By Mathias Eichler
Sponsor:
The Trail Running Film Festival presented by Brooks -
Back on Tour for 2025.
The Trail Running Film Festival presented by Brooks -
Back on Tour for 2025.
This story has been floating around on German trail websites. The official Golden Trail Series website hasn’t been updated to reflect this news. I translated the quote from the GTS to the German participating events:
Dear Trail Community,
Over the past three years, we have experienced fantastic sporting achievements, hard battles for podium places and great sportsmanship as part of the Golden Trail National Series DACH powered by Salomon.
Unfortunately, the national offshoot of the Golden Trail Series will no longer continue next year.
In the future, we will devote all our attention and commitment to the Golden Trail World Series powered by Salomon, which is also expected to include two races in the DACH region.Thank you for the unique moments together in the National Series and we hope to see you again as part of the World Series!
Your team of GTNS-DACH
I assume this means that Golden Trail Series is closing down all national series events and increase their focus on their one World Series, maybe increasing the number of races as part of that series. The Golden Trail Series was a unique concept in the trail world with these national series event feeding into the global series. If GTS is indeed changing this up, does that mean they are taking inspiration from the UTMB World Series and just build one big series focused on short trail races, or did Salomon decide that they saturated the market in Europe (they also dropped sponsorship of Mont Blanc Marathon) and are relocating their money? In any case, this is a bummer for the events managers and racers who had been putting on these events for GTS/Salomon and it will be curious to see how and if participation in these events will drop over the next couple years.
Episode 323 with Tim Tollefson:
Tim Tollefson wears many hats and came to Singletrack with important business. Tim is newly on the board of directors for Runners for Public Lands. The environmental organization just recently shared the uncomfortable news that our trails and trail races may be significantly impacted this coming year and beyond by the U.S. Forest Service budget and staffing shortfalls. Luckily for us, Tim is a man with a plan and offers hands on experience, and with that solutions and ideas on how we can get involved. It’s high time for trail runners to take action.
Raziq Rauf in his newsletter (Substack) Running Sucks interviews the Mike Saes, founder of NYC Bridge Runners:
Growing up in New York City, the first community Saes was a part of was the graffiti scene. He grew up risking his lives with his friends by traveling to Coney Island Yard and writing on as many trains as they could without getting caught. The only escape was to run.
Urban runners are built different. The full article is worth a read to get the full background on this crazy phenomenon that has taking over the nation… and the marketing departments of every running brands imaginable.
This article is part of Electric Cable Car’s RE:RUN 2024 – The Year in Review.
This was January 2024 in our world of trail and mountain culture.
Amidst the usual running awards announcements which crowned the best runners of the previous year (and I will not mention here as I am trying to cover the events from the current year), the year 2024 started off with a bunch of fun and exciting announcements, as one would hope for:
So, all signs were pointing up, right? This year seemed off to a good start with lots of organizations increasing their commitments to our sport. But amidst all this another storm was brewing: When we had hoped that the turn of the year might’ve left the UTMB controversy behind, in comes Martin Cox from VO2max Coaching spilling the tea on some behind the scenes emails authored by Zach Miller and Kilian Jornet lobbying other athletes to skip UMTB events and together go and run some other race. What ensued was a lengthy “he said, she said” controversy that eventually brought the PTRA and UTMB to the table. Some closed door meetings were made public by no other than Camille Herron (more on her later!) and several public statements and apologies had to happen. Welcome to 2024, baby, where we were reminded quickly that while our sport is growing, some juvenile growing pains persist. And while the UTMB lottery draw had happened and many folks (including me) were scrambling to book their lodging in increasingly overcrowded Chamonix, the negative stories just wouldn’t leave UTMB. A certain amount of fatigue was setting in. People were wanting to move on, either by vowing to actively choose non-UTMB events (and still clinging on to hope that that magical race in Chilliwack would appear), or just biting the bullet and jumping on the UTMB World Series train. But in the early parts of the year many of the pro runners stayed silent for fear of online harassment and didn’t pre-announce their race calendar on Instagram as they had done in past years.
This post is part of Electric Cable Car’s RE:RUN 2024 – The Year in Review. I’ll be dropping February’s edition in the coming days. To catch up on all of them visit Re:Run.
Another brainchild by Gary Cantrell, aka Lazarus Lake that received mainstream media attention. He sure has a knack for creating events that capture the imagination of the every(wo)man.
(The Wall Street Journal is paywalled, so I linked here to the Apple News version of the article.)
Rachel Bachman writes for the Journal:
The hottest new event in distance running sounds like a riddle. The fastest runner doesn’t always win. It has no finish line. And it can drive adults to eat baby food.
Backyard Ultras clearly are having a moment, but I wouldn’t call them the “hottest new event”. Do the numbers of folks signing up really justify this claim? Or is the event just so nutty that it creates press along with it by its sheer novelty?
Shown at TRE, in that magical booth everyone keeps talking about, now officially announced with a release date of this summer – just before UTMB I would assume, Satisfy’s first foray into the trail shoe market:
Engineered for those who move between worlds. TheROCKER™ is a powerhouse of SATISFY-led tech developments, designed to seamlessly transition from concrete to mud. Equipped with our Vibram® TuneLug™ Outsole, Euforia™ Super Foam, and the Rippy™ Monomesh Upper, TheROCKER™ delivers precision traction, unmatched comfort, and all-terrain durability.
I didn’t know punk rock needed so many trademarks, but hey, why not.
