It’s not often you get to break some news, but today we have a Satisfy double-whammy - another departure and a new business line.

Hope everyone has a marvellous week, and for all those in Chamonix, hope it rains.

Matt

It’s Hard to Satisfy Brice

Losing your CEO two years after proclaiming you’re aiming to 10x in 10 years is a bad omen. Recently it got even worse for Satisfy when earlier this month head of footwear, Jean-Marc Dijan, left the business after two years, curiously without an announcement from founder Brice Partouche or PR.

Being a member of the hardcore scene, Brice is used to being knocked about in the thrall of the music, but he’s likely not been comfortable riding the storm Satisfy has been faring this year.

From the controversial circle pit, where Satisfy sunk vast quantities of money into a poorly orchestrated influencer event that turned into a PR wildfire, to launching a new cooling material that helped Max Joliffe win Badwater 135, to parting ways with their CEO after a reported difference in opinions on how to run the business. Now without a lead to their footwear division, Satisfy tell me they will be focusing on their only shoe in the market “theRocker” in the short term.

Having two senior leaders leave a small business could be seen as a pattern, but according to my sources, Jean-Marc Dijan is retiring and will be supporting his son, Robinson Dijan, in his burgeoning professional ice hockey career.

With a cap table of hungry investors, no CEO, no new footwear, and a stated ambition of 10x’ing the business, Brice now has to prove his vision for the business and where growth will come from.

Interestingly, a fun quirk of the French legal system is that a business must announce they’re moving into a new line of business before they’ve moved into it. A little snoop of their legal filings has revealed that Satisfy are moving into retail, food and beverages.

In September Satisfy will be launching a Fuel Station and Supply store in Paris, their PR team have confirmed to me over email. There will be two spaces facing one another, Supply will house the full Satisfy universe, while Fuel Station will be dedicated to hydration, nutrition and rituals around the run. The exact location will be revealed in a press release in September, but as Brice has recently liquidated a cafe called Ob-la-Di, I imagine it will likely be here. This is a progression on their pop-up activations, but also mirrors what independent brands such as Rapha and Bandit have proven can work.

Launching this over 10 years since they’ve formed as a business could be read as copycat behaviour, something that seems antithesis to the ethos of Satisfy. However it really depends on how Satisfy executes it. Bandit’s café and retail model works because it’s structurally tied to their actual behaviour loop - people run past the store, gather before/after, consume a beverage before pootling off. The café is functionally part of the run and business itself, not just adjacent retail theatre. Having ran pop-ups that have tested this model out, Satisfy are likely assured that this won’t be an operational drag on their business.

Whether this is read as an evolution or improvisation depends entirely on what comes next. A café doesn’t 10x a business. It buys them a storefront, a loyalty loop, and, if they’re lucky, some breathing room to figure out what the next shoe/move actually is. Brice has bought himself that room. Now he has to use it.

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Bits and pieces

• UTMB asked brands to refrain from using social runs next week in a bid to reduce the traffic in the town. There’s now 42 social runs over the next five days. Light.

• Killian both announced a new book covering his Alps crossing, and that he’s not running at UTMB. Jim didn’t even announce a new book, he just pulled out of UTMB.

• Kailas Fuga had a pop-up shop on the finish line of UTMB last year. This year they opened the store as their first retail shop in the country.

• Adidas are following the same launch model as they always do - announced a new trail shoe this week for a first glimpse in Chamonix next week. Price? $500.

• Last Soul Ultra enraptured the internet over the last week with a backyard race lasting 94 hours, with a peak viewership around 67K. The format is ideal for livestreaming and the Rappid team perfected it. This was essentially branded content (all competitors wore head-to-toe Rappid, a brand I’d never heard of and looks like another BPN/bro-ey/vanilla/Instagram-pilled offering), which is seemingly a trend for backyard ultras. Why sponsor an event when you can build one yourself? It worked for Salomon and Golden Trail Series, why not backyard ultras? You then own the rights, control the pacing, production, talent, commercial integrations and the final media product. If it’s successful, you then can talk broadcast rights. It’s a lot of upfront investment, but likely not too dissimilar to a large scale sponsorship deal, with more potential upside. Expect more to come from this.

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The UTMB run up has begun. Prepare for a barrage of articles and podcasts on the week long runapallooza. For the first time in three years i won’t be there - I’m moving house - so no round-up from me this year. If any writer, or person with sardonic humour and an eye for detail, is going and wants to cover the sport from a Trailmix perspective, let me know, reply to this email!

Today we’re looking at how trail running’s independence has become a commodity in itself, but also defence against standardisation, even with the growth of UTMB.

Hope you have a wonderful week,

Matt

When Doug Mayer writes about UTMB, you sit down and read. Doug’s article this week in TrailRunner demonstrates his usual even keel and ability to dance between criticism and applause in the same sentence.

Ultimately, the article covers the quietening of criticism of UTMB and the work the UTMB team have done to combat their policy and image issues, asking a reasonable question about whether the UTMB World Series is moving trail running in the right direction. Its concerns are familiar ones: the growing commercial influence of UTMB, the increasing importance of qualification systems and Running Stones, the expansion of the series, and the possibility that a sport historically built around independent races and communities could become increasingly shaped by one organisation’s model. Those concerns deserve attention, particularly because UTMB is no longer simply one race in Chamonix. It has become a global competitive structure, connecting races around the world to a common pathway towards its Finals. The ambition is considerable, and so is the influence that comes with it.

In full transparency I’d argue that UTMB has made great leaps with its policy changes and is doing well at taking onboard its critiques. Overall the volume of critcism has pretty much evaporated from the mainstream and independent trail media outlets. Wider criticism of UTMB remains, as Doug’s piece points out, but to me they give too much weight to the idea that the sport is heading towards a monoculture*. UTMB may be enormously influential, but trail running is still an extraordinarily fragmented sport. There are thousands of races, hundreds of organisers, innumerable local communities and a growing number of brands with very different personalities.

In fact, I think there is something more interesting happening in trail running. The sport has made individuality commercially valuable. Trail running’s commercial development has been unusual because its appeal has never rested entirely on performance, It is also about identity. A race can be attractive because of where it takes place, how it feels, who organises it and what kind of people it attracts. A brand can sell a shoe, but it can also sell a philosophy. One brand might represent mountain heritage, another environmentalism, another irreverence, another technical performance, another a deliberately independent or anti-establishment aesthetic. The product or race becomes a way of saying something about the person using them.

That creates an unusual commercial incentive. In many sports, becoming closer to the core consumer is the ultimate goal. In trail running, becoming too mainstream can actually undermine some of your appeal. If every race looks the same, every athlete dresses the same and every brand speaks the same language, the things that made the sport distinctive begin to disappear. Difference itself has become part of the product.

You can see this in the way runners move through the sport. Someone might aspire to run UTMB while also being fascinated by a tiny local 50K. They might buy shoes from a Nike and a vest from Raide. They might spend months training for a major international race and then spend a weekend doing a self-supported route with friends. These aren’t necessarily competing identities. They coexist remarkably comfortably.

That makes the relationship between corporate and grassroots trail running more complicated than the usual argument suggests. The two can coexist because they fulfil different needs. The big organisations can provide infrastructure, professionalisation, media, sponsorship and international visibility. Smaller races and independent brands provide personality, experimentation and a sense of discovery. The existence of one does not necessarily require the disappearance of the other.

Where I think the real pressure lies is in the middle. The smallest races can survive precisely because they don’t need to behave like businesses at scale. The biggest organisations have the resources to professionalise and expand. But the ambitious regional race sits between the two. It wants to grow from 500 runners to 2,000. It needs better timing, marketing, media, sponsorship and staff. It wants international athletes and international recognition. Yet its attraction may depend on the fact that it still feels distinctive and local.

That is a difficult balance to make. The more successful it becomes, the more it may need to resemble the large organisations it originally differentiated itself from. And perhaps that is the more important question raised by UTMB’s expansion. Not whether one organisation will own trail running (it won’t, let’s move on from that refrain) but whether the average race experience will gradually converge on the same model. A monoculture doesn’t require a monopoly to form, It can emerge when everyone starts copying what appears to be working.

This is where trail runnings tendency towards uniqueness becomes a counterweight to commerciality. Trail runners actively seek out difference (thats why they’re running off-road in the first place). They want the obscure race, the unusual route, the independent brand and the event with a personality. In that sense, the culture itself has a quasi-defence against homogenisation. The more successful trail running becomes, the more valuable those alternatives might become.

There is an irony here. Trail running has commercialised individuality to such an extent that independence has itself become a marketable quality (and something new brands always lean way too hard on to the extent they become awkward).

Perhaps the future of trail running therefore isn’t a choice between corporate and grassroots. It is a messy ecosystem in which both need each other. The global races give the sport visibility and aspiration; the independent races keep it interesting. The big brands provide scale; the smaller ones prevent everything from becoming generic.

*(side note: the number of conversations in trail that are “off the record” for fear of brand or UTMB repercussions is a real limiter on diversity of voices in our sport, but i digress)

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Bits & Pieces

• Independence only thrives when it is supported. We always do a great job as a culture to support people who are putting things out there to further our sport and community. One event that deserves our support is Runculture held by Simon and Julie at Like The Wind, held in London on the 4-5th September. The line-up is insane and shows the depth of influence and gratitude many have for the work LTW has done for running as a whole. Sign up for tickets here, many people have already spoken to me about it so I’m sure it’ll be selling out pretty soon.

• Speaking of UTMB, they have a new event in Hiroshima, Japan, their second in the country and 68th worldwide.

• A lot was made in the trade press about Hoka going into Sports Direct, despite many not realising that most shoe brands sell mono-colour versions of their core models there already. I’d also argue it ignores that distribution is only as effective as what you do with it - price, promotion, placement - and that SportsDirect isn’t your bargain basement of old. The news did jar with the controlled distribution narrative that Hoka have always espoused, but it’s more a reflection of the changing face of running retail and the evolution of Hoka from a smaller brand to a mature one.

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A proper mixed bag of things to talk about today, from the response to last issue’s comments on media, to a politics lesson around Chamonix’s mayor’s plans for UTMB, to my case why in some cases radio broadcasts would work better than livestreams.

Hope you have a fantastic week,

Matt

He’s not Laffin’ about UTMB

François-Xavier Laffin, elected Chamonix mayor this spring, told L’Équipe that a “large majority” of Chamoniards now resent UTMB week rather than love it, citing gridlock, night-finish noise, and a sense of losing their town for several days each August (even access to their own garages’…). He’s not attacking the race itself (calls it “remarkable”) but wants to shrink its footprint: a smaller exhibitor village, fewer passages through nature reserves, capped spectators, fewer night races, and even discouraging runners’ whole entourages from all traveling out for it. Format changes are on the table from 2027.

It’s worth taking a step back and considering the broader political context because it gives a sense the scale of influence Laffin has.

My understanding from a bit of googling (je suis desole to any french readers if i butcher this, let me know in the comments) is that in France, towns are run by a mayor who isn’t elected directly by voters in the way you might expect. People vote for a list of local councillors, and then those councillors vote among themselves to pick the mayor. So Laffin first had to win his council seat in a town-wide vote, then get chosen as mayor by his fellow councillors.

Chamonix itself had been politically very stable for a long time - one mayor, Michel Charlet, ran the town for 25 years (1983-2008), then handed off smoothly to Éric Fournier, who ran it for another 18 years. Both were from the same broad political centre-right family holding power uninterrupted for over four decades.

