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.

Word on the street is that for 2026 the Broken Arrow Skyrace will have a livestream again, but it’s not contracted with or supported by Mountain Outpost (arguably the most experienced and only real livestream provider in the trail space). But apparently Nike/ACG is providing their own?

I cannot wait to see what this will look like.

And speaking of words on the street… another birdie told me that the Broken Arrow team has asked ACG to tone down the “orange” for the event, and cool it with the heavy-handed branding.

It seems we won’t be getting an orange gondola – I am very sad about that.

Chris Foster – Editorial Director of Endurance, Outside Inc. shares the news:

Trail Runner is now the home of everything from hard-hitting journalism and brutally honest gear reviews to trail-obsessed poems, doodles, and cartoons.
…
As the sport expands around us, Trail Runner is rising to meet the moment with an improved version that is bolder, louder, deeper, and weirder than before.

After firing all their longtime writers, smoothing off all their opinionated edges, and unifying all their media properties Outside is here to announce that they will get ‘weird’ again. This has some massive “Zuckerberg on a jet ski” energy and I cannot wait to see how Outside will turn this into action. More memes!

This explains Kilian’s teaser on IG about some form of collab with Eliud in the lead up to WSER. From the app’s ‘story’ page:

At Kotcha, we have an obsession: the science and craft behind elite running. How a season is structured, how effort is rationed across months so the body adapts instead of breaking, how strength work and recovery quietly do as much as the hard sessions, how discipline compounds, day after day, into performance. These are the decisions that separate the best in the world from everyone chasing them.

That’s why Kilian Jornet and Eliud Kipchoge are athlete-founders. The greatest mountain runner and the greatest marathoner of all time sat down to build the product with us, opening up the real logic behind their training: why a given week looks the way it does, when to push and when to hold back, how a plan bends to the runner instead of the other way around. We take that logic, distill it and translate it into a plan that adapts to you: your level, your goal, your life.

These days the word ‘founder’ is stretched into interesting terrain. I don’t believe Kilian and Eliud were just text messaging each other debating in which ones’ garage they should build their first prototypes. They are brought into the project by an experienced team of app builders and marketers with the goal to give the app some celebrity cache. And in lieu of endorsement fees – startups often don’t have that cash laying around – they are being offering equity shares into the company at ground level does earning themselves the title of ‘founder’ – which in turn adds even more credibility to the app.

Is the app any good? Who knows. I’m not the target market for this, maybe DCRainmaker will take it for a spin? Or maybe I will get a chance to chat with the folks behind it at TrailCon? Kotcha seems to certainly be aimed at the folks who are looking for a AI powered training app with celebrity endorsement.

Add this one to the growing bucket of ‘tech entering the trail running space’.

Lastly I’m just gonna note that Kilian is extremely good at using Western States especially to launch and market his products and businesses.

Just announced today:

This face does not belong to just one person.

It is yours: the face of the runners who push their limits every day on the trails, the many volunteers present all along the course, the elite athletes who inspire us and make us dream through their performances, and the supporters who, behind the scenes, make it possible for their loved ones to pursue their passion – our passion: trail running.

There is no single hero here, but a collective portrait made up of many faces, representing all those who bring this adventure to life and allowing everyone to see themselves in it.

And behind all these faces, there is always the mountain. The backdrop to this shared adventure across France, Italy, and Switzerland.

I do appreciate UTMB’s putting the efforts in to create a unique poster each year. It creates a visual representation and allows us to speculate a bit on where ‘their’ head is at.

Here are the versions for previous years: 2025, 2024, and some versions from 2023 and before.

We need a word or tagline to describe this incredible concentration of trail events happening on and around Lake Tahoe in Northern California every June. Is it Cali Week? NorCal Week? Howdy Tahoe? Good Morning ‘Merica? I’m taking suggestions – let me know what you think we should call this annual pilgrimage to Lake Tahoe, Olympic Valle accumulating in a finish on a modest high school track in Auburn, California.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• June 12 -16: Destination Trail’s Tahoe 200
• June 18 – 21: Broken Arrow Skyrace
• June 22-24: TrailCon
• June 24-28: Western States Endurance Runs
• June 25: TRFF’26 in Truckee, presented by Brooks*

*Okay, the last event is just a self-serving promotion for our Film Festival screening – you are welcome and you should come!

UltraSignup’s Trailhead Media calls it Tahoe Week and has a more detailed schedule of events for the entire long week – if you’re coming this one’s worth keeping handy.

I’ll be in town for TrailCon and staying through Western States. Here on Electric Cable Car I’ll try to provide updates and observations, right from the ground – stay tuned for those.