I’m not a shoe-fluencer shoe-tuber, shoe-stagrammer?, so I only care about products like this because they are being released by micro brands, and I find these moves fascinating. A couple thoughts on this announcement:
This is an add-on post to my Substack rant from a few days ago. On 404 Media Jason Kobler writes:
X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts.
Use social media as a way to DISTRIBUTE the content you’re building, but do not BUILD your brand and community on these platforms.
That a corporate social media company says it owns the social media accounts on its service is probably not surprising. Meta, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and ByteDance have run up astronomical valuations by more or getting people to fill their platforms with content for free, and have created and destroyed countless businesses, business models, and industries with their constantly-shifting algorithms and monetization strategies. But to see this fact outlined in such stark terms in a court document makes clear that, for human beings to seize any sort of control over their online lives, we must move toward decentralized, portable forms of social media and must move back toward creating and owning our own platforms and websites.
Substack grew out of the Y Combinator startup accelerator cave. It’s cut from the same cloth as all these other special media platforms listed above. They are just a few years behind the others in “cashing in for their investors”. Give it time.
I know this is meant to be clickbait and I really shouldn’t, but I did… and now you have to too. Outside, or Trail Runner Magazine or Run powered by Outside, or whatever posted a listicle titled “The World’s 8 Toughest Races.
From the lows of Death Valley to the peaks of the Alps and San Juans, some races are so tough that they nearly destroy the best in the world.
6 of the 8 are in the US. Toughness is never explained or quantified:
Since it’s nearly impossible to quantify toughness, we surveyed the most daunting roads and trails, consulted some of the pros, and whittled down our shortlist of running’s most extreme sufferfests.
There are so so many harder, tougher and more bad-ass races than the ones on that list. What an hilarious myopic attempt to get me to rage link to it. And so I did. And now I feel bad.
The year 2024 is slowly winding down and it’s the perfect moment for some celebration, reflection, perspective, and probably a bit of snark. Grab a comfy chair, a warm beverage, sit back and enjoy: It’s time for Electric Cable Car’s ‘RE:RUN – The Year in Review’. Over the next few weeks I’ll take a look back at some of the biggest stories that shaped our sport. Together we’ll be revisiting the ECC archives and I’ll share the highlights with some commentary. The year 2024 certainly wasn’t a boring one but was filled with lots of excitement, some missteps, historic results, and stories that kept us talking for weeks. So let’s get to it. This ain’t an award show!
Amidst the usual running awards announcements which crowned the best runners of the previous year (and I will not mention here as I am trying to cover the events from the current year), the year 2024 started off with a bunch of fun and exciting announcements, as one would hope for:
So, all signs were pointing up, right? This year seemed off to a good start with lots of organizations increasing their commitments to our sport. But amidst all this another storm was brewing: When we had hoped that the turn of the year might’ve left the UTMB controversy behind, in comes Martin Cox from VO2max Coaching spilling the tea on some behind the scenes emails authored by Zach Miller and Kilian Jornet lobbying other athletes to skip UMTB events and together go and run some other race. What ensued was a lengthy “he said, she said” controversy that eventually brought the PTRA and UTMB to the table. Some closed door meetings were made public by no other than Camille Herron (more on her later!) and several public statements and apologies had to happen. Welcome to 2024, baby, where we were reminded quickly that while our sport is growing, some juvenile growing pains persist. And while the UTMB lottery draw had happened and many folks (including me) were scrambling to book their lodging in increasingly overcrowded Chamonix, the negative stories just wouldn’t leave UTMB. A certain amount of fatigue was setting in. People were wanting to move on, either by vowing to actively choose non-UTMB events (and still clinging on to hope that that magical race in Chilliwack would appear), or just biting the bullet and jumping on the UTMB World Series train. But in the early parts of the year many of the pro runners stayed silent for fear of online harassment and didn’t pre-announce their race calendar on Instagram as they had done in past years.
Still in the midst of winter, things are getting heated in our little world. Just when UTMB and the PTRA seem to have made peace with each other, in comes Camille Herron (and we can now assume that it might actually have been her husband Conor Holt) and shares publicly on Twitter screenshots and out-of-context details of a private, closed-door meeting between UTMB and PTRA. After Electric Cable Car posts about these tweets, I receive a request via DM from one of Camille’s social media accounts to take down these posts and to not mention Camille’s name. When I refuse I get blocked like so many others before me who have called out Camille in the past. Foreshadowing!
All of this ongoing kerfuffle leads to the point that notable trail figures are starting to be fed up and are finally publicly calling for peace; or at least are asking to let folks do their thing without the constant bickering, name calling and warmongering – this is just trail running after all.
It’s all manufactured controversy. This is all just made up. So many people just want to have the magical experience of circumnavigating the mountain and doing it with others, because there’s this strong communal feeling when you’re doing it. And all the other shit? No one actually cares.
Anton has since run and placed second at Grindstone with the goal of getting back to the UTMB Finals in Chamonix.
The trail world sees its first high profile doping case with 2023 OCC winner Stian Angermund testing positive and getting banned from competition. Like with many other high profile cases like this, there’s plenty of controversy going around with it. Several pro runners jump to Angermund’s defense and are publicly rooting for him in the IG comments, while Marcel Höche takes a different approach. Angermund responds claiming his innocence and eventually UTMB is forced to respond as well. As of this writing the case is still not resolved, Angermund was still claiming his innocenceback in June.