Laffin broke that streak. He’d been in opposition to that establishment for years, and this March he won the town’s mayoral election outright with about 54% of the vote, beating two other candidates (one of whom dropped out before the final round and backed him instead).

The hot topics in Chamonix’s election was housing and overtourism. With only around 8,700 permanent residents against millions of annual visitors, all four candidates spent the campaign addressing a town where seasonal workers and locals increasingly can’t find housing or parking. Laffin, in a June interview, pointed to the Calanques, a national park near Marseille which uses a reservation system to cap visitor numbers, as his model for popular hiking sites like Lac Blanc, framing the whole approach around “capacity” and “quality of life” rather than simply limiting tourism outright.

There’s also a second, less well-known layer: Chamonix sits alongside three neighbouring towns (Servoz, Les Houches, Vallorcine), and together they share a joint local authority that makes some shared decisions, a bit like a mini regional council. Laffin also won the leadership of that body, but only just - by one vote, 12 to 11. So while he clearly won Chamonix itself, his authority over decisions affecting the wider valley is more uncertain.

When we put Laffin’s UTMB comments back in this light, they carry real weight, but his position is shakier than the his strong rhetoric suggests. He won Chamonix decisively, ending a 40+ year run by one political family, so he clearly has a mandate to change course on the town’s own turf. But UTMB doesn’t just run through Chamonix; large chunks of the route cross Servoz, Les Houches, and Vallorcine, and decisions affecting the whole valley go through the joint intercommunal body, where Laffin won the presidency by a single vote, 12-11.

This matters for how seriously UTMB Group needs to take him. A landslide mayor with valley-wide backing could genuinely force structural change (e.g. permitting leverage, reserve access, the works). A mayor who just scraped control of the body governing the neighbouring towns is in a weaker spot to push through anything contested, especially if UTMB Group works the room and finds allies among the other three communes, several of which likely benefit economically from the race in ways Chamonix’s residents feel less directly.

So I’d read this less as “the valley has decided” and more as “the valley’s new leader wants to renegotiate the terms, but hasn’t yet proven he can bring the other three towns with him.” UTMB Group’s likely play is probably to engage on the softer asks (exhibitor village size, spectator numbers) while quietly testing whether that 12-11 split holds when something actually costs them, like permitting, route access or race-day scheduling on land Laffin doesn’t fully control.

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Can Radio kill the Video Star?

Mathias at Electric Cable Car did a great bit of snooping for this piece around livestreaming in trail running and what feels like an unsustainable venture for most races/brands in the sport.

I’ve talked about this a few times, but let’s put forward an alternative in a serious/not serious way. What if we’ve been chasing the wrong media format to broadcast trail races?

Livestreams demand constant visual action, and ultra racing simply doesn’t offer it. Hours can pass between meaningful moments, and all we get in the gaps is drone footage of empty singletrack or a static feed nobody’s watching. We’re forcing a football-shaped format onto a sport that moves at an entirely different rhythm, and we’re pretending the emptiness is a technical problem when it’s actually a format problem.

Radio solved this a century ago. Cricket figured out how to make eight hours of very little happening into something people leave on in the background all day, because commentary - that real, textured, narrated commentary - doesn’t need a picture to hold you. It needs voices who understand the story; who’s fading on the climb, who’s about to make a move, what that next descent is going to do to legs that have already run sixty miles. Trail running has that story in abundance, we’ve just not built the format to bring it to life.

Production cost is the other argument. Camera crews and stable connectivity are nearly impossible across most of a mountain course, but a spotter phoning in from an aid station is cheap and reliable. For races without broadcast budgets (which is most of them) that’s the difference between some coverage and none.

It’s not even a hard sell! it’s cheap, it’s reliable where cameras and connectivity aren’t, and it matches exactly how people already follow these races: checking in, not watching eyes glued to the screen. The sport doesn’t need more drone shots. It needs commentators willing to talk about the mountain the way cricket commentators talk about the pitch.

What are your thoughts? I’m so here for a return to radio!

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Ooft hope you’ve all recovered from the post-WSER blues.

We’ve got two stories for today - the revival of TrailRunner, and hopefully journalism in trail, and a change of hearts at Naak.

And, If you’re UK based, I also wrote an article for Athletics Weekly on the growth of 200 milers, so pick that up at your local WHSmith!

Anyway, here’s to more long summer days ahead,

Matt

Trailrunner Returns from the Dead

TrailRunner is back! The site and long lost brand that just two years ago was hollowed out of staff and zombified to only repost Outside Run articles has been revived to live another day.

Abby Levene, a lone survivor from the previous incarnation of TrailRunner, has been promoted from senior editor of Outside Run to Managing Editor of the brand to lead the charge. The stated rationale in Abby’s piece and the press releases leans heavily on participation data: Outside Interactive announced an expanded editorial direction for Trail Runner, framing the shift around how runners engage with trails beyond competition and training, into travel, community, storytelling, and everyday life, citing Outdoor Industry Association figures showing trail running reached 17.2 million participants in 2025, up 6.6 percent year over year, with the largest increase in core participants of any tracked outdoor activity. The brand’s official framing pairs editorial ambition with product integration, pairing storytelling with Trailforks route discovery so readers can move from inspiration to participation, positioning this as much as a funnel strategy as an editorial one.

Where the commentary from Outside diverges is in tone and candor. Levene’s own launch essay is unapologetically playful, describing the redesigned TrailRunner as “bolder, louder, deeper, and weirder than before,” a home for everything from hard-hitting journalism and brutally honest gear reviews to trail-obsessed poems, doodles, and cartoons, and explicitly signaling that some stories will be serious and some will be silly. Outside’s Chief Media Officer, Heather Dietrick, gave a blunter commercial account in trade coverage: the expansion targets runners who are less interested in performance and more interested in the broader experience of being outdoors, growth fueled largely by younger audiences, particularly Gen Z women, with weekly content cadence set to double. That same coverage noted the relaunch landed after a period of scrutiny for Outside, following a public letter from 35 writers, editors, and photographers over layoffs of longtime editorial leadership and budget cuts, a link Dietrick explicitly rejected, insisting the expansion is about explosive growth in the activity, not a response to criticism. Monetization details were left vague throughout: it remains unclear how much of the expanded output will sit behind the Outside+ paywall, with Dietrick saying only that Outside regularly tests different gating strategies.

In practice, since the announcement, the site has shown a genuine format spread: a dedicated travel column, first-person culture essays, a cartoon, and personality-led profiles alongside continuing gear and training coverage. However the promised poems haven’t arrived yet. I’ll wait patiently.

In all seriousness, the more interesting question sits above all of that: in a landscape where trail news is no longer chased by journalists but fed straight to hungry Instagram aggregation accounts by PR teams, and where the sharpest independent analysis lives on Substack but is narrow (one athlete’s training log, one gear obsessive’s spreadsheet, more opinions on the story of the sport as a whole than are necessary) what’s the actual lane TrailRunner is claiming? Its own framing pushes toward the terrain the aggregators and Substackers already occupy: personality, lifestyle, vibe, speed - but with more resourcing and bigger pockets. That’s a crowded fight to pick. A problem made more different when you’re writing behind for a publication thats not your own and where your personality as a writer is secondary to that of the brand, issues that new personality driven media doesn’t face. The real differentiation isn’t going to be whether they can churn out more articles than the newsletterer or bring a “silliness” to the sport, it’s whether the irreverence is backed by actual reporting. Doodles and poems are fine, but only Trail Runner has the standing and resourcing to do sustained, well-researched, cross-race pattern journalism that a solo newsletter writer structurally can’t produce alone. It’s something this sport deeply needs.

Most media outlets whether they’re on Instagram, a podcast or a newsletter all suffer from the same disease - monetisation via brand sponsorships and “news” given to them by brand PR teams. Very few outlets source, corroborate, check or challenge these perspectives or stories fed to them by brands gagging for some free coverage. And no, podcast interviews don’t count as news when you’re not challenging what people are saying (dear god do we need some podcasters to learn to say “hold on” or even “i don’t think that’s right”).

Long time readers know I’ve been campaigning for people with a backbone and a dictaphone in trail media since 2023. All of what I’ve blathered on about today hasn’t changed since I’ve entered the sport. We certainly have more opinions, thats great, but we don’t have anything NEW that comes out of it. We’re all circling the same stories from slightly different perspectives, relying on hearsay and whatever our almighty brands and race organisations tell us.

Now I didn’t go to Trailcon, but from what I’ve gathered from conversations and the various podcasts and newsletters on it is that it suffered from the same ailment - great for networking, not that great at advocating for progress or difference.

The revival of TrailRunner could be a great thing for our sport if it brings newness and doesn’t lose itself in it’s proposed irreverence. Abby reassured me in a voice note last week that we’re on the same page, that trail has lacked journalism since the collapse of TrailRunner and through this relaunch she is hoping to keep that as a central spine in their output.

The next challenge is whether anyone will read it.

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Naak-Good

As an example of our reliance on rumour in our sport, there were mutterings online and at Trailcon that Naak was struggling in the US and might not be able to make it’s UTMB sponsorship requirements. As always there is usually some truth but more nuance than the rumours suggest.

The French-Canadian nutrition brand, official on-course fueling partner of the UTMB World Series, is restructuring its US B2B operations, moving from a direct-sales-and-delivery model to a distributor-led one. Co-founder Minh-Anh Pham framed the shift in an email to me in efficiency terms: Näak is not shutting down, remains committed to UTMB, and is evolving its go-to-market strategy to “better support our partners and scale the brand more efficiently in the US.”

That’s the version aimed to schmucks like me. The version co-founder and CEO William Walcker posted to his own LinkedIn network was more concrete, and considerably harder to spin as pure strategy. In it, Walcker confirmed that Näak’s entire in-house US team (Country Manager Michael Ambrose, along with Jackie Hoffman and Tom Mi) is departing as part of the restructuring. Ambrose will stay on for a 90-day transition period to keep existing accounts serviced while Näak looks for what Walcker’s post calls “a specialized Distributor or National Sales Agency” to take over. As of the post, no such partner has been named.

Eight months ago, Näak was telling a very different story about the same market. A November 2025 announcement had the brand “doubling down” on the US: a new country headquarters in Ogden, Utah, at the foot of the Wasatch range; Ambrose overseeing two additional full-time hires; and a field sales team of 12 reps spread across the country. Walcker was quoted at the time calling the US a market Näak had “deliberately” prioritized since founding the company in 2016.

That structure is now being dismantled before its replacement exists. A distributor-led model built around a signed partner, announced alongside a wind-down of the direct team, would read as a clean strategic pivot. What’s happened instead is the reverse sequence, the in-house team is leaving first, fast, with a 90-day bridge to cover the gap while Näak recruits for the role. That ordering of events is the nugget of the story - it suggests the decision to cut costs came before the plan for what replaces them, which is generally what a reaction to underperformance looks like, not what a considered channel-strategy evolution looks like.

Considering the size of the US market, underperformance there rarely is a good sign for the company as a whole. What happens to their presence at UTMB events in the US, and why they cut sales before a distributor was found is also unclear (I’ve asked William and will update once I’ve heard back).

Look, I’m no journalist, I just know how to use Google and have an email account. Trailrunner has the resourcing to do this sort of thing on a much bigger scale. I just hope they too use Google to cut through the rumour mill that perpetually is churning in our sport.

Quick hits

• Skyline Scotland is now a UTMB event. Great to see Shane Ohly, founder of the now defunct Ourea, found his feet again with this announcement.

