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.

LINKS

• Tim Tollefson on Instagram
• Mammoth Trail Fest website
• Runner’s for Public Lands – Call to 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:

• There was that Chipotle + Strava challenge, which got really fun once we heard how some folks gamed the system. Maybe that’s what made Strava so mad that they spend the rest of they year retaliating at their users and implementing changes and new policies that got everyone pissed off (more on that as the year goes on).
• Trailblazing since their beginnings the Broken Arrow Skyrace continued to lead the way: The race organization announced an advisory council to help them deliver an event “that is not only reflective of the community we are but of the community we also want to be”. – leadership!
• AMER, parent company of Salomon and Arc’teryx, filed of IPO. – growth, especially in China!
• UTMB increased their prize money for their Majors and Finals and shared the lottery registration numbers. – The juggernaut rolls on!
• ON published their insane growth numbers. – Taking the lifestyle shoe market by storm – I still rarely see anyone wearing these shoes on the trails!
• Merrell became the title sponsorship for the Skyrunner World Series. – Brand are realizing that event series sponsorships are a good idea/deal!
• In Electric Cable Car news: I added the Global Race Series Calendar. The goal was to make it easy to find information on the various events and track the races UTMB and other racing series are adding to their calendar. This grew throughout the year, has become one of the most visited pages on this site and is now due to a major overhaul. Stay tuned!

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:

• The price is not announced yet, but if we’d look at the pricing of their other products, which is about 2-3x of competitor pricing one could assume that these shoes will be between $350 – $600. Their brand cache fill demand that these shoes will absolutely be the most expensive product on the market.
• This will be the first product in their lineup with can actually be compared in its feature set to other competing products. So far everything they’ve released has been so preposterously priced that no serious reviewer could many any honest argument on WHY someone needs to buy one of their running shirt. There’s no 3x performance gains in a cotton shirt to be found.
• As to the look of these shoes? They look like over-engineered hiking shoes with a really rugged sole and an ultra-light upper. But I haven’t seen them in person.

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!

Electric Cable Car RE:RUN 2024 – The Year in Review

• January
• February
• March (coming soon)
• April (coming soon)
• May (coming soon)
• June (coming soon)
• August (coming soon)
• September (coming soon)
• October (coming soon)
• November (coming soon)
• December (yet to be written!)

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.

LINKS

• Thomas Reiss on Instagram
• Snowman Race
• Thomas Reiss on Singletrack
• Nate Bender’s Snowman Race experience on Storymaps

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.

• Running is one of the oldest sports.
• Skateboarding is one of the newest sports.

• Skateboarding has always been an underground, counter culture sport.
• Running is one of the most established, mainstream sports.

• Skateboading is about tricks.
• Running is about endurance.

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.