Coast Mountain Trail Running pulls the plug on the much-hyped Chilliwack race for 2024 (and there won’t be on in 2025 either). Permits are hard to obtain, especially for brand new events and it seems especially if the event had been announced out of jealous rage.
The full entry list for Western States is posted and I had some fun had with digging into the numbers.
On the business end of things we begin to hear more and more about the chilling headwinds the outdoor industry is facing after several years of pandemic fueled growth. But, nonetheless several promising announcements are being made:
We end on a positive note, meant to challenge and inspire. On a recent run I chatted with friend of Electric Cable Car and frequent guest on Singletrack Alex Bond about the need for trail runners to pickup the slack and start helping with trail maintenance, and trail building, and trail advocacy. This conversation was initially was prompted by Runner’s for Public Land’s call to action about the upcoming budget shortfalls at the US National Forest Service and the possible consequences leading from that budget crisis. Tim Tollefson, newest board member of RPL joined me on the latest episode of Singletrack to talk more in-depth about all this – you should give it a listen and then find your nearest volunteer opportunity to get your hands into some dirt. But, why I am adding this paragraph to the end of February’s RE:RUN 2024 edition is that this year, during the month of February, the Kilian Jornet Foundation launched an initiativeaimed exactly at this perceived shortcoming by trail runners: trail maintenance and restoration. So, clearly, high profile athletes and spokespeople are speaking about this issue and doing something about it. Yet somehow this still isn’t enough to inspire enough folks to get out and dig. Maybe we do need to revisit my idea that we should lobby Strava to add a ‘trail work’ activity to their app so folks can show off, I mean share and inspire others, when doing trail work and logging it as their workout.
In March of 2024 we finally are heading back out onto the trails. Events are happening around the world and the mood is upbeat. The Trail Running Film Festival Global Tour 2024 kicks off and with my race management company Rock Candy Running I host the Little Backyard Adventure races again. For the first time we try some live-tracking and posting on Electric Cable Car. And I learn that this shit is hard especially when you’re also the race director and got a million of other things to do.
March is of course, sometimes, often, maybe, who knows, the month for the Barkley Marathons. The event that barely sees any finishers, but, because people are glued to the cryptic messages from official voice of the race Keith Dunn on Twitter/X the hype around this event is unprecedented. The event this year experiences favorable weather, an unprecedented 5 finishers, and most importantly for the first time a woman, and no other than the incredibly Jasmin Paris finishes the race with less than 2 min to spare. Jasmin’s achievement I would consider the greatest race performance in all of 2024. And while we don’t have a livestream for this event the photos that made it around the world of Jasmin’s finish instantly became iconic.
While everyone was waiting for the start of Barkley to be announced we did get a momentary distraction by one of the biggest and most unique marketing events ever conducted in trail running. The Lululemon Further event has everyone talking, for days. The images and storylines that are being shared on social media during the event are having a huge impact. ‘Further’ feels new, and fresh, and over the top. Sadly it was just a marketing event after all, the products aren’t available in their online store anymore and the website created for it is completely offline – it doesn’t even reroute to their main corporate site. What a waste of what clearly was one the biggest and most important marketing campaigns of 2024.
For TDS, registration opened in December, and as March comes around the race is still not sold out. With the Finals in Chamonix being oversold year after year, this seems strange. Does this have anything to do with the general weariness of the running public about all things UTMB? When the starting list is first posted iRunFar takes a look and highlights the top runners. Jim Walmsely is initially listed but then disappears of that list. Oh, the drama continues.
Outdoor Podcasting is also going into overdrive with seemingly everyone starting their own show. Or a second one for that matter. Aaron Lutze and Dylan Bowman take their personal conversations about the outdoor industry and their business ideas, and record a show around it: Second Nature is born. This podcast has found its way into my feed of top podcasts I listen to regularly. Sometimes I yell at the trees when listening, mostly I agree with the two of them. If you’re interested in the intersection between the outdoors and business, this is a good show for you.
Adidas finally brings their trail super shoe to the market. First announced and teased to much hype during UTMB week in Chamonix in August of 2023 the Agravic Speed Ultra is available for purchase on their website, where they immediately get lost in the deluge of other products. I understand why Adidas wants to sell all of their products through one webshop, but man, this is one convoluted shopping experience not doing the product any justice. What a bummer.
It’s April and brands want to have a word.
The big news is that HOKA becomes UTMB World Series title sponsor. Dacia is getting demoted in the process, much to the joy of the Green Runners. HOKA’s title sponsorship brings the announcement that Jim (what race are we gonna run next year?)Walmsley is going back to Chamonix. This sponsorship also extends to the Majors and it increases and solidifies prize money for the Majors and Finals. These are all big developments that don’t just mean that checks in backrooms are written but that pro athletes are being rewarded for their performance – something the PTRA has been championing for awhile. This extends doping protocols to the UTMB Majors and Finals events. In the same turn (although not officially related) Western States is also implementing an updated doping policy which now extend to their Golden Ticket races, which are also sponsored by Hoka. From afar, no one is saying this out loud, it looks like Hoka’s increasing their sponsorship presence and footing the bills for price money and in turn requiring and or enabling doping controls. This all makes sense: want money for performing well, you should probably want it in a clean sport.
Dacia stays on as premier sponsor getting some love in the Chamonix mobility program and the Eurosport series UTMB launches later in the year.
Headphones maker Shokz also comes on as premier sponsor of the UTMB World Series. – What’s funny about that is that Suunto signed on a UTMB sponsor just the month prior and while Suunto is known for their GPS watches they had just released a couple pairs of headphones that essentially worked and looked very similar to the bone-conducting headphones Shokz had made famous.