• Raziq had a cutting piece on the lack of diversity at Trailcon and the continued peculiar comparisons of this moment in trail running to skateboarding by industry folk. Very much worth a read.

• Can we admit WSERs livestream was visually great, but experientially poor? It felt like half the commentary was Dylan and Corrine guessing who they were looking at on screen and the ordering of racers. Why do we not have better systems for confirming this?

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It’s fair to say that life recently has been overwhelming. I won’t bore you with the details, but it has meant I haven’t had any time for this little newsletter. There’s so much i want to do, but with so little time, i’ve ended up picking articles up only to drop them to prioritise, well, life.

What’s made it even worse is that I’m currently grounded due to work reasons, so won’t be seeing a lot of you at Trailcon. Even though UTMB is two months away, I’m even questioning if i can make that. First world problems and all, but I do this because I want this to be useful for you, i want to be able to report on stories that few people really dive deep into, and doing so requires time, something I don’t have. Consequently, so far this year I’ve let you all down.

But hey ho, here we are, deal with the what you’ve got, move on, and all that jazz.

Today we’re talking about Trail’s new inevitable luxury watch sponsorship, Tudor, and why that’s not really the story, but why we haven’t had one before is.

Hope you have splendid weeks you lovely lot,

Matt

Tudor signing four trail running ambassadors last week was treated, in some corners, as a landmark moment, evidence that trail running had finally arrived into the promised land of non-endemic notoriety. Huzzah. In reality, it’s closer to confirmation of something the sport’s demographics have been telling us for a decade: the money was always here. The brands just couldn’t figure out how to reach it.

The income data on trail runners is striking. Around two thirds of American participants earn over $100,000 a year, according to an independent survey of the sports competitors. A quarter earn over $200,000. These frankly insane numbers don’t require much creative interpretation. They represent exactly the consumer profile that luxury brands spend fortunes trying to access. And yet, until recently, the most prestigious watch sponsoring a mountain ultramarathon was a Garmin.

The easy explanation is visibility. Trail running existed outside the cultural frame of reference that triggers luxury brand interest. No primetime broadcast, no mainstream athlete recognition, no clean trophy moment. That’s changed materially in the last four years. Courtney Dauwalter is now recognisable beyond the sport’s core audience. UTMB and Golden Trail Series has global broadcast distribution. The Western States lottery has become, improbably, a cultural artefact. The visibility barrier has largely fallen, and Tudor’s announcement is probably best read as confirmation of that, not cause of it.

But visibility was never the only problem, and I’d say it wasn’t even the hardest one. Luxury watch brands like to attach themselves to institutions. Rolex doesn’t just sponsor tennis or golf - it sponsors Wimbledon, the Masters, the Open Championship. It sponsors the Rolex 24 at Daytona. It buys institutional association with things that have a finish line, a ceremony, a repeatable televised moment where a watch on a wrist or a big ole’ clock can be visibly seen. Trail running doesn’t have that. UTMB’s finish line in Chamonix is the closest thing the sport has to a Wimbledon moment, but it’s one race, owned by a private company with its own commercial architecture already in place (bring on the battle of the watches!).

The race ownership problem runs deeper than any single event. Trail running’s institutional layer is genuinely fragmented in a way that road running and triathlon are not. There is no single body a brand can write one cheque to and receive institutional association with the sport in return. UTMB Group, independent race directors, national federations with limited commercial reach - our bizarre landscape requires a brand to do complicated, multi-territory, multi-event work to achieve what a single Wimbledon partnership delivers in tennis. Most luxury brand marketing departments are not structured to do that work.

Then there is the cultural friction, which is real even if it’s harder to quantify. Trail running built its identity around a specific refusal of commercialism and of corporate sport’s slickness. Kilian Jornet founded an entire brand on the premise that the industry’s values had become incompatible with the sport’s soul. That self-image has softened as the sport has grown, but it hasn’t disappeared. Luxury brands instinctively read that as risk, because the downside of a sponsorship that feels incongruous to the core audience is worse than no sponsorship at all.

Tudor has navigated this by openly conceding their functional premise. In their press release they pre-empt any criticism that you can’t reasonably run in one of their watches: “ Elite athletes typically don’t wear mechanical watches, but that’s not the point. The point is to celebrate the win. To memorialize the finish.“ Their positioning frames the watch as ceremony, something you put on at the finish line as a marker of achievement rather than a tool of performance. That’s somewhat defensible. Whether the sport’s audience buys into that, or whether it reads as a brand renting cultural credibility it hasn’t earned, is a question Tudor’s next few years will answer.

For now, the ambassador signings are exactly what they look like: a brand testing the water. Let’s be clear-eyed about what this is and what it isn’t: It isn’t investment. The structural barriers, fragmented ownership, no broadcast institution, the two-watch problem (can you run in two watches? Can’t wait to see someone try), remain entirely unsolved. Until a luxury brand is willing to title-sponsor a major race series, produce a trail-specific product collaboration, or commit to the kind of decade-long institutional presence that Rolex built in Wimbledon, trail running’s relationship with luxury is more ambient.

Luxury demands a certain clientele who are frankly frivolous with money. Whilst we all understand that there are never enough shoes, there isn’t a culture of spending like there is in luxury’s current domains: tennis, golf, sailing and triathlons. Until the tide turns and more people begin to think buying a fresh pair of Norda 005s is cheap, trail just doesn’t have the instuitional and cultural set-up for luxury to dig their perfectly groomed talons into.

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A single topic today, and tbh after the Satsify palava we all need to go outside and touch grass a little.

A lot of people asked my opinion on it and honestly, I really don’t care about it. Yes it was cringey, yes Brice and Satisfy’s attempts to quell the online fire made it worse, but let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. If you want the story from someone who was there, read Grace’s article. If you want to know how Satisfy got here, read Seb’s piece. Now let’s move on.

Today is one of those articles that only the hardcore fans of the business side of the sport will read. I’m fully expecting one of my lowest engagement rates, but it hella interests me, so let’s do this.

Watching ultrarunning live can be both fun and frustrating. Josh has a nerdy fix for it.

Hope you all have wonderful weeks,

Matt

Josh at Borderlands Trail Running has been thinking about what’s missing from ultra running coverage and recently decided to build something. LoC (Live on Course) is a live race intelligence system that, in theory (it’s not live yet) uses human observers positioned throughout a course to capture the moments that cameras and GPS trackers tend to miss, such as comments from athletes or whether they look like confident or sketchy. Field reports are verified and shaped by moderators before reaching two audiences: fans following a public live wire, and commentators getting a deeper tactical feed to fuel their commentary. The idea is to make 20+-hour broadcasts with signal issues and limited footage feel alive between checkpoints, not just at them. It’s a working prototype right now, and Josh is open about the fact that he’s still working out what it becomes

As both a data nerd and watcher of many hours of livestream, this makes sense to me. Data created by field observers is part of all live televised sports. Entire companies are built around their ability to have humans report and codify whenever something happens in a game to generate the datasets that underpin the information architecture of modern sports. Today more data is being captured through optical tracking in-camera, automatically calculating data as it happens, but people simply watching a game and counting when a pass happens, for instance, is still fundamental to the business.

Josh’s idea here has a genuine use case for ultrarunning, so I thought I’d ask him some questions to get the background.

What’s the core problem you’re solving here - a livestream problem, an audience problem, or a data problem, because they each create different solutions?

I’d frame it primarily as a race visibility problem, which then becomes an audience retention problem.

In our episode Cocodona Has a Fan Problem, one of the big points I made was that the issue with longform ultra coverage often isn’t top-of-funnel interest. People enter the coverage constantly. The problem is exits.

Every 20 seconds a viewer is subconsciously asking if this is worth their time right now?

A lot of ultra coverage struggles because huge portions of the race become invisible between aid stations and drones. Cameras only catch fragments. Commentary is often bridging gaps with incomplete information.

LoC is an attempt to restore visibility to the middle of the race through distributed human observation.

If the race becomes more understandable moment-to-moment, viewers stay longer because there’s more narrative tension, more emotional continuity, and more meaningful insight.

So yes, it touches livestreaming, audience retention, commentary quality, production value, and operational awareness, but I don’t really think of it as a “data business” problem.

The goal isn’t more data. It’s better race understanding.

A huge guiding principle for us while building this has been: miss the coverage, miss the race.

Not because the coverage becomes louder, but because the insight becomes deeper.

A huge part of that is the commentator layer. The public-facing live wire is only one part of the system. The commentator feed is intentionally deeper and more operational. It surfaces developing tactical reads, emotional shifts, race dynamics, and emerging storylines that help commentary become more insightful and more connected to what’s actually happening out on course.

Is there an ambition to make this into the data business of trail running?

Not really, at least not how I think that phrase is normally used.

I’m less interested in building a giant statistics layer and more interested in building a live race intelligence layer that creates a fan experience my kids would actually join me in consuming because it’s more legible and emotionally understandable.

I want more visibility, more tactical understanding, more emotion, more storytelling from moments we’ve never really had access to before.

All of that makes the coverage harder to leave.

A huge amount of ultra racing currently disappears in real time. That’s the thing I’m interested in solving.

You mention you built this with AI. UTMB and Aravaipa already have armies of volunteers on course with phones. What stops them from building a WhatsApp channel with a good moderator and doing 70% of this for free?

As a fan, I wish they would build something that did that.

The human network is already there. Volunteers, crews, aid stations, camera ops, spectators, people scattered all over the course observing meaningful things.

What doesn’t really exist yet is infrastructure that structures those observations into something operationally useful.

A WhatsApp thread can move messages around, but it doesn’t really create moderation systems, confidence structures, role-specific routing, public vs commentator intelligence layers, structured field reporting, signal prioritization, or operational UX built specifically for live ultra coverage.

AI is mostly helping us accelerate moderation, structure, routing, and synthesis. The value still fundamentally starts with humans on course paying attention.

In some ways LoC is less about inventing a new human network and more about making the existing one legible.

Still very early obviously, but that’s the direction.

Even if you’re delivering qualitative signals, they will need some form of categorisation and hierarchy to make the editing process simpler and standardised across field reporters, ultimately creating quantitative data in the process. Part of the moat of a sports data business is their methodology and categorisation that can be applied across multiple races, so it’s a problem you will likely come against.

The interesting thing is the project started less as “sports data” and more as frustration watching races I cared about feel too hard to follow despite massive effort from production teams and commentators. The deeper I got, the more I realized the issue is really an information architecture problem.

You’re also right that the qualitative layer eventually becomes structured data whether you intend it to or not. Part of the challenge is figuring out what deserves standardization versus what loses value once over-systematized. I suspect the moat is less raw data collection and more operational judgment around signal quality, prioritization, moderation, and race relevance.

Have you reached out to RDs, commentators and athletes for feedback? Any thoughts so far?

I’ve spoken informally with those who would have to adopt it but I chose to bring it to the market first mostly for the enjoyment of seeing what fans would think if implemented.

Do you want this to be a business? If so what do you envision the business model to be at the moment?

As for business model, still very exploratory. My instinct right now is that the primary value accrues to live coverage quality and audience retention, which likely makes races, broadcasters, and production ecosystems the eventual customer more than consumers themselves. But I’m intentionally resisting pretending the business is fully solved yet. Right now I’m more interested in proving the operational concept and seeing if the signal quality can become genuinely useful in a live environment.

