Ranking Trail Sponsorships

Seth LaReau posts an fascinating thought process on his blog Trail Waves:

These rankings are my way of taking the pulse on which shoe brands are showing up at the top of the world’s biggest trail races.

Think of it like sports writers’ weekly power rankings. I wanted to bring the same energy to trail running.

It’s a fun way to “create data” and try to rank the effectiveness of brand’s sponsorships in the trail space.

Seth fully admits that there’s lots of subjectivity in the system, and I am not here to fault him for any of this. In fact it inspires one to take this as a starting point to think further. For example: ‘how did these results change compared to the last few years?’ Or: ‘How different would it look if another set of races were selected?’