For the Boston Marathon rabbit releases their first foray into the footwear space with the Dream Chaser. Clothing makers taking the leap into making shoes is a huge challenge and while often seen as a logical next step (Lululemon did it, Satisfy is about to do it) doing it right is not easy. I don’t know a single person beyond the “shoetuber” who were paid to review the shoes who has spoken highly of these products.
Speaking of shoemakers, Merrell launches a marketing campaign in form of an open letter to the IOC asking them to consider adding trail running to the Olympics. This call to action comes ahead of the Paris Olympics in the summer, but these types of decisions take years, if not decades and the ‘trail running lobby’ (which doesn’t actually exist) missed their boat, not just for Paris, but even for LA in 2028. (And Los Angeles would have some incredible mountains just outside their city limits.) So Brisbane is the next logical venue… that’s in 2032. That’s eight years from now when we could possibly see trail running as an Olympic sport. Who the heck knows what trail running as a sport will look like then?
Alright, for the month of April I really buried the lede. The company that is all over the news and social stream and would end up staying there for weeks (and really wished it wasn’t there at all) is Spring Energy. A Reddit post first scoops and claims that the printed nutrition facts on the much loved Awesome Sauce product by natural foods nutrition maker Spring are all wrong. This leads to much outcry – did I say Awesome Sauce was popular? Yes, even I used it for most races in recent years. Several high profile athletes got into the crossfires and much “ink is being spilled” discovering the truth. My favorite comments are the folks lamenting (and calling for class-action lawsuits) that the DNF in their last race was due to the mislabeling of Spring’s products. Independent lab testing is being conducted, product gets pulled from the shelves and folks are wondering if Spring can survive this. As of this writing Awesome Sauce had gotten retooled and is back on the market and on most virtual shelves. Other products in their lineup still exist and are still for sale. The show must go on. And speaking of show, there’s a whole sideshow developing, in many ways even overshadowing all this, and includes a popular coach doing everything in his power to become “main character of the day”. But this takes us into May.
In May, I ran a race, finally. And it was my first ever road marathon: the Capital City Marathon in my hometown Olympia. Here’s what I wrote afterwards:
But overall, compared to probably any other trail race I’ve ever run this race was easy.
This one might’ve been easy but what is certainly not easy is Cocodona. And that is what everyone’s talking about in May. On Singletrack I chatted with the cutoff chasing friend of mine Ben Mead who ran, and finished this beast of a race and while I am still deeply impressed by Ben’s and anyone’s achievement running this super long power-hiking adventures even after this interview I am not sold that this is something I ever want to sign up for. Cocodona can’t really be mentioned without Aravaipa’s Mountain Outpost live-streaming efforts. This event, more than any other on the annual trail running calendar lives off of the livestream. And naturally, folks have thoughts on what this new media brings to our sport.
As I mentioned above (in April’s write up) the ’Spring Saga’ spilled from one month into the next and even in May it doesn’t find its conclusion. In fact there were so many articles I posted I can’t even summarize it all here. But I promised a side show and it arrived in Jason Koop turning to Instagram and taking it upon himself to bully coaches Megan and David Roche (competitors of his in the coaching world). Somehow this saga turn the entire conversation from talking about product trust and integrity and made it about human decency and weird white male behavior. Not sure what the intentions here were, but if I was coached by Koop I’d run. But then again, the “end justifies all means” is one of America’s most favorite mantras, and the results his racers achieve leave little doubt that behind the macho appearance is probably a good coach. But that’s like saying Musk shooting rockets into space somehow excuses his otherwise subhuman behavior.
In eyebrow-raising footwear news, Altra drops a not-zero-drop shoe. Got that? The shoe maker that made us believe you should wear shoes like walking barefoot is now adding a gentle drop to some of their shoes… as if some podiatrists rang the alarm bells.
Tailwind Nutrition makes their previously limited seasonal release Dauwaltermelon a permanent flavor. Aside from it being delicious and it immediately coming one of their most popular flavors this product is also a partnership with their sponsored athlete: Courtney Dauwalter. I don’t have any insight into how this partnership breaks down, but it is, in our sport, still a fairly rare occurrence, that athletes have their name and likeness so closely tied to a product. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Salomon releases a small capsule with Courtney ahead of UTMB week in August and just before the holidays Suunto released a “Courtney watch” – the Suunto Race S titanium with a special “Courtney watch band”. Clearly brand Courtney is a hot commodity.
And another interesting pattern is emerging this year: races and especially UTMB events are running out of water at the aid stations. Is this amateur hour?
June is Western States Month. And what started as a single race increasingly includes the Broken Arrow Skryrace as these two race organizations are fusing their events together (Jim Walmsley loves racing the Broken Arrow VK ahead of Western States – what a fun double. This year there’s ‘The Taste of Trailcon’ that gives us a hint at the glue that brings these two events closer together = more activities in Olympic Valley. What will be interesting to watch is how Hoka, which re-upped their sponsorship if Western States and Salomon which is all-in on Broken Arrow will play the handoff midweek, probably sometime on a Freetrail podium.
And while in the US, on that fabled last weekend of June everyone celebrates Statesmas and 375 lucky ones get to run it, in the Alps a combined over 18,000 runners compete at the Lavaredo Ultra Trail in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, at Marathon Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France, and at Kaiserkrone Trail in Scheffau, Austria.
