By Mathias Eichler
The adventure podcast about trail running and mountain culture. Subscribe in your favorite podcast player.
The adventure podcast about trail running and mountain culture. Subscribe in your favorite podcast player.
Electric Cable Car is counting down until the end of the year by reliving the action-filled year 2024 in trail running. Join me.
Singletrack – Episode 262:
Lifelong runner and founder of the US Trail Running Conference Terry Chiplin joins the show from England to share his story into running, his motivation to make running the focus of his career, and his perspective on what combines us as a community and how we can grow into the future.
In Portland of course:
Come join us on Thursday, December 1st from 4-8pm for the grand opening of the adidas TERREX pop up store. Store is located at 1411-1435 NW Flanders St. Portland, OR 97209.
Adidas has had a challenging go with its outdoor sub-brand ‘Terrex’. The first foray into the US market was with a subsidiary and their product was sold exclusively on their own domain adidasoutdoor.com. Then they canned that partnership, taking the product line in-house, and onto their main website Adidas.com, where it sort of gets lots now. That happened around the same time they bought Five Ten, the mountain bike and climbing brand. That brand was also usurped onto their main web shop essentially giving these markets as much visibility as some ‘fashion brand collab’, which might make sense financially. A Beyonce collab surely must make more money than selling some trail running shoes, but I fear the products, geared toward the outdoor market, are just getting lost amidst the thousands of sport and fashion shoes they sell.
Now this fall Adidas launches a big push through REI and are now promoting the Terrex brand in a standalone store. From a supply chain and inventory management point of view it must make sense to have all product lines under one roof but from a marketing point of view these products deserve their own platform and visibility. We shall see how this goes, and where it might lead.
ATRA has all the info, including dates, locations, and detailed maps of the various courses.
They also published qualifying requirements for US athletes wanting to compete.
Here are the US qualifiers
For the Vertical Race:
For the Short Trail:
For the Long Trail:
For the Classic Up/Down Mountain :
There’s more detail and nuance on the selection process at the link.
From today’s official media announcement:
The 96th Comrades Marathon will be a Down Run on Sunday, 11 June 2023, starting at the inland City of Pietermaritzburg at 05h30 and ending 12 hours later in the coastal City of Durban. Due to the ongoing roadworks, the distance will be approximately 90km. This will be the 48th Comrades Down Run, which is finally on par with the same number of Up Runs.
Entry period opens today and is open until 9 December, or until entry cap of 20,000 runners is reached.
20,000 racers! What an amazing event.
Just a couple minor housekeeping tweaks for my UTMB Events Calendar:
PS: Still no announcement about that possible forthcoming US race. The subdomain has since been completely taken offline.
PPS: On the UTMB World website: If you click on the link “UTMB World Series Events” that’s right next to the top left logo “UTMB WORLD”, you are presented with a navigable layover of all the UTMB events sorted by continent. Another visual guide that’s possibly helpful in navigating the website.
From the organizers of the Chiemgauer100:
Many reasons play a role, but above all the high organizational effort and the declining number of participants. The strong competition of many, partly at the same time of other running events, finally made us make this difficult decision.
Germany is a big country to not have a classic 100 Mile race, so this comes as quite a shock, especially in the light of seemingly endless expansion in our sport.
Singletrack – Episode 261:
Fresh from an incredible performance at the World Mountain & Trail Running Championship in Thailand Rosanna Buchauer joins Singletrack to talk about her year of racing, her inspiration to move to Innsbruck, Austria, and her role as project manager for Tourism Tyrol. We chat about delicious Kaiserschmarrn, the finish line atmosphere in Chamonix ,and what it means to wear a Team Germany’s jersey when racing ultras.
Over the weekend a new link and subdomain briefly popped up on the UTMB World website (it has since been removed). But it looked like a website snafu unearthed a potential new UTMB race for the U.S.. People over here have been waiting, longing, shouting for more races where they can acquire their stones and the website might’ve just spilled the beans.
Maybe I am completely off base and the whole thing is just a technical glitch… but the subdomain still exists, albeit goes to an empty page now. So take all this with a grain of salt.
Some sleuthing found the possible event that might become a UTMB race: the Desert RATS Trail Running Festival in Fruita, Colorado on April 14-16, 2023. Registration is currently open on UltraSignup with no mention of any UTMB affiliation.
Perhaps an official announcement is imminent?
