RE:RUN 2024 – January

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.

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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.