This year I sit on the couch during that weekend and I’m taking in all the media and reporting on all the events. I write:
No sporting event solves political problems or cures small-mindedness over night. But what sporting events offer us is a shared experience in a peaceful gathering. These moments can give us hope. They create a break in our daily worrying and struggle. Yes, I may ask a lot, maybe too much of these events. After all they are still managed by corrupt leaders and corporation use them to sport wash their image while destroying the planet. But dammit, we, as people, living on that fucked up planet need a fucking break. We need a breather. You know when you for yourself decide that you had a long week/month/season and all you want to do is watch some shitty TV and eat a pint of ice cream? Or when you know you shouldn’t spend frivolously but you had a rough day and then you buy yourself a new book? When you give yourself a break, a little treat? That’s what these events feel like. We, as people of this earth, as fans, as societies, as communities, we get a little break. These sporting events are our little treat.
In 2025 I’ll be in Cortina d’Ampezzo racing Lavaredo – finally, my dream race!
June is also Electric Cable Car’s birthday month and for the second anniversary I announce the following:
ECC started off as a companion to Singletrack, my podcast. I’m working on reversing the order of priorities. There are SO. MANY. PODCASTS out there. There are very few blogs. Singletrack will remain, but the frequency, and focus will change bit.
Since this statement everyone started their newsletter/blog and is writing now. This is great and I get to link to their content – keep it up everyone!
And fine, I’ll mention Spring one more time… this month, all the big races are dropping them as nutrition supplier and sponsor, Spring finally makes an official announcement and they relaunch the re-tooled Awesome Sauce. Is anyone still using it? Is it still awesome?
The Women’s Trail Running Fund launches their quite brilliant campaign ‘Here for the Women’s Race’ with a simple shirt and a powerful message. All the cool kids in Olympic Valley and later in the summer in Chamonix are wearing the shirt. When I report on it I quote:
The shirt is currently only available in Olympic Valley, but an online ordering system is being setup.
Well, I’m here to share the new website and online shop is now live. And we picked up a shirt in Chamonix during UTMB week.
It’s full on summer now and before the attention of the trail world descends onto the tiny town of Silverton high up in Colorado on Singletrack I chat with Hannes Namberger and Rosanna Buchauer after their respective wins at Lavaredo late June. Both are German and have been on the podcast before, both run for Dynafit, and both use this event as their tune up race before UTMB. I mention these two amazing athletes because I feel they, and others like them often get lost in the list of “best athletes of the year”. Our sport is still somewhat young and our sport reporting even younger. And while any global sport has a hard time truly capturing athletes, and their achievements from all corners of the world. Currently, if you don’t speak English as your primary language and if you don’t show up on the US centric racing circuit you somewhat don’t exist. This is not a complaint. This is what it is and I don’t know how or even it’s solvable. In trail running we still – and thank god for that – have so much diversity in races, locations, and athletes from all over the world, that it’s impossible for anyone reporting on it to fully have a grasp on all the happenings.
The reason why I’m bringing up this topic right now is not just because at the end of June Western States sucks all the air out of the room and other races happening the same weekend barely make the headlines1, but also in July we’re heading to Silverton to follow a tiny race, in a tiny town on really big mountains that has incredibly outsized media attention and mind share in the global trail community.
This year I am heading to Colorado to experience it all for myself. I’ll be emceeing the Trail Running Film Festival, in Ouray as part of Camp Hardrock, where we’ll be premiering Salomon’s new film ‘A Team Sport’ which shares the story of Courtney Dauwalter’s incredible 2023. After the film I get to interview the filmmakers Alexis Berg, Julien Raison and Oliver Denton. Massive highlight for myself. After the screening I stay a few more days in town to experience Hardrock, connect with some incredible people and try to document a run around these massive mountains. Zach Miller’s appendix takes up most of the media attention, but Ludovic Pommeret’s win (and course record (taking the crown from no other than Kilian Jornet), at age 49 makes this performance one of the most inspiring of the year. (And yes, I just mentioned ‘biases in reporting’ above. Of course, getting up at 3:30am, stumbling onto the dusty roads of tiny Silverton in the middle of the night and watching Ludo’s headlamp emerge in the distance is an experience I will never forget.)
For Hardrock fans do not miss on the Singletrack episode with Dale Garland, long time run director and heart and soul of this event.
Alright, enough about Hardrock, there is other stuff going on in the world this month. For one, Jamil Coury purchases American’s only print magazine focused on ultra and trail running “Ultrarunning Magazine”. He also gets the fantastic domain ultrarunning.com with it. This media property has a long history in the sport, is much beloved, and is also way overdue for a brand refresh to match today’s time and media landscape. This development prompts me to name Jamil the ‘most powerful person in trail running’, which writing this today in December still holds up, I feel. Case in point: Jamil’s Media Outpost is operating the livestream for Hardrock and Jamil himself is out there running the race. Jamil also gets picked in the two big American lotteries for 2025 – Western States and Hardrock. Busy guy.
It’s August and as the summer is slowly coming to a close all the important races are happening. Rock Candy Running’s Beast of Big Creek Skyrace kicks off the month that climaxes at the annual UTMB week in the Alps. Beast keeps me busy on the mountain directing a race and away from my computer, heck, the Beast finish line doesn’t even have cell reception. Then the world, and for the first time myself, descend onto Chamonix for THAT Big dance around Mont Blanc. But before we dive into the details of UTMB 2024 a couple other things were noteworthy.