We’re talking about what On’s quarterly report and Mount to Coast’s win at Cocodona have to do with how brands are built today; a behind the scenes of a new media experiment in ultra running; GTWS tries out team rankings; and a new model for running retail.

Hope you have a great day!

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

On posted another huge quarter this week. Revenue climbed again. Margins remained unusually high for a performance brand. Apparel surged more than 45 percent. By now, the financial success itself is no longer that surprising.

Yet if we think step back from our screens for a moment, what is interesting is what those numbers reveal about the direction of how running brands are growing more broadly.

For most of modern running history, brands followed a fairly predictable path. First, they earned credibility with serious runners. Sponsor a few athletes, be present at key races. This would establish some technical chops and demonstrate their capability in a racing environment. Only after years of proving themselves would they eventually drift into lifestyle and fashion territory.

That was the traditional route. Brands became desirable because they were credible. But newer running brands have increasingly rejected that sequence of events altogether.

Smaller companies like Satisfy, Bandit Running, District Vision, and Soar Running didn’t launch as purely technical businesses. They arrived fully formed, with performance products alongside strong aesthetics, carefully constructed identities, and clear cultural positioning. They assumed modern runners didn’t want to choose between fantastic but fuggly and sexy but dire shoes anymore. They wanted both at the same time.

In many ways, On now looks like the first brand proving that model can scale on an industrial scale. You can see it throughout the company’s recent quarter. The apparel growth is important to notice because apparel is where brands stop being equipment companies and start becoming lifestyle ones. The retail expansion matters because On’s stores increasingly function less like running shops and more like cultural spaces. Even the margins tell part of the story; consumers are willing to pay premium prices because they are buying into more than performance alone.

That doesn’t mean the product is unimportant (running is still an athletic endeavour after all). But increasingly, technical performance feels like the baseline expectation rather than the differentiator itself. You could say the differentiator is now the world around the product.

Running brands increasingly compete on what we seem to call “taste”, identity, and emotional resonance as much as foam compounds or outsole rubber. A decade ago, the idea of a running brand building itself around design language, cafés, celebrity campaigns, or fashion-adjacent retail would have felt incongruent to the sport itself. Now it sits at the centre of how brands growth.

But trail running still appears to operate under slightly different rules. Road running has become culturally liberal. A brand can gain momentum through aesthetics and a hyped social media account before it has fully proven itself at the highest levels of competition. Trail remains far more suspicious of that process.

In trail, brands still largely need to earn trust first. You only have to look at Mount to Coast to see this example play out. The brand’s visibility at Cocodona 250 this year, where three of the top 5 runners wore the H1s, immediately gave it legitimacy among serious trail runners. Cocodona has become one of the sport’s harshest proving grounds, the kind of race where product failures become brutally visible. Performing well there matters because the environment itself acts as validation.

Over the past few years Mount to Coast arrived somewhat unannounced into the scene with sponsorships of ultra long distance athletes at the 300+ mile scene on the road and eventually on the trail. By proving their shoe could hold up in the most extreme of circumstances, they built an understated rapport amongst “the heads” in running circles. Yet despite these wins, their brand hasn’t developed much broader cultural gravity.

In road running today, desirability and credibility increasingly happen simultaneously. A shoe can become culturally relevant through run clubs, aesthetics, or social identity before it has accumulated years of elite racing pedigree. Trail still tends to work the other way around. An IG carousel of a café run club backlit by a Melbourne sunrise can make a road shoe vibey. A 250-mile race through Arizona makes a trail shoe believable.

Part of that comes down to the nature of the sport itself. In road running, product failure usually means discomfort, inefficiency, or slower times. In trail, the consequences feel more serious with shoes tied to stability, durability, safety, and survival over long periods in difficult terrain. That naturally creates more conservative, research heavy, consumers.

The harsher the environment, the more technical legitimacy matters. It is also why trail still retains some resistance to overt fashion positioning. There remains an underlying suspicion toward Satisfy or the eccentric end of Salomon’s positioning that appear too polished, too trend-driven, or too disconnected from genuine mountain use. Trail culture still values suffering, experience, and utility as forms of social proof.

That does not mean trail is immune to the same forces reshaping road running. Brands like norda and NNormal are already blending premium aesthetics with technical storytelling and athlete credibility. The shift is happening there too, only more slowly and with stricter conditions attached.

Which may ultimately be the bigger story sitting underneath On’s quarter. The pathway to growing a running brand is no longer singular, more multifaceted. The sport is fragmenting into different economies with different definitions of authenticity, different recognitions of what particular segments of runners want. Road running increasingly behaves like lifestyle culture, where taste and identity drive growth alongside performance. Trail still behaves more like equipment brands, where legitimacy must be earned before desirability can fully emerge.

I’m sceptical that trail will ever become as much as a cultural hotbed as road has become. Sure as trail running grows globally, particularly in urban markets, the pressure toward aesthetics and cultural positioning will only increase. And yes, eventually, trail brands all face the same tension road brands already have: how to become desirable without losing the credibility that made them matter in the first place. But the grounding pretence of trail will always be utility first. Whether the clothes, shoes, equipment allow you to have a good time on your run, unhindered by their very presence. Desirability is unlikely to outrun the requirement to simply work.

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Other bits and pieces

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A short one this week with plenty of small news stories.

Ourea’s races have a new owner; UTMB actually have to spend their own money on a race; Aravaipa engulfed another race series; and why trail running for all it’s quandaries is moving in a positive direction.

Hope you have the best of weeks!

Matt

The response to my last article on why we struggle to have local news in trail running (but how I think there’s a market for it), was heartwarming to say the least. Many people reached out wanting to see something like that in their country or region, one person suggesting the news sourcing could be assisted by an AI Agent, another voicing their own failed attempts at starting something similar. However one note from Chris Wristen in Boston reaffirmed my belief in the strength in our community:

The Dragons Back Race and Northern Traverse were acquired by Ultra X, a UK race company specialising in multi-day events, from Ourea after they folded last month. As part of the deal, Greg Mickelborough, Ourea’s events operational lead will move over to Ultra X to manage the races and Shane Ohly, Ourea’s founder, will consult with Ultra X to ensure a smooth transition.

It’s a sigh of relief for the UK racing scene knowing how much DBR and Northern Traverse put the UK on the trail running map. Some eagle eyed followers would have seen that two other Ourea events, Cape Wrath, a 400km multi-day event along the Cape Wrath trail, and Skyline Scotland, a series of short and long trail events around Ben Nevis, were not part of the acquisition.

I emailed Sam Heward, founder of Ultra X earlier this week who explained that “logistically and commercially, they were just too complex to take on. Cape Wrath, in particular, is a huge undertaking and not something we felt we could deliver with the right level of service or continuity in a sustainable way. The decision had to be based on both emotional buy in to the events as well as complete confidence that we could deliver them in a way that was commercially viable. We were as confident about those two.”

Sam described their purchase of DBR and NT as more akin to stewardship, than acquisition ”both DBR and NT have their own loyal followings and distinct identities, and we wanted to respect that - the idea is to support and grow each event on its own terms, rather than subsuming them into the Ultra X brand.”

UTMB will be paying for the whole of their race in Nice this year after a surprise announcement from Nice’s new mayor, Eric Ciotti, who cut all funding for races in and around the city to reduce costs for the council. In his statement Eric mentioned that by cutting their funding for UTMB they would save 650K euros. Where this figure came from is curious considering the usual cost per year for Nice has been around 530K euros for the past two years. UTMB’s PR team didn’t seem to know either, so potentially the tender for the race was increased this year or there are additional costs the city has to incur to put on the race safely. Regardless, with over 2500 runners and supporters already booked in for the race, UTMB have took it on the chin and said they will take the L on this one.

Another reminder of the fragility of race economics.

Vacation Races, a US race organisation that has a variety of ultras from Zion 100 to Bryce Canyon, has sold their ultras to…Aravaipa. No surprises in the acquirer, bringing Aravaipa now to Utah, and over 70 races in their custody.

Additionally we have a new answer to the pub quiz question of “which race organisation owns the most trail running events in the world?”

One day someone is going to do a decent profile of Aravaipa’s business.

Not running related, but Rapha have released a follow-up to their Rapha Roadmap for how they would revive Cycling. It’s honestly one of the most extensively researched and mapped out recommendations I’ve seen in the public domain. A proper incisive dissection of the economics, management and politics within the sport.

It’s a unique comparator to trail running and where we are as a sport. Cycling often gets wheeled out as an example of What Trail Running Could Be because its long and held in the mountains (yes, it’s often that simple minded ). The similarities stop there, but there are learnings of what not to do and what to avoid when growing the sport - the inability to hold a consistent competitive racing calendar, the political leaning on broadcast TV deals even though they make no money and audiences have been dropping for years, a market propped up by private racing series’ and rich people, and so on. As a sport, trail running is comparatively flying. Sure there are areas that we need to improve, but the work by the PTRA is shoring up some of the stubborn issues within the private series’, and World Athletic are doing their diplomatic duties to attempt to bring cross competition drug testing and calendar wrangling to a better place.

There’s plenty of areas of improvement, but progress is always bumpy. The arc of trail running’s trajectory is moving towards the possibility of a sustainable future.

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Riddle me this - why don’t we have more local trail running news outlets? The US is covered in them. Why not the UK?

That’s what I explore today as well as Nike’s strategic missteps.

Hope you’re all doing fab, and you have a marvellous weekend!

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

On paper, UK trail and fell running looks like it should be able to support its own media. It’s established, it’s active, and it has no shortage of stories. Most weekends there are races, results, new records, and the occasional performance that travels across the proverbial pond. There are institutions, too like the Fell Runners Association and Trail Running Association that give the whole thing a semblance shape, even if loosely. And then there are the flagship events everyone recognises, from Ultra Trail Snowdonia to efforts on the Bob Graham Round that still carry a certain weight.

If you were designing a media market from scratch, you’d probably start here. And yet, very few people have managed to make anything sustainable out of covering it. That’s not for lack of trying. Over the past few years, a few blogs, news outlets, YouTube accounts and podcasts have emerged, each attempting, in slightly different ways, to make sense of the same landscape. Some lean into results and reporting, others try to tell broader stories.

But most end up covering more than the UK, settling into something broader than originally intended to capture a more regular audience of trail fans across the world, making it less a UK specific media outlet, more just a trail or ultra running outlet like many others.

When I talk about a truly local media outlet, I’m talking about your local paper/newsletter/website that covers just your local area. The ones that serve a small community knowing size will always be limited, but that seek to serve as well as inform. Most attempts at “local running media” drift, sooner or later, towards volume. More international races, more results, more content. It’s an understandable instinct, if there’s not enough happening locally, publish more of it from somewhere else. When your business model is ad/eyeball based, then creating what feels like an unnecessary restriction on your coverage feels pointless.

Whilst today I’m talking about the UK, this applies to most markets - starting a trail running specific local media outlet outside the US (and maybe France?) is difficult.

One way around this is a different business model, one less centred on eyeballs. Last year Harrier Trail Running, a British equipment and apparel brand founded by Kate Parker, started a weekly newsletter that covered the UK scene as part of their regular e-commerce emails. The posts were written and sourced by Alecsa Stewart, a freelance journalist, who every week would scour race results and write a few paragraphs on the races that had happened, the faces behind the results, and what was coming in the next week.

