according to his Strava file.

Matt Walsh takes on the sticky subject of “sponsorships, gifting and investments” as it pertains to trail media:

Running media and influencers have professionalised. Brands fund shows, athletes overlap with product development, outlets take on consulting work, and creators build real businesses hawking gels and AI training plans. None of that is surprising, and none of it is inherently negative. The interesting bit is how the presence of money subtly shapes the edges of the conversation.

It’s worth reading the entire article and Matt is way too kind to the various personalities he clearly speaks of but never directly calls out.

Running media doesn’t lose credibility because money is involved, it loses it when the presence of money quietly shrinks or loudly amplifies what gets talked about. Small signals of context can do a surprising amount to reopen that space.

He also addresses the reality that, well actually, mentioning sponsors and financial ties is already required by law.

These laws set the floor for transparency, not the ceiling for editorial range. An industry can be compliant (although I’d argue we’re not the best at it) and still develop predictable blind spots simply because relationships, access, and formats influence what feels worth saying.

We, in the trail media, gotta be more transparent and honest if we want to keep our credibility.

Outside Interactive the company formerly known as Outside Magazine shares some positive financial news:

Following a five year transformation, the platform brought in $125 million in 2025, over 60% of which came from recurring lines of revenue.

I’ve give Outside a lot of flack over the years, but this surprised me, I gotta admit.

… the company has more than 1 million paying subscribers, although that figure has remained largely flat in recent years and includes people paying for the bundle, as well as those paying for individual services. In total, Outside brings in 35% of its total revenue from the line item.

The law of large numbers. I can’t fathom that there are still a million people subscribing to this “product”.

According to The Colorado Sun, every employee at Outside Magazine who was there before the acquisition has been shed. 

So this really was a complete hostile takeover and private equity play. Grab the brand – which clearly is still worth enough to keep a million people paying for a subscription – and throw the entire team that’s been shepherding and building the business over the years to the bloody curb. If you were responsible for this, how can you sleep at night?

Brooks shares Financials:

Brooks Running closed 2025 with record-breaking global revenue, achieving a 16% increase year over year and extending its track record to nine consecutive years of growth.

Albeit not mentioned in their press release I am claiming a small part in their success due to their partnership with the Trail Running Film Festival.

On a more objective note, this release is kind of funny as it is full of percentage numbers yet has no dollar figures at all.

Marathon Sport, a chain of running stores shared this via press release:

Marathon Sports announced the acquisition of six03 Trail Races and the Cranmore Mountain Race, expanding the company’s long-term investment in trail running in New England. The company also announced more than $100,000 in total prize money across its New England trail race portfolio for 2026.

This puts a renewed focus on trail races from the East Coast and is a big position statement coming from this side of the country. Exciting times for trail races that are not a 100 or 200 miler in Colorado, Arizona or California.

It’s Monday, and we have now numerous news shows dedicated to trail running all airing/dropping on the same day. Some aim to capture the happenings in the world of trail running by actually going live and talking about ‘breaking’ developments.

• Finn dropped his show early Monday morning
• Trail Talk was live on Instagram around 12pm
• Freetrail will be live on YouTube this afternoon 5pm

Gone are the days when the only trail media we had were videos of race recaps posted months after the event, and podcasts interviews full of long form story telling. Tickers, short form hot takes and rapid response “emergency recordings”. That’s where we’re at. And Electric Cable Car is entering the 4th year of doing just that, without the video component – for now. And we’re just getting started.

Something something about ‘blue ocean strategy’…

What absolute impeccable timing with this announcement:

Announcing the welcome return of skyrunning in the USA with a four-race Merrell Skyrunner® USA Series alongside a US stage on the Merrell Skyrunner® World Series – already announced in December.

On the same day as GTWS announces their calendar of events leaving the US entirely, skyrunning swoops in and announces its US National Series.

And no, I am not just patting myself on my own shoulder here, I had nothing to do with the timing of all this. But also:

The Beast of Big Creek will play a double role hosting the only US stop of the Merrell Skyrunner® World Series and the Merrell Skyrunner® USA Series.

All there’s left to do is book your trip to the Olympic Peninsula and come race with us this summer. Let’s go!