Now, let’s go to Chamonix together. I had been thinking for many months leading up to this – essentially since I had been picked in the lottery to race OCC – that I was taking on a fascinating and brain splitting endeavor: 1. This is foremost a family vacation. 2. I am racing the race of my life and cannot fuck this one up – like I did at Monte Rose a couple years before. 3. With a media pass for Electric Cable Car I need and want to report on everything. In the end I focused on my family, and on my race and let the media coverage take a back seat. I really wanted to report on more stuff, but instead of holing myself up into a hotel room for the entire week to feverishly blog and podcast I spend every moment out on the town, meeting people, seeing everything, experiencing it all and eating lots of cheese. It was the right decision and I am not the only one who struggled with trying to find the right balance between being media and athlete/fan. Dylan Bowman shared his conundrum on the Second Nature podcast. So how does one report on this UTMB week that has grown into massive scale and increasingly is becoming too big to touch? Doug Mayer kicks off the week with an assessment of the state of things and as the main show unfolds, the sideshow during the week is a small section added to the official UTMB media kit describing ‘ambush marketing’ – what it entails and how a brand, that’s not an official sponsor, partakes – or rather not – in the festivities in and around Chamonix. But, in the end it’s the performances on the trails we remember and above all of them the non-elite, non-sponsored Hoka employee Vincent Bouillard who figures out the puzzle on a hot year where lots and lots of pros are DNF’ing and he arrives under the famous blue arch in incredible fast 19:54:23. There’s so much to say about our sport where a non-sponsored athlete can still win the biggest race of the year. The media didn’t know how to report on it and is still under-valuing this achievement in my opinions as I doubt Vincent’s run this year will top anyone’s performance of the year lists. This is not the last word on the UTMB Finals as the reporting continues in September.
The month of September exists in the afterglow of the massive UTMB week. Everyone is a bit hungover returning home from the Alps and recovering from their massive runs around Mont Blanc. Or they are heads down and are using the last days of summer to jump into a race themselves one more time.
German Katharina Hartmuth is in the latter category. She decides to skip TDS and races Tor des Géants. Wins the women’s race and set a new course record in the process. Afterwards I chat with her on Singletrack about her crazy year of ups and downs and I’m happy for her that she finishes it on a up, a huge, incredible ‘up’.
And speaking of downs: After 20 years Salomon parts way with the Marathon du Mont-Blanc. This is a massive change, which is foreboding to Salomon later on in the year shaking up their Golden Trail Series and dropping several other big events from their race calendar. To make up for all this Salomon gives us a first in footwear: a gravel shoe.
I find myself still on a high from a successful OCC and decide to take advantage of my body still feeling great, the recent course changes at the Whistler race that are now offering 3 Stones for a race with “just” 69KM and 12,600 ft of vert, and the proximity to my hometown. I spontaneously head across the border to get my 3 stones, yeah baby! And I am also up there to report on an event that almost broke then trail running world when it was first announced, but now when it actually happens no one seems to notice – maybe on purpose.
I had mentioned that trail persona non grata Camille Herron would make it back into the news as the year goes on and here in September a report by Marley Dickison for Canadian Running dropped that no one had on their bingo card for the year and yet there were no surprises either when the news was unveiled.
Acclaimed American ultrarunner Camille Herron, who has more than 12 ultrarunning world records to her name, along with her coach and husband, Conor Holt, have found themselves at the centre of a Wikipedia controversy. It stems from several edits to the Wikipedia pages of ultrarunners Kilian Jornet and Courtney Dauwalter, which degraded their accomplishments, while also adding accolades to Herron’s own page. The edits have been traced back to Herron’s email and Holt’s IP address.
The response to all this comes rather swift: The duo deactivate all their social media accounts, haphazard apologize while claiming no real responsibility in all this, and sponsor Lululemon drops Camille unceremoniously and quite immediate. I’m still not sure why the overall response was that decisive. Yes, the reporting was impeccable and Marley brought receipts, that’s for sure, and that might’ve been enough to dispel any doubts, but it’s also worth noting that no one jumped up in support of Camille. Everyone sort of shrugged and said, out loud or to themselves, “yeah, this checks out”. But, as we’ve learned from the last few years, cancelled people never stay cancelled for long, and in December Aravaipa Running posts an episode of Laps & Legends with Scott Traer and Callie Vinson interviewing Camille Herron celebrating her performances on past Desert Solstice events with no mentions of her actions when she’s not wearing a bib.
As we’re entering the last quarter of the year and the mountains receive their first dusting of snow we turn our attention away from the action on the trails and back to what the businesses and organizations that outfit us are up to. And we start with a gut punch. Patagonia is announcing layoffs, a first in a long time (ever?). And this ain’t a canary in a coal mine. The is a clear sign that even the established, measured and highly regarded companies are struggling trying to find footing in this volatile business environment. And hey, tariffs are coming, 2025 will be a wild ride.
In further business news:
Oh, wait, we weren’t fully done with trail news yet. This fall a FKT attempt by Michelino Sunseri who runs up and down the Grand Teton has everyone talking. I had sort of missed the initial news dump as I was in Europe at the time, but Alex Rienzie’s blog post brought the story back onto my desk. I chat with Alex, who was on the mountain documenting the run, on Singletrack about how to look at this from the various angles by the various parties involved. And while I certainly support a conversation about the style and ethics around how we run and record these FKT efforts, I find myself wondering if taking the lawsuit route is really the best thing for everyone involved and for the larger outdoor community. The verdict is still, literally pending.