Despite being branded, the newsletter saw no drop in enthusiasm from reader, with similar open rates and conversion rates as a normal newsletter, according to Kate. Interest from race directors flooded in wanting to get a call out or get coverage. Alecsa recalled in a conversation this week that when she contacted Beth Langley after her win at Skyline Scotland, a relatively small event , Beth was thrilled to hear someone cared and happily relayed her thoughts and feelings on the race.

When the newsletter was in service of Harrier, it didn’t need to be too concerned about volume, just on whether people engaged with it. The newsletter ultimately ended after a few months when Kate evolved her operations to be leaner in size. Despite its short tenure the question of whether something like this could last longer and be a cornerstone of the scene has stuck with me.

I reached out to Alecsa earlier this week to ask what are the challenges to creating something like this and why she thinks no one else has. The first reason, she said, is simply that you run out of things to say. Not entirely, but enough that a weekly rhythm starts to feel forced. Races happen, but they are local and often already understood by the people who care with the results circulating quickly through the network of clubs, group chats, and Facebook pages. It did force Alecsa to look at more niche events and find the storylines there. This then becomes one of the rewards of constraints - it forces writers to look for narratives not commonly told, broadening the horizon of what British trail running is for readers.

Another difficulty was sourcing results. As mentioned, trail and fell running groups have built an support system of pages and group chats where race results are posted and shared, but rarely are they connected and widely disseminated. Sometimes you have to wait for results to be posted on a Facebook page, or a website. Sometimes you’re trying to read between the lines of Instagram stories to guess whether a particular athlete has crossed the line first or second. Most of the time you have to be the one actively following all of these various groups, pages, websites, group chats, Instagram accounts to put all the clues together about what happened in the race. And all of the time this takes hours to complete, making the news sourcing the most time consuming discipline to be in in this sport. It sounds like we’re quite a backwards nation, but when the sport has grown up without a centralised place for news this is what we get used to.

Yet this is what i think is missing. For all the activity, there isn’t really a place that consistently steps back and explains what’s happening across the scene. Not just what happened at a race, or who ran well, but how things are changing: what’s growing, what’s disappearing, what matters and what probably doesn’t. It’s something I’ve said time and time again on Trailmix - journalism or basic research drawn into a cohesive narrative just doesn’t exist, and when it does it either covers the same well worn narratives or doesn’t last long. The fragments of stories about our sport exist, scattered across different corners, but they’re rarely brought together.

To me, this suggests the issue might not be the size of the scene, but the type of coverage being attempted.

If I were to design something to survive in this environment, it would probably look quite different (but very similiar to Trailmix).

Weekly, for a start. One considered piece a week, rather than a constant stream. Distributed directly, most likely as a newsletter, rather than relying on people to seek it out. Maybe a quick 10 minute podcast reeling off the results. Supported by the obligatory Instagram presence. Built on a cost base low enough to remove most of the pressure, something closer to a single freelance spend than a full operation.

Ideally it would be supported in a way that reflects the scene itself: a small number of advertisers who see value in being close to it, and a small number of readers willing to contribute, not because they have to, but because they think it’s worth keeping around.

Even then, It does feel idealistic.

For something like this to work, it has to feel necessary. It has to do more than repeat what’s already available elsewhere. It has to connect things, occasionally challenge them, and say the kinds of things that are usually left unsaid. It has to source news itself, reaching out to relative strangers to ask what they felt at mile 78 of the Tunnel 200. Otherwise, it slips back into the same pattern of useful but ultimately replaceable. That’s the line most attempts at trail running news don’t quite cross.

These principles in this model can work, and should work across various markets. I foresee one day we have that - a network of local media outlets owned by passionate individuals in multiple markets running these businesses sustainably.

A sustainable UK trail and fell running media business isn’t sitting there waiting to be built. The conditions aren’t especially favourable, and the examples so far suggest as much. It would take time, and effort. But my god do I think it should and could exist. Something small and sustainable - that might just hold.

So if you’re a freelance journalist/passionate fan/want to start something in trail - let me know. Let’s see what we can do.

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The Independent Team Advantage

Alecsa also works for Elite Trail Team, an independent trail racing team akin to what’s in cycling - a collective of athletes supported by a cadre of physios, nutritrionists, and more all to meet their performance needs. They’ve had quite a bit of success with a relatively small team. I’ll likely dig into that a bit more another time.

What Alecsa and I noodled on was something I hadn’t quite thought about - by virtue of not being attached to a shoe or apparel sponsor they can court non-endemic sponsors and look for budgets from companies that traditionally sponsor cycling teams, e.g pharma, banks, media, and tech companies.

One the many barriers to non-endemic sponsors coming into the sport is that there’s not really any real estate that has scale and is not already taken by the endemic brands. Add on top the operational costs of creating their own trail team and you have very little reason to invest beyond a hope that the numbers work out.

With ETT, there’s a model there that works as a blank canvas and easy entrance to a cautious non-endemic brand. That’s something that could have legs.

Nike’s Big Red Flag

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I write to you from a bucolic garden in Oxfordshire where I’m taking a much needed respite from the rampage of work.

I wanted to get a full-debrief from Shane Ohly, Founder of Ourea about the backstory to their collapse, but with administrators roaming Shane can’t say anything on the record. However, there are a few lessons and learnings we can take from their demise - reflections on the unsteady finances that our sport sits on and the forces that shape them.

We also have Nike’s running return, much needed outdoor industry criticism, takeaways from Mile&Stone’s trail running conference and a new trail running publication!

Hope you’re having better weeks than i am,

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

Four learnings from Ourea’s collapse

1. This was not representative of the UK market. It was a model failure.

Ourea’s collapse says less about the health of UK trail running and more about the limits of a specific way of operating within it. Participation of trail running remains strong, calendars are more crowded than ever, and interest in the sport hasn’t disappeared. What struggled was a model built around high-cost, high- time commitment, low-frequency participation. Shane always built events that put the runner’s safety and experience first to make epic distances seem achievable, but that is difficult to maintain when you’re swimming in debt. Multi-day stage races demand early commitment, both financially and logistically, and rely on a steady flow of runners willing to lock in plans months in advance. As sign-up behaviour shifted later, closer to the race date, and competition for runners increased, that model became increasingly exposed. Ourea attempted to build in shorter distances into the long multi-day events to introduce runners to the routes, but this initiative came too late. We can point to the increasing market pressures, brexit etc. as a rationale for Ourea’s downfall, but we first need to recognise the fault in Ourea’s model.

2. Multi-day racing is structurally dependent on international demand

Shane’s statement highlighted a structural reality about multi-day racing that is easy to overlook (and something I have missed). These events are not just premium products for a self-identifying group of masochists, but are built on the assumption of a global audience. In a market like the UK, the pool of domestic runners able and willing to commit significant time and money to a single race of this extent is limited. The format therefore depends on attracting international participants to fill the field and make the economics work. For Ourea, their races (Dragons Back, Northern Traverse, Capes Wrath) maintained a 20-40% participation rate of international runners, according to their finisher data, whilst typical single day UK ultramarathon races of the same scale typically only have 10% finishers that are outside the UK. That reliance introduces a layer of vulnerability. As international participation becomes more selective and more concentrated into fewer events (read: UTMB), the available audience narrows. When that happens, it is the most demanding formats that feel the pressure first.

3. International growth is real but most races won’t feel it

The broader trend in trail running points toward increasing international participation, but that growth is not evenly distributed. Runners are still travelling, and in some cases travelling more, but their choices are being shaped by systems that offer structure, recognition, and progression. Events tied into UTMB’s global stone system benefit from this concentration of demand, while independent races must continue to attract runners on the strength of their individual proposition. In the UK, since Ultra Trail Snowdonia’s entry into the UTMB’s system, the number of finishers with a non-GBR nationality increased by 18% in three years. Across independent UK races its hard to find any races that increased it’s international base outside of UTMB events since they began. The result is a landscape where internationalisation benefits UTMB races, but not others. Some races become global hubs, while others operate in a more constrained and competitive environment despite being part of the same overall market. You could make the argument that travel introduces new runners to a different market, who are more likely to try other races in that country as a result, but currently that hasn’t been reflected in independent UK race’s finisher data.

4. The middle has been neglected and no one built the system to support it

Trail running has spent years elevating its most iconic races, building narratives around extremes and positioning them as defining experiences that we should all aspire to. What has received far less attention is the development of a coherent middle layer that connects everyday participation to those headline events. UTMB has done this through the stone system, but independent governing bodies like ITRA have not established clear pathways, incentives, or structures that encourage runners to move through different levels of the sport in a sustained way. ITRA point’s original purpose was to start to facilitate this progression, but when the Poletti’s split from ITRA and UTMB formed their own system, ITRA failed to adapt and build on theIr rankings to build something that could compete. Without that scaffolding, mid-tier races are left to operate without the support systems that might stabilise demand or create repeat engagement and runners choose races based on appeal in the moment, rather than as part of a longer-term pathway. The result is a landscape where the top is highly visible through livestreaming, pro athlete participation and word of mouth, the base remains sustainable with its basic provisions, and the space in-between carries more of the strain than it can reliably support.

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Other bits and pieces

• Running continues to be Nike’s guiding light as the category saw double figure growth in their latest quarter, when most other categories remained ‘soft’. I was curious to see if their ‘demand creation expense’ (marketing) had increased markedly for their ACG launch, but there was only a 2% increase over the past nine months. However, when they’re spending £1bn a quarter, wrapping an entire Italian train car is actually well within their budget. Don’t know why they don’t do it every year.

• We finally have some critical analysis in the outdoor industry! Wes Allen, a leader of an outdoor retailer in Wyoming, makes a distinction between Outdoor and Outside brands in a piece this week that argues that the outdoor industry is misreading inflated participation and market data, causing heritage brands to chase low-value “outside” consumers they’re not built to serve, leaving them stuck in an unprofitable middle while both specialist outdoor brands and lifestyle-focused competitors pull ahead.
  
  This is a sharp, challenging piece, exactly the kind the outdoor industry probably needs more of. The distinction between the “outside” and “outdoor” economies is particularly effective at naming something many brands and retailers are dancing around but rarely articulate. The critique of inflated market sizing and the overreliance on participation data is also pretty well made. It’s common practice across any industry where big top-line numbers, whether from the Outdoor Industry Association or elsewhere, get mistaken for real, addressable demand (another example is race impact reports that state “£xM was generated for local economy”).

  But the argument ultimately overcorrects. The “outside” and “outdoor” economies aren’t parallel systems anymore, let alone separate, they’re interconnected, and realistically always have been. Treating them as separate forces a false choice on brands that have historically thrived by managing the tension between them; you can be both an “outdoor” and an “outside” brand, you don’t have to “pick a lane”. The success of companies like Patagonia or even the cultural expansion of Arc’teryx suggests that the real challenge isn’t picking a lane, but building a model that can translate credibility across different buying contexts without diluting it. The risk is that brands fail to understand how one context feeds the other, not whether they should serve both audiences.

  Regardless, it’s a good read if you’ve got 15 mins.

• Mile and Stone, the french trail running B2B newsletter, put on its annual trail running conference this week and Alessio Punzi, head of running at World Athletic, had some useful takeouts from it:

  

• Asia is the fastest growing continent for trail runners at 35% YoY growth rate, according to ITRA data reported in an interview with Janet Ng in Trail Running World, a German website i recently discovered (make sure you translate the page, there’s quite a few well researched articles in there including this one on the rules that hinder the likelihood of trail running entering the Winter Olympics).

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Last week marked the end of Ourea Events, the owners of iconic races that put the UK on the ultrarunning map: Dragons Back, Cape Wrath, and the Northern Traverse.

