RE:RUN 2024 – November

This article is part of Electric Cable Car’s RE:RUN 2024 – The Year in Review. 
This was November 2024 in our world of trail running and mountain culture.

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.

• UTMB announces the dates for their North American events. Notably Puerto Vallarta is be on pause for 2025 but will returning in the spring of 2026.
• Lavaredo shares their lottery numbers and of course all longing eyes are impatiently set on the Western States and Hardrock lotteries.
• The Golden Trail Series announces pretty significant changes and kills several of their national series events.
• Brooks is returning as title sponsor of the Global Tour 2025 of the Trail Running Film Festival.

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.

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This post is part of Electric Cable Car’s RE:RUN 2024 – The Year in Review. I’ll be dropping the December edition in the coming days. To catch up on all of them visit RE:RUN.