Back in 2024 I connected DT’s Tahoe 200 to the rest of the festivities. Some might find that offensive, or undeserving, and I’m not sure why this doesn’t get connected? Is this on Candice who likes to play ‘Lone Ranger’ or is this a clique thing where the some folks aren’t invited to the party?

Broken Arrow is sponsored by Nike/ACG this year, so it’ll be interesting to see how much the valley will be orange and mimic the heavy-handed branding we’ve seen the Gorge earlier this year. I am told race management has asked ACG to tone it down a bit – so we might, to my great disappointment not see the gondola painted orange after all. The other aspect worth looking out for is that this is the first post-Golden Trail Series year weekend for Broken Arrow. Will this be felt in at the races?

TrailCon will be offering 57 events in the three days between the two race weekends. Of those, over half, 33 with my counting, are considered ‘official brand activations’ and sponsored by a shoe brand or hydration brand provider. Is this the hidden genius of TrailCon? They found a way to charge brands a fee to officially promote their activation? TrailCon here gives brands which are not affiliated with Broken Arrow or Western States a platform and helps them promote their activation, which they probably would’ve anyway in in the lead up to WSER. Compare this to UTMB week in Chamonix. HOKA, as title sponsor (and all their other official sponsors) get their activations listed on the official schedule, but everyone else is considered “ambush marketing” in some way or another.

This massive week in trail running will be climaxing with the historic Western States Endurance Run. Is this event under threat to feel drowned out by all the new shiny efforts being put on by brands and businesses entering the trail space? Will it still feel historic and important? What will the brands – like HOKA – do to stand out against the displays ACG is putting on at Broken Arrow? What will WSER do to not have their story be told just by the for profit businesses entering the space.

Yes, this extended week is about the races and performances, but I’ll be looking for the stories found between the lines and results.

First update on the Freetrail website since mid-January, here’s the schedule for Freetrail-related events happening in and around Olympic Valley next week:

We’re excited to announce our 2026 Trailgating schedule for Broken Arrow and Western States! All shows will be broadcast live on our YouTube channel. Our Western States pre-race shows (6/22-6/25) can also be attended in person in Palisades Tahoe.

Will be fun to experience this in person.

UltraSignup’s new system to award their sponsor spot into Western States:

Each year, UltraSignup awards one Western States entry to a runner. Our goal is to reward a runner who has been waiting in the lottery pool and active in their community, racing, volunteering, and showing up year after year. We’re tallying this up with “Forsaken Points.”

UltraSignup has a leaderboard tracker posted sharing who’s currently “in the lead”.

What a fun idea.

Mountain Outpost’s Race Purse – which some people have considered dead already – is getting an update. The app morphed into a database tracking prize purses across trail and ultra running events:

Track every prize purse and every dollar won, browse upcoming races, see what’s on the line, and follow the money list.

Not sure I love the inclusion of ‘ultra races’ like Comrades. This skews the overall numbers too much. Maybe the option to sort by just ‘trail events’ would solve that problem.

What’s funny to me about this project is that Aravaipa (owner of Mountain Outpost, Steep Life Media, Read Reckoning Labs and this Race Purse app) – I believe – have never paid out prize money for any of their races (except the crowdfunded prize purse at Black Canyon from earlier this year) but now their new tool is tracking and putting a spotlight on other races.

Laura Hall for the BBC coins a new-to-me term: ‘darecation’:

Earlier this year, Pinterest identified “darecations” as one of their top trends for 2026, reporting a 75% increase in searches for adventure tourism and forecasting a boom in “full-throttle, adrenaline-inspired tourism” among Gen Z and Millennials.

More mainstream coverage of the phenomenon that is ultra trail running.

“The ultimate gain at the end is not speed-related metrics: it’s about how cool the course was, what you saw along the route and the stories and adventures you bring back,” she said.

Less than two weeks until the anniversary of my last big race: Lavaredo Ultra Trail. Did it hurt? Yes, but man, I am so ready to go back to the Dolomites.

99 Laps:

99 Laps is a relentless elimination race on a 1.2 km loop. Every 15 minutes, a new lap begins, and the last athlete to finish is eliminated. With 99 eliminations and only one winner, the pressure builds lap after lap. Live timing and a real-time leaderboard keep the intensity high until the very end.

A more “managable” backyard style format that has a fixed ending and focus on more competition rather than collaboration. And another event pushing supplements. Fascinating developments from “that side” of the trail running world and a somewhat polar opposite approach to the idea that people love races because of the places where they are held. This one hasn’t even announced where it’ll be:

The location is still a secret but it will be visually iconic.

So they say.