Shane Ohly, founder of Ourea, is someone who was always a great booster of our sport in the UK, so it’s gutting to see the company’s downfall. Over the past week the news has echoed across the sport’s media, influencers, LinkedIn posts as well as the BBC. Most coverage has rightly focused on the runners who’s race fees have been lost with Ourea’s downfall, but a lot of what has been said about Shane and Ourea is a mischaracterisation of the situation and who he is.

I want to give Shane the chance to explain his perspective on what went wrong and address the criticism, but obviously the past week he’s been busy dealing with the fallout, so expect an article on Ourea and ultrarunning in the UK landscapeshortly.

For now we go to UTMB’s broadcast ambitions and why I think they’re chasing clout, an unlikely monetary windfall,and not embracing the possibilities of what livestreaming in ultrarunning could be.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

(All written from my phone this week, excuse the lack of pictures and any typos)

UTMB’s latest broadcast announcement reads like a sport trying to convince itself it’s something it isn’t.

If you missed it, UTMB released it’s list of broadcast partners and races that it will livestream in 2026.

2026 Broadcast Partners:

- Le Groupe L’Équipe (France)

- DAZN (Global, excluding Canada, France and the United States

- Eurovision Sport (Europe)

- iQIYI (China)

- FloSports (new - US)

- Tencent Sports (new -China)

- (You can also watch all livestreams on YouTube)

(Outside TV got the boot, but they’re still an Ironman partner, so I expect their return.)

Calendar:

On paper, it all sounds suitably grand. Deals with DAZN, FloSports, regional splits, a sense of global scale. The kind of language that places UTMB alongside established sports leagues rather than a loose collection of mountain races. You can almost hear the pitch decks humming in the background. And yes, brands like Hoka will look at that list and feel reassured. Distribution equals legitimacy. Or at least, it used to.

The problem is that ultra running isn’t built for this model and pretending otherwise risks eroding the one advantage it actually has.

This is not football, or tennis, or even Formula 1. It is a 20-hour narrative scattered across mountains, forests, and tarpaulin aid stations. The gaps between athletes can stretch into hours. The moments that matter can often happen off-camera due to poor signal. Even at its best, a live broadcast requires heavy interpretation from a commentator to feel coherent. That doesn’t make it bad, It just makes it different.

And different doesn’t monetise well through traditional rights.

There’s a blueprint here in Ironman. The endurance racing company has had situationships with many broadcasters in the past from ABC and NBC in noughties, to Outside, ESPN and DAZN today, but there has been no documented money given for their media rights despite decades of trying to prove the model could work and they too could slot neatly into the broader sports media economy. It’s not a failure of execution, but a reality check on what and where the value of the product actually is.

UTMB appears to be taking the long way round to the same conclusion.

Because while these deals add polish, they also introduce friction. Audiences fragment across platforms. Access becomes inconsistent. Casual viewers, already a fragile cohort in a niche sport, are asked to hunt for coverage rather than stumble upon it. For a property that still depends on growing its base, that’s a strange trade to make.

Meanwhile, the obvious route sits in plain sight: Use YouTube as your free livestream host with ads and commentary, then use UTMB Live as your paywalled option with graphical overlays, no ads and LiveTrail data integration. People who have already paid for a UTMB race in the past get access, otherwise you pay a season pass for the livestream. UTMB gets customer data and another income stream, and the far significant reach of YouTube.

YouTube already does the heavy lifting: global, free, frictionless. It aligns with the culture of the sport, where participation trumps spectacle and community spreads organically.

A YouTube-first model wouldn’t mean lower ambition. Quite the opposite. It would allow UTMB to build a broadcast that actually fits ultra running. Slower, more observational, less obsessed with mimicking traditional sports coverage. A place where the live feed is the spine, not the entire experience. Where highlights, storytelling, and personality do as much work as split times.

Layer something more sophisticated on top through UTMB Live and you have a product that serves both ends of the audience without compromising either. Casual viewers get access. Dedicated fans get depth. UTMB keeps control.

Most importantly, it keeps the audience.

Because that’s the part that feels oddly under-discussed in all of this. Media rights are only valuable if people are watching. And in a sport like ultra running, attention is hard-won and easily lost. Sure, they’ve seen growing “live broadcast views” through broadcasters (I won’t get into how flimsy a metric “views” is), but trading reach for the promise of future revenue that may never properly arrive feels less like strategy and more like clinging on to an addictive habit.

There’s a version of this where UTMB makes money from its livestreaming rather than leave it up to regions and brands to partially fund it. That won’t be done by imitating traditional sports and clout chasing deals with more online platforms, but by leaning into what makes it unique.

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As an addendum to all this, the first UTMB livestream was meant to be at the Tenerife Bluetrail this weekend before it was cancelled due to the adverse weather. UTMB confirmed to me that there are no plans to replace that livestream with another race this year.

Another reason why traditional broadcasters would be hesitant to pay for coverage…

For those curious about the cost of the livestreams, the livestreaming tender for Tenerife Bluetrail this weekend (before it was cancelled), was euros 82.5K, up from 75K euros last year.

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The snowdrops have given way to daffodils across the valleys I’ve been hiking in recently (yes, hiking not running. I already have an injury 🎉). It’s a small change, but it’s natures colourful way of marking the passage of the seasons and reminding us of what is yet to come.

Running also has a more gaudy way of showing the passage of the seasons through more advertising campaigns. As we move into racing season, brands come out of their winter hibernation with a spring-summer set and ritually shower social media companies with cash to make sure we’re all well aware of it.

This week we talk about a less gaudy, more thoughtful, campaign from Merrell and what it reveals about the positioning moves of the outdoor industry; UTMB getting into skincare; and Klattermussen’s arrival in trail.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

Two pieces of news landed in the outdoor industry this week that, on the surface, appear to have little to do with one another.

One comes from Merrell, which has launched a new global brand platform called It Starts Outside to mark its 45th anniversary. Created with London agency Uncommon Creative Studio, the campaign moves away from the traditional outdoor formula of remote peaks and epic expeditions. The imagery is deliberately softer; a person steps outside their front door; someone walks through a park; a runner moves along a local trail. The message is that the outdoors begins the moment you leave the house.

The other development comes from KEEN, which has announced a push into performance trail running. The company is entering the sport with new shoes, athlete signings, including ultrarunning veterans Jeff Browning and Krissy Moehl, alongside a new trail-focused film and a community activation on Strava.

Both traditional brands pointing towards a similar underlying trend. Across the outdoor industry, companies are reorganising themselves around movement rather than exploration, and trail running has become the activity that sits at the centre of that transition.

For much of its history, the outdoor sector revolved around hiking and mountaineering. Those pursuits might produce powerful imagery that give ardent outdoors types a semi when reading through their latest issue of Mountain Gazette, but they always had limited participation. A summit attempt might take place once a year. A multi-day trek might be a rare holiday. Trail running operates on a different rhythm - It is an outdoor activity practiced weekly, often several times a week, which makes it far more compatible with the product cycles and communities that modern brands depend on.

This helps explain why trail running has become attractive to companies that historically built their reputations elsewhere. KEEN, for example, spent decades selling rugged sandals and hiking footwear. Moving into trail running places the brand inside a culture defined by regular activity, race calendars and digital communities. The presence of athletes such as Browning and Moehl offers instant credibility while linking the company to a sport that has steadily expanded over the past decade.

Merrell’s new campaign suggests a different but related strategy. Rather than emphasising specialist sports, It Starts Outside reframes the entire outdoor category around everyday movement. The campaign’s imagery suggests that the outdoors is not a distant destination but something accessible from your own front door. A short walk, a run along a path, or an hour outside becomes part of a broader narrative about wellbeing and connection to nature.

That positioning also aligns with a wider shift happening across the outdoor economy. New data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis out this week shows the sector continuing to expand, generating roughly $1.3 trillion in economic output in 2024 and accounting for about 2.4 percent of U.S. GDP. Yet the same data points to emerging pressure on consumer spending. Participation in outdoor activities remains high, but inflation and affordability concerns are beginning to limit how much people spend on gear, travel and trips. In practical terms, that means the industry’s growth increasingly depends on widening the base of people who participate outdoors, rather than relying on existing enthusiasts spending more each year. A campaign that frames the outdoors as something that starts just beyond the front door makes strategic sense in that context.

Trail running fits neatly within that strategy. Among outdoor activities it occupies a productive middle ground. It carries the sense of athletic challenge that attracts committed participants while remaining approachable enough to feel realistic for newcomers. A trail run can happen before work or during a weekend trip. That balance between aspiration and accessibility makes it an unusually useful sport for brands trying to expand the outdoor audience.

Recently another term has begun appearing in the running shoe brand manager’s vernacular: gravel running. The phrase describes running on unpaved roads, forestry tracks and canal paths, terrain that sits somewhere between asphalt and mountain trails. The concept echoes the rise of gravel cycling, where the bicycle industry successfully built an entire category around mixed-surface riding.

For running brands, gravel running solves a practical problem. Not everyone lives near technical trails, but many regions have networks of “gravel” roads and park paths. Promoting gravel running allows companies to frame outdoor movement as something that can happen almost anywhere, which aligns neatly with the idea that the outdoors begins just beyond the doorstep.

Seen from this perspective, trail running and gravel running form part of the same strategic ladder. Gravel offers an accessible entry point into off-road running, while trail running represents the more demanding performance end of the spectrum. Together they allow brands to address a broader range of participants without abandoning the outdoor identity that defines the category.

That context makes the week’s announcements feel less coincidental. Merrell is attempting to redefine the meaning of being outside, presenting the outdoors as a daily habit rather than a distant adventure. KEEN is moving directly into the sport that has become the outdoor industry’s most dynamic performance discipline.

Both strategies recognise the same reality that In today’s outdoor market, the most valuable activities are not necessarily the most extreme. Brands can sell a chunky mountaineering boot that makes scaling K2 like walking on clouds, all for the price of a MacBook NEO, but trying to find a customer for that is going to cost as much as it took to produce it. The most valuable activities are the ones people can practice often, share with others and integrate into everyday life. Trail running, and increasingly gravel running alongside it, sits precisely in that space.

For trail running, this comes with an interesting implication. The sport may still present itself as a gnarly pursuit played out in remote mountains, but its economic value increasingly lies somewhere closer to home.

Regardless, for a sport that once lived at the margins of the outdoor world, trail running has had quite a shift in influence over the past couple of decades. From a niche sport, to one of the main ways the outdoor industry now defines what being outside means.

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Another small, odd, but telling signal of the sport’s commercial maturation comes from the UTMB World Series, which recently signed a three-year partnership with French dermatology brand Laboratoire SVR. At first glance, skincare might seem like an unusual category for trail running sponsorship. In reality it reflects the gradual onward march of commercialisation in the sport’s ecosystem. Historically, trail races attracted sponsors from a narrow group of industries: footwear, nutrition, hydration and outdoor equipment. A dermatology partner signals a shift toward more specialised performance and lifestyle categories, the kind typically seen in larger endurance sports such as cycling and triathlon. As a pasty white ginger Brit who recently got a sunburn from a day of hiking in winter, I approve or this partnership.

Klattermusen, the Swedish outdoor brand with a penchant for triangles, has dove headfirst into trail running partnerships in 2026 sponsoring Sormlands 100 (2025), Lofoten Ultra-Trail (wait until UTMB find out about that name), Peak Divide (still the best trail event I’ve been too), and the Fjällmaraton 100. Welcome to the party! I hope their branded aid stations have all the foods cut into triangles.

