Innsbruck Alpine Trailrun Festival Joins World Trail Majors

Announced today via Instagram:

It’s one of the biggest independent trail running event in the region, and in 2027 it joins World Trail Majors.

Welcome to the family, Innsbruck. We can’t wait to run it. 

Innsbruck Alpine already has the announcement on their website and Egon Theiner has the story on ‘Trail Running World’ (translated via my browser tool):

Alexander Pittl, Managing Director of the Laufwerkstatt, speaks of an honor: “It is a privilege for us to become part of this important international ultra-running series. We share the same values and passion for the mountains as the other races in the series.” Nevertheless, the organizer wants to remain independent, and he is convinced that runners who experience his mountains will immediately fall in love with the alpine-urban spirit of Innsbruck.

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Announced a few years ago with much fanfare the World Trail Majors seem to have never really fully taken off and almost disappeared into obscurity. I do believe that their scoring system of their ‘Series’ isn’t working and they struggle to attract sponsors to help with promoting the series overall, but having a “home” for events that don’t want to stay completely independent and don’t want to join/be bought by UTMB is a good thing for our sport.

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What’s fascinating with Innsbruck Alpine’s model is the way they are going about managing their huge number of runners – over 10,000 are expected to run in 2027: Innsbruck Alpine is offering 12! different races throughout the week. Only three races are ultra distances with many shorter ones including a vertical race, a night race, and what they call the Business Trail:

The K7 Business Trail is the perfect after-work run for all companies, organizations and institutions.
Experience the joy of running together with your work colleagues, club friends, partners or customers and let the day end in a fun atmosphere after work.

A completely unique concept that works in a mountain city of this size and probably couldn’t be replicated in most other cities. But nonetheless it shows what other event managers are doing “for the sport” in introducing folks to the trails, beyond drone shots of Mont-Blanc with an invitation to collect Running Stones.