Bri Sullivan on her blog responds to the Edgelords from The Next Aid Station podcast and their lazy ripoff of the ‘Here For The Women’s Race’ shirt:

This script has played out my whole life, and I think most women can recognize it immediately. I watched it play out again this week in trail running: a sport I love, a community I’m part of, a world that has lately been doing some genuinely exciting things around visibility for women. Unfortunately, alongside those exciting things, there’s been a creeping comfort with invalidating women – with making them the butt of the joke or invalidating women’s achievements and then saying women are dramatic for having negative emotions towards it all (read my piece on Rachel Entrekin and Cocodona 250, too). I want to talk about it. Not because I’m angry – I mean, I am, but that’s not the point – but because I think it’s worth really understanding why this keeps happening, what it’s actually doing, and what it costs all of us when we let it slide.

Bri should be commended here for doing the work explaining and outlining in detail of why their effort fell flat. I probably would’ve just called their copycat slogan a “fucking loser move”. But then again, I’m also a man, and I would’ve gotten away with it.

Bri in closing:

Women expressed discomfort with being erased from their own visibility campaign. Men responded by making a shirt that sexualized their presence in the sport. And the lesson drawn is that if women hadn’t been upset in the first place, none of this would have happened. Women’s feelings, again, are the origin of the problem. Not the actions. The feelings.

This.

This floated across my radar this morning – thank Zach! – and I’ve been trying to decide if it’s worth commenting on and linking to it.

The gist of ‘Trail Running Isn’t an Environmental Sport’ posted by Trailsnultrasnc is can be boiled down to the assertion that the sport of trail running is hypocritical as it pertains to its environmental stands.

Here are 4,000 words (not counting the notes) written generated to say “yes, but”.

Why am I adding more?

This blog is anonymous. Yes, there can be a reason to keep someone’s persona private and I am not asking for a social security identification but everyone has a bias and a frame of reference. Dropping an article of this magnitude and taking a swing at the entire world of our sport without any context is hard to take serious.

In the last paragraph the admission is made that this was penned with support of AI writing tools. And you know my general stance on AI so of course I gotta comment on that. When it comes to using AI writing tools maybe my general point is not that someone shouldn’t use them at all – although it feels a bit rich to comment on environmental concerns while using AI – but that AI just generates so so so so many words. AI doesn’t have a regard for the reader. Could the point of the article – which was important enough for the creator to generate – only be made in 4,000 words? It’s just asking a lot of the reader.

Is there an actual point to the article?

Maybe, probably. But just as I had been writing this the entire blog (all of Substack) went offline. So there, jokes on me.

Speedland announces partnership with Scandinavian brand SAYSKY:

Introducing RX:SKY – a next-generation trail shoe built to challenge what performance on the trail can look and feel like. Now for the first time also in Europe. Shipping worldwide.

Collab is launching on June 11 – selling worldwide.

Side note: I really really hope that launch video is meant in jest and not to be taken too serious. It has serious vibes reminding me of this.

It’s not often that worlds collide so perfectly, but in this instance it was just too perfect an opportunity to pass up. My oldest kid, now in college, has been a huge watch nerd enthusiast for several years now. Of course, as a kid being into luxury watches means watching from afar rather than just going out and buying their dream collection. Now, a traditional watch brand is entering my domain of trail running and I foresee many, many conversations in our house on this subject and on what this all means for trail running and fine watch-making. Oh, and I gotta pick my favorite new Tudor, I suppose. But before I do that, I will let my kid, Ribbon Eichler, say a few words on this announcement.

Tudor hits the trail, how alliterative. I’ll be honest this feels like a long time coming, at least as a watch enthusiast; and I would be curious about the results of a survey on how many trail runners consider themselves watch enthusiasts. The interesting reality is much of the watch world relies on a consumption model rather than an action model. The only types of creativity or productivity in this industry are for the designers, artists, and professionals. For example, as a lowly writer/musician/psychologist the traditional watch doesn’t offer anything for me besides and accessory for my wrist. Compare that to a race car driver or a deep sea diver who have historically used wrist watches to keep themselves safe and informed about the world while they are performing their respective stunts.

Finally, the trail runners are getting their piece of the pie – specifically Courtney Dauwalter, Miao Yao, Rémi Bonnet, and Baptiste Chassagne; trail runners from the USA, China, Switzerland, and France respectively. All four of these trail runners have earned much deserved acclaim in various international endurance races in the mountains, forests, roads, and deserts.

It is also very pleasing that two of the four runners taking part in Tudor’s leap into the trail running world are women, who are still an underrepresented portion of the community. Next I would like to see queer, and indigenous folx as well as more people of color; but let’s not let perfection be the enemy of the good right?

Let’s do a brief history lesson. Tudor is the sister brand of the much more iconic, and slightly older Rolex. In 1905, businessman Hans Wilsdorf founded “Wilsdorf and Davis,” it wouldn’t be until 1908 the Rolex branding would start to appear, and 1915 when the company rebranded as “Rolex Watch Co.”

