RE:RUN 2024 – April

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

It’s April and brands are wanting to have a word.

The big news is that HOKA becomes UTMB World Series title sponsor. Dacia is getting demoted in the process, much to the joy of the Green Runners. HOKA’s title sponsorship brings the announcement that Jim (what race are we gonna run next year?) Walmsley is going back to Chamonix. This sponsorship also extends to the Majors and it increases and solidifies prize money for the Majors and Finals. These are all big developments that don’t just mean that checks in backrooms are written but that pro athletes are being rewarded for their performance – something the PTRA has been championing for awhile. This extends doping protocols to the UTMB Majors and Finals events. In the same turn (although not officially related) Western States is also implementing an updated doping policy which now extend to their Golden Ticket races, which are also sponsored by Hoka. From afar, no one is saying this out loud, it looks like Hoka’s increasing their sponsorship presence and footing the bills for price money and in turn requiring and or enabling doping controls. This all makes sense: want money for performing well, you should probably want it in a clean sport.

Dacia stays on as premier sponsor getting some love in the Chamonix mobility program and the Eurosport series UTMB launches later in the year.

Headphones maker Shokz also comes on as premier sponsor of the UTMB World Series. – What’s funny about that is that Suunto signed on a UTMB sponsor just the month prior and while Suunto is known for their GPS watches they had just released a couple pairs of headphones that essentially worked and looked very similar to the bone-conducting headphones Shokz had made famous.

For the Boston Marathon rabbit releases their first foray into the footwear space with the Dream Chaser. Clothing makers taking the leap into making shoes is a huge challenge and while often seen as a logical next step (Lululemon did it, Satisfy is about to do it) doing it right is not easy. I don’t know a single person beyond the “shoetuber” who were paid to review the shoes who has spoken highly of these products.

Speaking of shoemakers, Merrell launches a marketing campaign in form of an open letter to the IOC asking them to consider adding trail running to the Olympics. This call to action comes ahead of the Paris Olympics in the summer, but these types of decisions take years, if not decades and the ‘trail running lobby’ (which doesn’t actually exist) missed their boat, not just for Paris, but even for LA in 2028. (And Los Angeles would have some incredible mountains just outside their city limits.) So Brisbane is the next logical venue… that’s in 2032. That’s eight years from now when we could possibly see trail running as an Olympic sport. Who the heck knows what trail running as a sport will look like then?

Alright, for the month of April I really buried the lede. The company that is all over the news and social stream and would end up staying there for weeks (and really wished it wasn’t there at all) is Spring Energy. A Reddit post first scoops and claims that the printed nutrition facts on the much loved Awesome Sauce product by natural foods nutrition maker Spring are all wrong. This leads to much outcry – did I say Awesome Sauce was popular? Yes, even I used it for most races in recent years. Several high profile athletes got into the crossfires and much “ink is being spilled” discovering the truth. My favorite comments are the folks lamenting (and calling for class-action lawsuits) that the DNF in their last race was due to the mislabeling of Spring’s products. Independent lab testing is being conducted, product gets pulled from the shelves and folks are wondering if Spring can survive this. As of this writing Awesome Sauce had gotten retooled and is back on the market and on most virtual shelves. Other products in their lineup still exist and are still for sale. The show must go on. And speaking of show, there’s a whole sideshow developing, in many ways even overshadowing all this, and includes a popular coach doing everything in his power to become “main character of the day”. But this takes us into May.

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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 May edition in the coming days. To catch up on all of them visit RE:RUN.