For the 146 entry slots 2413 people put their name into the lottery (and qualified by running a really hard 100 miler to begin with!). Of these, 1938 are men, 475 women. Based on that, and due to the new regulations we should see a field of about 20% women in the 2023 race. According to Jamil Coury that’s a slight increase from the 18.6% women who started the the 2022 event. Not sure on any further historical data, but I’d be curious to see if this number is the highest it’s ever been?
Stephanie Case made big waves in the ultra online world a couple weeks ago by offering a refund to any woman who enters the lottery but has to bow out for any reason. This, of course, annoyed a few old men, but it in the end it seems to not have moved the needle as much we had hoped. Overcoming inequality will take a lot of work and sadly won’t happen over night.
Last week Alex ran the Red Rock Canyon 100K | 50K, an endurance foot race in the shadows of the Keystone Thrust just outside of Las Vegas, NV and came in 6th overall in the 50K event, nice!
When adventurers start families they drop the risk level of their activities and, well, ultra running is perfect for that.
Discovered by Aidstationfireball and shared on Twitter.
Another big Euro race in the Alps is now officially a ‘by UTMB’ race: the KAT100.
The cat is out of the bag! We are proud to announce today that Austria’s longest ultra trail, the KAT100 by UTMB®, has been confirmed as the latest event for the 2023 UTMB World Series, giving runners the opportunity to explore the famous Kitzbüheler Alps during the fourth edition of the event.
They’ll offer 7 different distances, plus a kids race. Dates are 3-5 March, 2023. Registration is going to open on November 24th.
I have added the race to Electric Cable Car‘s ever-growing UTMB calendar.
Swiss outdoor gear and clothing company Mammut releases a limited edition outdoor watch that’s not really a smart watch, but definitely a watch that can help you in the back country. In partnership, not with any Swiss company but with Casio, the Japanese watch maker known for their G-Shock watches. It costs €500 and is sadly not available in the US. The watch has a distinct “Casio style” and is very much the opposite of the classic minimal Swiss design aesthetic. Totally not my cup of tea at all but, my kid, a huge watch nerd, thinks it’s awesome. So there.
Athletics Canada:
Athletics Canada, in collaboration with the Association of Canadian Ultramarathoners (ACU) and the Canadian Mountain Running Association (CMRA) is pleased to reveal that the 2023 and 2024 Canadian Mountain & Trail Running Championship will take place in Squamish BC, under the umbrella of the Squamish 50 race weekend.
As Gary Robbins tweeted: “Exciting times ahead!”
Forgot to include the mozart 100 race in last week’s post mentioning well-branded races with long history which are now redirecting their domain to the official UTMB.World website.
We give the UTMB World website a lot of crap, and rightfully so in many ways, but it’s worth pointing out that the main website is available in four different languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish), and the Mozart race in addition, is available in German. In fact, several of the subdomains dedicated to their respective races in various countries are available not just in English but also in the native language for that respective country. Pretty cool operation they got going on over there to make this all happen.
Announced earlier during the iPhone launch, now enabled and live, via a software update for all iPhone 14 users:
iPhone 14 users can now connect with emergency services when cellular and Wi-Fi coverage are not available; the service extends to France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK in December.
Obviously I haven’t tried this feature yet, but this could be a potential game changer for how technology can help in the backcountry. The ability to SOS in the backcountry of course has existed for a long time, via satellite phones and other dedicated devices. But this is the first time a feature like this is available on everyone’s daily device, their phone in their pocket.
Currently the feature is free and takes users through a short questionnaire describing the situation they find themselves in, I’d love to see Apple extend this feature and offer a preset message to someone in one’s contact list. Not every situation requires full emergency operation, but a short “I’m running late” could ease a lot of worries for the folks back home. That’s where Garmin still has a leg up… and is charging for. Apple could add this for your iCloud family and make it part of Apple One?
Ari Schneider on Twitter:
Sources at Outside (parent company of @outsidemagazine) have told me that the company laid off about 12% of its staff today. An official announcement is expected shortly.
I like dunking on Outside for their NFT initiative, and they were peddling their NFTs at last week’s Warren Miller show in my hometown, but layoffs are never fun and I feel for the people affected.
This moment in time does really feel more and more like the early 2000s. Buckle up, everyone.
Singletrack – Episode 260:
In this episode Thomas Reiss shares his experience as the international athlete manager of the epic and unique Snowman Race that just happened a couple of weeks ago in the Kingdom of Bhutan. This event was about so much more than racing. It’s goal was to bring people and cultures together to share the urgency to address climate change. Especially as it affects people living in the shadows of massive glaciers high in the mountain regions of our world.
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