Throughout the brands history they would design watches for trenches, and diving. Specifically with the introduction of the “Oyster” which was a hermetically sealed, hence water and dust resistant, watch case. Rolex would also popularize the dive watch, and made an unimpressive chronograph that would only blow up after being worn by Steve McQueen.

In 1926 Hans Wilsdorf would register “Montres Tudor SA” in Geneva Switzerland, with the goal to sell more affordable watches to more professionals in fields such as deep sea diving. Nowadays, Tudor is known for making “affordable” recreations of vintage Rolex watches and have even started sponsoring sports teams. Tudor is a substantial sponsor of the Formula 1 team “Visa Cashapp Racing Bull,” although you wouldn’t be able to tell based off of the team name; Tudor Pro Cycling has also recently created a new headquarters in Sursee, Switzerland.

As of this press release Tudor has not created a specific watch for their athletes but that is par for the course for a brand new athletic collaboration. The watches chosen to begin this relationship are from the much beloved “Ranger” collection, a simple and solid field watch with only three hands, a stainless steel case, gender accessible size of 39 millimeters, and an in house automatic movement.

This collaboration feels right, Tudor prefers to brand themselves as the individual athletes brand, rather than Rolex who prefers to stick with the red carpet celebrities, or sports timekeeping. It remains to be seen where this collaboration will go, but I think it could turn into something really special.

Sources:

• Montres, Tudor. “Tudor Hits the Trail with the World’s Top Running Athletes.” TUDOR HITS THE TRAIL WITH THE WORLD’S TOP RUNNING ATHLETES, 9 June 2026.
• Montres, Tudor. “Tudor Pro Cycling Gears up for the Future with New Headquarters.” TUDOR Watch Official Website, 4 Sept. 2025.
• “Rolex.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 9 June 2026.
• “Tudor Watches.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 7 Apr. 2026.

This announcement is already a couple of weeks old but in the light of today’s Tudor announcement I thought it was worth posting. Jimmy has been a brand ambassador for Bremont watches for several years. Here the sponsorship deal flips the other way. First was the luxury watch deal, then comes the practical GPS watch deal one can actually wear out on an adventure.

First luxury watch brand to enter the trail running space. From their official announcement:

It already seems impossible to run 100 kilometers, much less 171km with over 10,000 meters of elevation gain, and that’s to be taken literally. To anyone “normal”, it’s unthinkable. But for Courtney Dauwalter, Miao Yao, Rémi Bonnet, and Baptiste Chassagne, it’s what they were born to do. It’s where they find meaning and purpose.

The announcement clearly is aimed at UTMB and the athletes are carefully chosen to create global appeal.

Elite athletes typically don’t wear mechanical watches, but that’s not the point. The point is to celebrate the win. To memorialize the finish. To commemorate the achievement. That’s the point.

I find this sentence surprisingly honest and to the point. Tudor admits here (and avoids brand partner confusion – Courtney is still sponsored by Suunto for example) that their watches aren’t meant to be the tool “on the trail” while running, but rather the gift one buys themselves for having completed their epic adventure and fulfilled their dream.Train years, collect stones, travel around the world, race UTMB, finish and buy yourself a $4,000 watch. Seems like the rest of the world is waking up the reality of who trail runners are = affluent global citizens who can make the pilgrimage to Chamonix once a year to race around Mont Blanc.

Well then, now I gotta pick my next watch, I guess. Aspirationally of course.

Announced by UTMB this week:

If an injury or illness occurs after registration and cannot be fully resolved in time to allow participation under appropriate conditions, the organization recommends that the affected runner avoid taking unnecessary risks, cancel their registration (cancellation terms are outlined below), and apply for priority registration for a future edition.

There are a few stipulations around this, of course, but it’s a good move for UTMB to ensure that runners aren’t risking their bodies for their one-shot, hard-entry entry. If shit really hits the fan and you’re injured you can now defer your entry without losing your place. Good stuff.

I wonder too if this might be a pre-cursor to a long anticipated wait-list?

Gabriel Solomon with a thought-provoking essay on LinkedIn titled: ‘Major City Marathons Don’t Belong to Organizers‘. The premise Gabriel put forward is pretty straightforward:

You can’t simply move the Bucharest Marathon to another city and expect it to remain the same event. You couldn’t move the Paris Marathon to Lyon or the Rome Marathon to Milan and pretend nothing changed.

It’s worth reading the whole article – despite it being on LinkedIn – and taking a moment to reflect on how this translates to the trail races we’ve built and enjoy.

He concludes:

[…] organizers often discover that the most valuable asset was never the logo, the trademark, or even the event name. It was the trust of the community.

Happening this weekend, 4-7 June 2026 in Ljubljana – Kamnik, Slovenia.

Here are the results for the various short distance races.