As the end of the year comes into focus we’re starting to get an idea of how the 2025 trail running season is going to unfold.
Runners for Public Lands is raising awareness of the US National Forest hiring freeze and the possible impact this could have on the permitting for trail race events in the US. I talk with the newest board member of RPL Tim Tollefson about all this on my last episode of Singletrack for 2024.
The media landscape significantly shifted in 2024. About 10 years ago ad sales execs coined the phrase “pivoting to video” as a rallying cry for where big money would be found for creators and media organizations. Over the course of a few years social media mega corps made every journalist and reporter from outfits small to large, independent to traditional believe that the written news is dead and everything needs to be captured and shared in video form – preferable on their platforms, of course. Well, everyone has had been doing that over the last few years, and now just like clockwork the algorithms are squeezing the creators and ad revenues are dwindling. Now folks are looking for the next thing and are pivoting to Substack. Writing is back in fashion. The new platform of choice is of course also a walled garden, and creators will be just as dependent on an algorithms tuned by a VC funded, cash-burning startup that’s flirting with nazis. So in many ways we’ve learned nothing, like it seems we never do. On the upside though a ton of creators with opinions, and trail runners, from elites to amateurs, are sending newsletters and publishing their thoughts and ideas on what looks almost a website. This is a huge positive development for me here at Electric Cable Car and for the industry as a whole. Yes, Substack is many ways just another silo, but at least there’s an RSS feed and it feels somewhat more like a website one can actually properly link to, and read the published content, without having to watch a 20min video or listen to a 90min podcast.
And speaking of opening and and finding once voice, Vincent Bouillard, winner of UTMB 2024, who previously had his Instagram account private, makes it public in late November, posts once and within a couple weeks gains 34,200 followers. In case you’re wondering what a UTMB win can do for your publicity.
We’ve made it to the end of 2024. Thanks for hanging with me. Let’s close things off with some fun stuff:
And UTMB opens its registration for the World Series Finals in Chamonix and the demand is so high that their servers melt due to overload.
UTMB announce the entry fees for the World Series Finals for 2025 and I look at some comparisons across the industry. Then the registration for their lottery opens and demand is so high that their servers melt due to overload, or bad programming. And speaking of bad ideas: someone in a bar in Chamonix made sexual advances in the hope to get a bib for UTMB. This story fake – but rest assured, demand is high, and so are some people, apparently.
Finally, if you got some free time over the next few days, UTMB released their series ‘Extraordinary Humans’, which initially was created for Eurosport and in partnership with their sponsor Dacia, on Youtube and is now available for everyone to watch.
And that’s a wrap on the year 2024 in trail running and mountain culture. Thanks for sticking around and reading the 7,000 word (ooof!) summary.
For the first time the World Trail Majors crown their champions:
Courtney Dauwalter and Miguel Arsénio are the winners of Gran Canaria World Trail Majors!
The American runner clinches the victory after her wins at Transgrancanaria and Mt Fuji.
An epic triumph for the Portuguese runner, with a first place at Swiss Canyon Trail and a second place at Ultra Trail Cape Town.
First place winners Courtney and Miguel each will get €12,000 in price money.
This concludes the first full year of operation as the World Trail Majors. For the organizers and the media heads there’s a lot to talk and think about as this circuit embarks on their 2025 season.
On Instagram he takes his profile public and announces his official arrival:
For a long time, despite reading a lot on this platform, I wasn’t sure what I could add to the many stories already told and stunning landscapes already seen. And yet, here I am. Winning UTMB brought a spotlight I wasn’t expecting, and suddenly people wanted to hear from me. It’s a little intimidating for my fairly shy nature, but it also made me wonder: What if this page was about more than just me?
His account gained over 22K followers in just a few days.
Episode 322 with Thomas Reiss:
Thomas Reiss is back on Singletrack and back from Bhutan where he supported the runners and race organization of the famous and grueling Snowman Race. We chat about the event, the mission that inspired its founding, and mostly the people and how connecting with other cultures makes us better human beings. Climate change affects us all and we really one have that one rock floating in space we
call home.
Hot off the presses:
The Trail Running Film Festival (TRFF) is thrilled to announce Brooks Running will be returning as the official Title Sponsor for the 2025 film tour. This partnership marks a significant milestone for TRFF, as it prepares to embark on its most expansive tour to date, bringing together trail running enthusiasts, filmmakers, and outdoor enthusiasts from across the globe.
Loved the work we did last year together, this year will be even better!
Substack has exploded in recent months in the trail running world with many athletes and creatives jumping on the platform as a way of expressing themselves and growing their audience. Probably a response to many finding out that the obligatory video play is well.. played out, and actually really time consuming and hard to pull off – not even mentioning that monetizing on Youtube has become harder and harder. Instagram’s algorithm is fucking with people’s timelines so engagement is way down as well. Where to turn? Bluesky? Threads? And start all over hoping to rebuild that social graph? This is all hard work.
In comes Substack, a somewhat proven but definitely simple to setup tool to send newsletters and hopefully monetize them along the way. Especially for folks not technically inclined I don’t begrudge them jumping on this rather simple solution to have a website and newsletter tool. I’ve mentioned before the nazi problem that Substack has and if you want to catch up here’s Anil Dash, one of the social web’s most important voices:
Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.
John Gruber responds to Anil’s post focusing on Substack’s strategy rather than their awful politics:
Substack, very deliberately, has from the get-go tried to have it both ways. They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like “Substack”. I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.
