By Mathias Eichler
Little Backyard Adventure
March 13, 2026 - Many twisted loops, one stunning forest - a 12, 6, 3 HR trail running event in the heart of the city.
Little Backyard Adventure
March 13, 2026 - Many twisted loops, one stunning forest - a 12, 6, 3 HR trail running event in the heart of the city.
How has it been a full year already? 2025 is coming to close. A lot has happened in our sport, and a lot has stayed the same. What better time to travel back and relive the best of the year, just like I did last year on Electric Cable Car? Join me over the next coming weeks as I’ll look the year Twenty Twenty-five in monthly installments. I highlight the best storylines and weave together a snapshot of the important trends for our sport, our favorite hobby and past time, and culture we call trail and mountain running.
Wanna get a taste and refresher of last year’s Re:Run – jump into the archive for 2024.
This article is part of Electric Cable Car’s RE/RUN 2025 – The Year in Review.
This was January 2025 in our world of trail running and mountain culture.
As the clock turned another page and January kicked off the year 2025 these were the stories set the tone for this shiny new year.
All these stories give that ‘Main character energy’ feeling, something we’ll be hearing a lot about throughout the year.
In other news, trail running brands are showing up at the Paris Fashion show, which too, signifies a trend that started sometime a few years ago with ‘Gorpcore’, then briefly gets compared to skateboarding culture and has now every running brand producing their own magazine. “Community”, “Culture”, “Commerce”.
The beginning of the year tends to also be one for bold predictions and naive resolutions. Two articles I posted I look back at now and want to pad myself on the head whispering “oh you sweet summer child…”. In my post ‘What The TROY (And UROY) Awards Get Wrong’ I pontificate about how to do ‘awards for trail running’ better, and while I don’t think what I complain about was so wrong, it’s now a year later and I am none the wiser. The noise around the various awards from the various media outlets will begin here momentarily, and I already know that I will feel compelled to think about how to improve this, but I can’t, for the life of me, come up with something that’s truly above and beyond better. Trail running media will, for while longer at least, or maybe even forever, float between incomplete and inconclusive numbers – which would allow us to actually measure and compare runners’ performances, and vibes – which will always be too myopic, regionally constraint, or just plain too subjective. It’s probably that way in any other industry/sport/genre, well of course it is, who am I kidding. In the end these awards are there to sell sponsorships and increase brand engagement. Folks know that finding ‘THE BEST’ in anything is inherently subjective, or just a fairly boring numbers game. So, where does this leave us? Well, let’s wait until this coming January and see if and how the exciting awards, be it ‘TROY’ or ‘UROY’, or the ‘Trail Running Awards’ will inspire me, and/or infuriate me to think of ‘yet another way’ on how to do this better.
The other article I published in January of 2025 was my big ‘2025 Predictions For Our Sport’ article. As I am rereading my thoughts there and consider what actually happened I come to the conclusion that I would’ve barely passed the class. But here I am a bit more forgiving of myself. Predictions are after all a crapshoot into the wind. Rereading this post motivates me to double down for another year. Stay tuned for this article coming in early January where I will, yet again, take a stab into the dark and predict what will happen in this coming year of 2026 in our tiny, but oh so fascinating world of trail running and mountain culture.
Lastly, I spoke of the futility of New Year’s resolutions. One I did keep for the entire year (and am quite proud of, if I say so myself): Electric Cable Car published results for EVERY UTMB World Series Event in 2025. Not just the ones the American and European elites showed up at, and not just the ones on the radar of most English-speakers, but every single one. (Well, there are two events still happening next week. So as of this writing, so I could still fail.) Is there another media outlet that published results for every single event in the series? All in all in 2025 the UTMB World Series will have hosted 53 Events plus 1 (Pacific Trails California) fully cancelled. When I started posting these results I was looking for stories among the numbers and results. Now that I have a full year of data I have some stories to share. And with it, lots and lots of numbers. But this too, will have to wait a bit until the last two events are completed, and until I can figure out how to properly use a pivot table.
In February things got dark in America. Shortly after the begin of Trump’s second presidency Musk arrived with a chain saw and a wrecking ball and laid off thousands of National Park and Forest Service workers. DOGE failed spectacularly and even while the worst fears didn’t come to pass it did signal the new reality in America. Uncertainty, fear, confusion, and an upside down flag on El Cap.