After all the talk of prize money recently i thought I’d update this graphic I made in 2024 showing the total prize pots of each race series. From 2024, the total has increased 41% to 1.15M euros - spicy. With so many races having a prize fund now, I probably should make one of these for independent races too…

Mucho news the past few weeks; Black Canyon introducing Race Purses; GTWS announcing its changed racing calendar; Brice Partouche having a public meltdown; and we now have a prediction market?! I cover all that in this week’s Trailmix.

Hope you all have a spectacular week (just a few weeks now until longer, warmer days!)

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

How much is a fan worth?

When Black Canyon Ultras introduced prize money for the first time last week, it did so through a mechanism that drew immediate attention. The purse was structured as a hybrid: seeded and heavily funded by Aravaipa Running, then expanded through community contributions integrated directly into the race’s live broadcast.

For the 100K, Aravaipa put up the first $5,000 and matched the next $5,000 in donations. The match was fully exhausted, bringing the total purse to $16,726, with $10,000 coming from Aravaipa itself. The 50K followed a similar structure, with a $3,000 seed and a $3,000 match. That race ultimately distributed $6,968. Across both events, nearly $15,000 of the roughly $23,700 total purse was funded directly by the company.

The idea had been circulating in the sport for some time. As Aravaipa owner and CEO Jamil Coury explained, “I honestly can’t quite remember where the idea came from initially but I know it’s been talked about by many folks in the industry over the years — the idea of a crowd sourced prize purse.” He pointed to a 2024 implementation at the USATF 10K Championships in Bentonville as inspiration, where contributions were integrated into a live broadcast environment.

The Black Canyon version was built quickly. “We started work on this just after Burrito League ended, so really only had about 10 days to spin this up,” Coury said. “We figured debuting at Black Canyon if we could pull it off would be a good way to make a splash and have the best chance at actually crowd sourcing some prize money since it is such a popular race.”

The mechanics were intentionally interactive. Donors could choose an emoji “flair” that appeared alongside their name and contribution on the broadcast. Over the weekend, 317 individuals made 381 contributions. Five donated more than $100. Seventeen donated exactly $100. The smallest contribution was $0.67. The largest was $400.

Coury framed the initiative as optional and additive. “Why not just put up $15K in prize money? We feel like this is just a fun optional way to help promote that prize money is going out and give an actual pathway for fans who have the means and want to support the athletes they watch some support.” He described it as comparable to tipping a streamer or donating to a GoFundMe, a voluntary gesture in a space where elite athletes often earn modest sums relative to other professional sports.

He also emphasised that Aravaipa did not intend to create a fully speculative purse model. “We didn’t want pure crowdsourced funding which is why Aravaipa provided the initial purse, matched funds, and ultimately contributed close to 2/3 of the total purse.” In his view, the experiment was successful. “We were able to provide a fun way for the audience to contribute to athletes, and they actually chose to do so.”

There is, however, a broader conversation attached to this experiment. Prize money in trail running has historically been inconsistent and often secondary to participant experience. Coury acknowledged that trade-off. “Funding of a prize purse is a decision like any other expense in a race management business and is often weighed against other options of how to improve runner experience - it can come at the offset of other amenities.” Aravaipa has historically invested heavily in live broadcasting and race films, which it sees as another way of elevating the elite side of the sport.

He was candid about the larger uncertainty. “Obviously this is a conversation starter of who should pay athletes? Should sponsors pay? Should race directors pay? Should media entities pay? I think it’s an imperfect system right now and this is just a fun bonus way for some athletes to receive support.”

That question “who pays?” sits at the heart of the debate.

Trail running has long operated on a participation-driven economy. Entry fees underwrite races. Brands sell to runners. Volunteers donate time to make events viable. Spectators have not historically carried measurable economic weight in the way fans do in major professional leagues. In that landscape, prize money competes with participant amenities, production costs and operational overhead.

The hybrid purse model introduces a new dynamic: the spectator as economic participant. When contributions appear live on a broadcast and the purse grows in real time, engagement deepens. Coury admitted he “just love[s] the idea that the race purse can grow over the course of a race.” That growth becomes part of the spectacle.

Criticism of the model has centred less on this specific execution and more on precedent. A purely crowdsourced purse would introduce volatility into race planning and athlete scheduling. Athletes choose races based on travel logistics, sponsor obligations and potential earnings. Uncertainty in prize structure complicates that calculus, especially when athletes aren’t told about the set-up until 2 days before the race. Coury acknowledged that concern. “I can see how a 100% crowdsourced fund could be an unknown question mark when choosing which races to attend especially if a race fails to attract any contributions… I’d hope that it stays a hybrid model, where fan contributions are just a bit of a fun bonus.”

There is also the question of equity. Models that rely on audience engagement can inadvertently reward visibility. Athletes with larger social media followings or more recognisable brands may benefit from greater fan activation. While Black Canyon’s purse was distributed by podium position rather than individual backing, the underlying engagement tools reflect a broader trend toward interactive fandom.

At the same time, the data suggests that community appetite exists. More than 300 people chose to contribute, despite no obligation to do so. That engagement is not trivial in a sport that still derives most of its revenue from participation rather than viewership.

The deeper issue is structural. If trail running seeks larger prize purses, stronger elite fields and more professional storytelling, funding must come from somewhere. Sponsors, race organisers, media entities and participants each carry part of the load. The introduction of fan contributions signals that spectators may gradually be asked to carry a portion as well.

If I could pop my head out of this essay parapet for a moment - my belief from when this was announced is that fans should not underwrite the prestige of a race and an athlete’s wages. The mechanism is fun, and I admire Aravaipa for experimenting with it, but it only works when there is already a guaranteed purse underpinning it. Otherwise it undermines the spirit of volunteerism that keeps the sport afloat.

Coury was explicit about Aravaipa’s priorities. “Our number one goal at Aravaipa isn’t to fund the pro athlete side of the space… Prize money has been a lower priority, but we are excited about the prospect of growing prize money in the future in new and unique ways.” That framing positions the purse as an enhancement layered onto a participation-focused foundation.

Black Canyon’s experiment does not settle the debate about whether we should adopting fan-funded purses wholesale. The hybrid structure, heavy Aravaipa backing and clear communication was thoughtfully implemented. The broader trajectory of trail running will determine whether fan-funded mechanisms remain supplementary or become foundational.

For now, the purse at Black Canyon grew in real time, checks were handed out, and 317 people saw their name and generosity flash across a live broadcast. Whether that weekend marks a creative one-off or an early step toward a more financialised spectator economy will depend on what comes next and who ultimately carries the weight of professionalism in trail running.

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A not-so Golden Trail

The GTWS (Golden Trail World Series) launched its 2026 line up a couple of weeks ago to very different array of races. This year they leaned further into Asia with three races, and surprisingly had no US race. Mile & Stone’s interview with Greg Vollet revealed that Nike ACG’s sponsorship of Broken Arrow was a surprise to them, so they had to find alternatives, which likely meant the introduction of Quebec Mega Trail, a race that is also in the World Trail Majors.

More tidbits from the interview:

• Greg expects GTWS to be back in France in 2027 after the lost the Mont Blanc Marathon in 2024

• WBD is relying on developing the athletes’ brand image to boost the attractiveness of GTWS to the trail audience and compete against UTMB’s draw

• Laurent Ardito, head of Team Asics, raised the criticism that flying to Asia three times isn’t entirely sustainable and that they will be selectively choosing races to compete in rather than the whole series.

• This paragraph from Greg echoed a few conversations I’ve had over the past couple of weeks across the industry after seeing Ski Mountaineering in the Winter Olympics: “We are indeed having discussions, I proposed this flower format, which seems to me to be the best compromise for athletes, spectators, and TV broadcasting, but there are technical rules that mean trail running is still far from being able to access the Olympics,” confides Greg Vollet. “Notably the fact that the entire race must be filmed in 4K, which we are incapable of today. Now, we must be very careful regarding what is happening with ski mountaineering at the Olympics. What can the Olympics bring to trail running? Visibility. But can’t that be brought in other ways? That’s what we are working on with the GTWS.”

How much is a fan worth? V2

Running alongside the Race Purse experiment is the emergence of a small, no-money trail running prediction market - something that is a low adoption for now, and more novelty than ecosystem. Yet placed next to Black Canyon’s crowdsourced purse, it feels directionally aligned.

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A delightful flu left me feeling like an unmotivated slug this week, so no news breakdowns or analysis today. Just a little thought about the dark arts of brand partnerships and how it guides where we focus our attention in trail running, and what it compresses.

Hope you had a better week than mine (or were invited on ACG’s “All Conditions Express” train ride through the Alps),

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

Lately I’ve been thinking about the dark arts of sponsorships, gifting and investments that is thoroughly embedded in running media, and about what it quietly changed once it became normal. Not in a scandal sense and not aimed at any one creator (although I know we all know more than one). More as a background effect, something you notice after enough podcasts, reviews, and race-weekend coverage start to blur into patterns.

Running media and influencers have professionalised. Brands fund shows, athletes overlap with product development, outlets take on consulting work, and creators build real businesses hawking gels and AI training plans. None of that is surprising, and none of it is inherently negative. The interesting bit is how the presence of money subtly shapes the edges of the conversation.

The content itself is rarely dishonest. Shoes are still tested. Races are still covered. Interviews are still engaging and often insightful. If anything, production quality has gone up across the board. The change is more about range than truth, a quiet narrowing of what tends to get explored deeply versus what gets skimmed or skipped.

One example is comparison. You’ll often hear why a shoe is good, who it’s for, or how it fits into a brand’s ecosystem. What’s a bit harder to find is clear hierarchy when two closely connected brands are involved. Not impossible, there are creators who do this better than publications, but generally evaluation leans additive rather than subtractive. Many strengths, fewer decisive weaknesses. In a sport built on marginal gains and gear nuance, that softness stands out, even if most consumers only feel it rather than consciously note it.

Bigger structural questions also tend to appear less frequently than product-level ones. Things like why certain races receive disproportionate media attention relative to participation, why some athletes feel omnipresent regardless of results, or why prize money in trail can stagnate while marketing budgets expand. These aren’t hostile questions and they’re not even especially controversial. They’re just slower, more complex, and sometimes less compatible with the formats that dominate running media - chummy podcasts, pithy social clips. Incentives play a role, but so does medium. I don’t think it’s avoidance, it’s just friction that feels counter to the optimistic outlook of running media.

Another subtle gap is follow-up. Running media is very good at launches and announcements - fancy new shoes, shiny new brands, exciting new race series. It’s quieter when something doesn’t land (unless you’re Tracksmith). A product line disappears, a race folds, a brand pivots away from a category, and it often just fades rather than gets revisited. This isn’t unique to running; most enthusiast media is forward-looking by nature. But the effect is a thin institutional memory. Everything feels new because little gets formally closed.

Complicated issues show a similar pattern. “Innovation”, “community”, and “growth” travel well as marketing stories. But trade-offs, whether rising prices, environmental impact, athlete burnout - the difficult things to broach in a pithy manner – they’re less investigated. If they are, they’re usually framed individually rather than systemically. Again, this isn’t censorship. It’s narrative narrowing. Clean stories move easier than complicated ones.

