Graubünden, a Trailrunning Hot Spot

I’m gonna link to that website a second time here.

The tourism office of the canton of Graubünden created a dedicated website just to promote trail running in the area. And the tourist destination considers Graubünden to be one of the best places to run trails. (Well, of course every tourist destination is paid to think and say this.) But nonetheless, there are tourism dollars spend trying to attract trail runners to the area. If you live on the West Coast of the US, let that sink in for a sec.

Clearly with the insane success of UTMB for Chamonix and it’s surrounding towns and valleys, we will see in the coming years lots of attention being directed to ‘trail running’ as an activity, which, doesn’t require special parks, special equipment (like cable cars, gondolas and retrofitted chair lifts to allow bikes to be transported up the mountains). Tourism destinations have been sleeping on trail running as a niche to market to, but I think this will dramatically change in the next few years. Trail running is the perfect low impact sport for a large and diverse group of people from all walks of life.

Currently the Graubünden trailrunning website lists lots of running different events, but none that I would consider internationally well-known.

In a related note: I briefly went to the tourism website for Auburn, CA, and the outdoor section on their homepage highlights a mountain biking. In Auburn! Birthplace of the modern ultra endurance run.