Yes, this is the stuff I read and care deeply about when I’m not staying up to date on the constant changes at the UTMB World Series and what new shoes are dropping next. But to get back to the matter at hand: Substack is a shit platform and I agree with Gruber’s points completely:
My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in.
But, I say it again: you do you. I understand that others have different reason for doing their thing and I will not judge, well maybe just a little. But here’s what I will do: I won’t call it a “Substack” anymore. It’s not “Check out Adam’s Substack” – it’s “check out Adam’s newsletter”.
There, that’s what I will do. And if you are on Substack and are looking for alternatives, Wired has an article offering some solutions like Ghost and Beehiiv. And if you need help migrating your content and audience, give me ring, I can help.
This notion has been floating around our trail media world and I’ve been sitting on it for a bit trying to make sense of it all. Matt Trappe wrote about it on his blog ‘A Matter of Brand’. (The article is now for paid subscribers only, so I can’t link to it, sadly.)
My initial response was that it’s just plain false.
But then I spoke with a younger filmmaker working in the trail running space and it got me thinking. Many our media creators and influencers have been growing up with skateboarding films, and the brands and culture around it as their inspiration. And while I don’t believe the sport, as an activity performed by the athletes, can be compared to each other, I do think that the media creators are being inspired by skateboarding culture in the way they are telling today’s modern running stories. This can be witnessed especially in the popularity of the city road running clubs which have been courted by brands left and right. These clubs are dating scenes. Folks meet to run for fun, not for competition. Fashion is an important factor and showing off indie brands which are NOT the established giants in our sport are hot right now.
So yes, the current creators and voices in our sport have been inspired in their youth by skateboarding culture and are now bringing this to running in their adult life. Skating is hard as an old person after all. Running still works, mostly.
Creators are looking to communicate with visuals that transcend the seemingly boring motion of putting one foot on front of the other. Insert more movement, more edginess and urban fashion clothing. Running just does not have the tricks.
Via press announcement:
The Trail Running Film Festival is thrilled to announce that Simone Martin-Newberry, a visionary artist, digital illustrator, and essayist, has been selected as the 2025 Poster Artist.
Humbled I get to work with artists like Simone and build this incredible tradition. This is our second artist collab and I just absolutely love doing this kind of work.
I cannot wait to see the merch Territory Run Co. is working on.
Finally an AI application that might actually be useful and worth the carbon it’s using:
Satellite imagery that’s currently used for active firefighting is available at a low resolution or only updated a few times a day, making it difficult to detect fires smaller than a soccer field. To address this challenge, Google Research has been partnering with the U.S. Forest Service to expand our existing work on fire simulation and develop FireSat, a purpose-built satellite constellation. FireSat provides highly detailed insights, useful data for ecological intervention, and novel ground truth that will allow scientists and machine learning experts to study fire propagation and risk.
It’s always such a novel idea when a California-based tech company is actually working on making their state, which is heavily affected by wildfires, a better place to live. And possibly the planet, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, this is Google after all, it’s probably just a play to insert ads into National Forest land.
And it’s not on Substack – figure that. It’s … “on Patagonia“? Not sure how this will work, but I like it:
I’ll bring reflections and insights from a life fully dedicated to climbing. I’ll share stories and conversations with friends, many of whom have also dedicated themselves to the climbing life. You’ll hear about folks who are on the cutting edge of our sport and its various disciplines, and about those fighting to protect the places we climb.
Is this Patagonia getting into the “newsletter game”. The brand that has previously heavily invested into beautifully made films is “pivoting to the written word”?
Newsletters, so hot right now.
As previously announced (somewhere, I can’t find where I hard read this before) there would be a new ‘major’ in the UTMB World Series for the Oceania region, and now we have the details:
HOKA Ultra-Trail Australia by UTMB, the largest trail running festival in the Southern Hemisphere, has today been announced as the newest UTMB World Series Major and is set to take its place on the global stage in 2025 as one of four pinnacle events.
UTMB will be adding a 100M distance to the already sold out event held in May of 2025, and everyone is getting double the stones – nice.
And speaking of ” largest trail running festival in the Southern Hemisphere”. Even before the addition of the 100M race this event had over 7,000 registered runners. Incredible.
The ECC UMTB World Series Calendar is updated.
Speaking of apps that integrate into the Strava eco system, Suunto watches sync with your phone through the ‘Suunto’ app. That app actually displays quite a bit of data. I never looked at as an option to see if it would be sufficient for me. I’m just way to comfortable in the Strava system and know (mostly) where everything is to bother with another app – which is what Strava is banking on – but maybe it’s time to look at other apps and see what they offer, like the app my watch comes with.
But this is not what this post is about. This is about Courtney Dauwalter’s amazing new ‘Suunto Race S Titanium Courtney’ watch. Taking a page out of the Coros partnership playbook, Suunto is releasing a special watch that is really just a special strap, in partnership with one of their sponsored athletes. The watch is already amazing. I own the Race, and the Race S is just the smaller cousin, but what makes this ‘Courtney watch’ so amazing is the strap… it glows in the dark.
Together with the ultra running pro, Courtney Dauwalter, we introduce a unique design that is inspired by her infectious joy and vibrant personality, and extreme resilience to pain.
…
The lightest watch in our portfolio, Race S in titanium, is now out with a fresh, new design. Its strap is vibrant and colorful in daylight, but comes nighttime, the strap comes to life and glows in the dark, revealing Courtney’s mantra – believe, in her handwriting.
And yes, you can just buy the strap by itself.
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