By Mathias Eichler
Yo Saturnalia!
Get ready for a fun and festive holiday 10K trail race at Squaxin Park in Olympia, WA on December 13.
Yo Saturnalia!
Get ready for a fun and festive holiday 10K trail race at Squaxin Park in Olympia, WA on December 13.
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.
Stay tuned to see how the year unfolded…
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