Sticking to the topic of politics in the weirdest possible way, this month I posted about Katy Perry wearing a running vest on stage ahead of her trip to “sort of” space. Now months later she’s dating Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and is seen with the Former Prime Minister of Japan together. Anyhoo… politics.. and hydration vests… going places.
In the more dumb news department: Outside (formerly known as “magazine”) labels itself as Outside Interactive, lays off most of their editorial staff and buys up more tech properties.
Back to our sport: 2025 will be the year the elites are weighing their worth, wondering about doping and rethinking their contracts. No surprise here as the previous social media strategies are increasingly failing and tariffs are kicking brands in the nuts.
Luckily we had burrito runs, and that’s what we focused on in the early part of 2025. That and a much talked about ‘state of trail running report‘ which I linked to and has since become one of the most visited posts for Electric Cable Car all year. Although, now that I come to think of it… can anyone actually remember any important factoid out of this report? Or do we all just reference this report in the same breath as “growth” and “business”?
Trail running news in March of 2025 led with a blockbuster partnership announcementby Sabrina Stanley. Calls for non-endemic sponsors had been loud in recent months, but no one saw this one coming: Sabrina signs with OnlyFans. And maybe no one thought through what it would me for a sponsor to enter the sport that didn’t actually get trail. Or rather, wasn’t approved by the current voices in our sport. This announcement had lots of podcast ink being spilled where men wondered how to hide their credit card charges from their partners. But all jokes aside, OnlyFans is getting into sports marketing to clean up their reputation and expand their subscriber count. Although what this story meant for our sport turned out completely different. Fate has its own ideas and Sabrina was diagnosed with cancer later in the year and largely went private as a result.
Conversations in the trail media turned a bit inward (maybe because not too much else was happening) and a larger conversation ensured around the question of “what is content“. This ranged from the use of AI in marketing and brand storytelling, to folks rediscovering printed media and jumping into book and magazine publishing – with varying results in both instances. But people also voiced their opinions around the influence of trail media and calling especially on Europeans to not let their sport be dominated by American (English-speaking) voices. To cap it off, one of my favorite blog posts of the entire year was written by Joaquin Lopez on his UTMB race and on meeting Vincent Bouillard.
And to close things out: Pine to Palm bids farewell and TrailCon expands, which sort of signals a shift in our sport.
Continuing with the focus on the media evolution in the trail and outdoor space April brought stories of Outside’s melt down being featured in The New Yorker and the bros at Second Nature are wondering out loud what to do with the brand and property. While all this is going down, UltraSignup quietly brings previous employees of Outside on board to build out their news team.
In the early spring we also hear about UNA the GPS watch that promises to be modular and allows you to replace various elements in the hopes to be repairable and sustainable. The product was supposed to ship in August, it’s now December and they still only take email addresses for their mailing list. Can you imagine trying to build a hardware product in these times when tariffs and other mad king fever dreams are occupying the global business news headlines?
We finish off our recap for April with a bunch of news from Salomon:
At the end of 2025 with ACG taking over Broken Arrow (from Salomon) as title sponsor and with seemingly no races left in the US on the GTWS calendar, the question arises if Salomon, in a effort to be the prime builder of trail toward the Olympics, is innovating themselves away from the sport.
I’m told to not get too political on here if I want to reach a global audience… not everyone’s affected or interested in what the orange Mad King is doing on a daily basis. But, but, but, hear me out, these tariffs are fucking everyone over more than we want to admit. Zoë Rom takes a stab for iRunFar on what this all means and Norda’s forced to temporarily halt shipments into the US. Not great, and it’s not getting better as the year goes on.
Martin Cox from VO2max Coaching took Koop AI for a spin and has thoughts – thanks for that, I was not going to try it.
In May The Grand Teton FKT finally is on trial, and oh boy did it turn out to be a grand waste of time and money.
May also sees the return of the media phenomenon that is Cocodona, and we get to continue the age old argument if “an European thing”: in this case Tor de Géants or “an American thing”: in this case Cocodona is bigger, better, faster, and more. What a fun way to spend a week in the small world of trail media.
Finally, we’re reminded of what’s really at stake and what we should be paying more attention to. The town of ‘Blatten’ in Switzerland in the Lötschental gets completely buried by a major glacier break induced by the inevitable climate change. And while one genuine feels horrible for the folks living in the valley I saw a note floating around online that points to the voting history of the inhabitants who by a large percentage voted against climate measures in recent elections. What a sad and pointed visual for the world we’re living in right now.
Stay tuned to see how the rest of the year unfolded…
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