Perhaps the most interesting layer is storytelling itself. Certain narratives repeat across seasons: the authentic founder, the athlete-designed product, the community-first launch. Many of these stories are true and worth telling. They’re also effective marketing structures, and it’s relatively rare to see much examination of why they work so well (or whether anyone cares) or what other narratives they might crowd out. Running media is good at telling stories; it’s less interested in analysing the mechanics of it’s storytelling.

None of this requires bad intent. In most cases it’s the opposite. Creators genuinely like the products they cover and the people they work with. It’s not deception so much as curation by incentive and format. Over time, audiences are exposed to a consistently partial picture. Certain questions drop below the threshold of “worth asking,” not because they’re wrong, but because they introduce friction, complexity, or simply don’t fit the channel.

It’s also fair to say that many consumers already understand the basics. People know creators have sponsors. They know brands want favourable coverage. The running audience (especially gear-focused or industry-adjacent readers) is often more media-literate than it gets credit for. We’re aware of the money involved, but we’re also aware of subtle articulation of boundaries. We sense where comparisons soften or follow-ups disappear but don’t always name it. Media literacy here isn’t about spotting #ads anymore. It’s about noticing absences, for instance which brands rarely get directly compared, which failures never quite get revisited, which topics consistently stop one layer short.

Running isn’t unique in this. Cycling, tech, food, and fashion media have all gone through similar phases. The difference is that running still likes to see itself as especially grassroots and authentic, which can make structural analysis feel cynical when it’s really just observational. The industry has matured financially faster than it has matured institutionally, and that shows up less in ethics debates and more in conversational blind spots.

So, what’s a realistic next step? Probably not public callouts or lengthy legal-style disclosures. Those tend to create more noise than clarity. A more practical move would be to normalise simple saying when you’re being incentivised. Small, repeatable bits of context that help audiences interpret coverage without turning every mention into a disclaimer.

That might look like a standing “how we work with brands” page linked in show notes, a consistent footer line in reviews, or a brief verbal note at the start of recurring sponsored segments. Nothing heavy. Just stable reference points. The aim isn’t to distance running media from commerce (that’s neither possible nor necessary), but to widen the conversational range again. When audiences have clear context, creators often gain more freedom to compare, revisit, question, and remember without it feeling like a breach of trust.

For those thinking “isn’t this already in law?” you would be correct in most instances. Any time you mention a brand that either sponsors you, gifted you anything or that you invested in, you need to disclose that according to both US, UK and EU law. But legal disclosure and conversational clarity aren’t the same thing. A brief “#ad” tag or a line in the show notes may satisfy regulation while doing little to change how content is perceived or what topics feel comfortable to explore. These laws set the floor for transparency, not the ceiling for editorial range. An industry can be compliant (although I’d argue we’re not the best at it) and still develop predictable blind spots simply because relationships, access, and formats influence what feels worth saying.

We’re never going to get every influencer and media outlet disclosing all their commercial ties, but we can notice its effect on content breadth. Running media doesn’t lose credibility because money is involved, it loses it when the presence of money quietly shrinks or loudly amplifies what gets talked about. Small signals of context can do a surprising amount to reopen that space.

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Last week was a big week. I held Trailmix’s first private dinner in Soho, London. We had a small mix of founders, CEOs, RDs, and marketers who have supported this newsletter for a long while. Honestly it couldn’t have gone any better. I’m so grateful for those that came and for Cam and Paul at Mellor&Smith for helping organise it. There’s certainly going to be more events on the horizon.

Now to the content and oh boy is there a lot. We talk Killian’s perspective on trail, what UTMB’s annual numbers say about its strategy, and why trail running brands care about Paris Fashion Week (paid).

Hope you have a great week!

Matt

🔎 Want me to look into a story? Work at a brand that’s got some new news and launches? or just want to say hey? Reply to this email or message me at Matt@wearetrailmix.com

Killian Looks into a Crystal Ball (and sees Trailmix ;) )

Killian Jornet started the year by reinforcing his position as the president of trail running with a NYT profile and an extraordinarily detailed post on the present and future of the sport.

As keen readers of Trailmix, you likely saw that a lot of what Killian wrote about are topics I’ve covered extensively here – the rise of China, the emergence of the richer demographic of trail runners, the athlete as media house, our Olympic future, prize money not being additive to the sport, the politics between the plethora of racing series’ etc. (not saying Trailmix readers are the most informed members of the trail running establishment, but the resemblance is uncanny 😉). However, there were a few points that confirmed rumours and raised eyebrows:

• “In 2026, World Athletics, in coordination with the ITRA and WMRA, has solidified a proposal for the Brisbane 2032 Summer Games”
  

• There are “a hundred trail runners worldwide that make enough to meet the average living wage requirement” – Quite a statement, but when the living wage varies from £27k in the UK to $70K (£52K) in certain US states, it’s understandable that we’re at such a low threshold.
  

• Prize money doesn’t bring the best athletes because sponsors have more sway over where an athlete races
  

• “The death of technical races” – this was the most insightful statement by Killian pressing on an argument that I’ve heard a few RDs reference but didn’t take to the global extent that Killian took it. This feels like an open goal for Skyrunning – a way to position themselves separate from the other race series. However, with a need for more participants and their 2026 calendar looking a lot less technical, it’ll be a hard positioning to pull off financially. If anyone at Skyrunning wants to chat about this, email me.

Why UTMB Doesn’t Need Bigger Event Weekends to Grow

UTMB ended 2025 on €30M, up 20% from €25M in 2024, according to a Mile&Stone interview with Frederic Lenart, CEO of UTMB, adding that they ended on another profitable year.

This line came a week after UTMB released their annual data dump on how successful 2025 has been for them. On the surface, it’s all grand – another year of growth and moral kudos. Yet, a few oddities come when you start to look at the comparables:

• The number of events they ran in 2025 grew 27% increase from 43 in 2024 to 55 in 2025. So far so normal.

• The average number of races they ran per event declined by 5% (4.8 vs 5.09 in 2024)

• The average number of runners per event declined to 2,671 runners per event ( -454 YoY, -15%), yet the average number of runners per race has increased, 554 runners (+62 YoY, +11%).

If we layer on revenue, we start to see the shape of UTMB’s portfolio strategy:

• The average revenue per event declined 6% from €581k in 2024 to €545K in 2025

Whilst we don’t know the split of entry fee revenue to sponsorship and destination contracts, these annual results give an indication of the portfolio strategy UTMB is beginning to carve out.

UTMB is growing as a company while allowing individual events to become less financially central to their success. Think of it like this, if each event was the primary growth engine to UTMB’s success they would maximise capacity by adding runners and races whilst aggressively testing runners willingness to pay (believe me, the current rise in race fees is conservative). Instead, they’re cutting the overall number of runners over a weekend, spreading them out into more events.

With top-line company growth in place, UTMB can afford to let events be “good enough” financially. It allows them to optimise for control, safety, and brand coherence, and avoid the reputational and environmental risk of oversized events. In fact, slightly shrinking events can protect group-level revenue by reducing the chance of disasters, keeps municipalities on their side and makes the whole system more predictable.

As such the higher race fees we’re seeing are more a way to anchor perceived value (even signal prestige), control demand and offset inflationary costs. At UTMB’s scale, every additional runner adds disproportionate cost: medical cover, transport, volunteer coordination, environmental mitigation, and increasingly complex permitting. Revenue per runner is rising, but so is the cost of hosting them.

By de-risking each event weekend and expanding internationally, my theory is that revenue growth is now coming from the benefits that scale gives UTMB. That’s bigger series-wide sponsorship deals, global brand partnerships, multi-year host-destination contracts, and maybe even media rights deals. That’s why the news that Dacia hasn’t renewed their contract likely hit UTMB harder than missing out on a few cheap French trucks at their races. UTMB is consciously uncoupling its dependency on race participation from growth, allowing event-level economics to soften while scaling the value of the series above the race.

This is no grand strategic shift but taken together it suggests UTMB is becoming more deliberate about where growth is allowed to come from. UTMB still needs runners to grow, sure, but it no longer needs every event to prove that growth.

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Paris Fashion Week is just as Important as TRE for Trail Running Brands

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We’re back. New year, same newsletter. I know you missed this.

Time to give a little summary of the main theme of 2025 followed by a few trends and events I’m monitoring in 2026.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

2025 was the year trail running lost the protection of its own myth.

For years, trail running benefited from a convenient story: that it was too small, too weird, too values-driven to be subject to the same forces as mainstream sport. That myth acted as insulation against scrutiny, against hard economics, against uncomfortable questions about power, money, and scale.

In 2025, that insulation wore thin.

Nothing dramatic “happened.” No UTMB scandal. No hostile takeover. No single villain we can rally against. Instead, the sport crossed a subtle threshold: it became large enough, expensive enough, and organised enough that its ‘dirtbag’ mythology stopped excusing its disorganised structures.

2025 was the year trail running stopped pretending it was small.

Leagues, rankings, broadcast ambitions, Olympics chatter, athlete contracts, more formal calendars - the sport continued its slow march toward looking like a “proper” professional ecosystem. Structure arrived, but consensus didn’t. The talks between GTWS, UTMB, PTRA and WA towards the end of the year are a signal that the arguments over how this sport is run has become unignorable for it to continue on.

Over the course of the year newsletters and podcasts sprung up offering analysis of the sport, confronting it’s many issues head on. No longer is our media world filled with branded boosterism through overly optimistic paid for shoe reviews, but a new panel of athletes vocalising their dissent.

Trail running didn’t sell out in 2025. But it did lose the right to claim innocence.

That’s why so many of the year’s tensions felt unresolved, and sometimes petty. The sport was negotiating with itself, with identify anxiety being thrown off everywhere. About who gets paid. Who gets heard. Whether Tracksmith are a trail brand. What durability and sustainability means when shoes cost more and races look slicker. Who the “average” trail runner is when £250 shoes become the norm. What “community” means once schedules, contracts, and bonuses exist.

And crucially this shift didn’t come from outside the sport, but from it’s own success. Growth forced trail running to explain itself to the world, to new runners, to athletes dabbling in the sport, to non-endemic partners, to international media organisations - all without leaning on mythology.

That’s the real story of 2025: 2025 was the year trail running became self-aware. Not fully commercialised, not fully dirtbag. A sport no longer able to hide behind mud-splattered romanticism.

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Trends I’m monitoring in 2026

Money, Money everywhere

Prize purses are up – GTWS and UTMB has grown, and Nike is bankrolling more races. Anecdotally athletes are asking for, and in some cases securing, higher sponsorship fees, often with agents now involved in negotiations. At the same time, brand revenues are growing and margins appear to be holding. On paper, there is more money in the system than there has ever been.

What remains unresolved is whether this money flows sustainably. Higher athlete investment only works if brands can articulate and measure return beyond goodwill. The next phase won’t be about whether athletes deserve more, that argument is largely settled, but about how performance, visibility, and narrative translate into commercial value. This 2026 contract season will signal whether trail running can move from symbolic pay increases to a functioning athlete economy.

Gravel as portfolio stress test

Gravel is currently being asked to do a lot of work. It’s positioned as a bridge between road and trail, a way to nudge road runners off tarmac, and a justification for another purchase in an already crowded shoe rotation. The strategic bet is clear: soften the polarity between “road” and “trail” and expand the middle of the portfolio.

The risk is equally clear. The industry has been here before with road-to-trail hybrids that promised progression but failed to change behaviour. If gravel becomes a genuine +1 in a runner’s quiver, brands win. If it quietly replaces light trail usage (absorbing fire roads and non-technical terrain), replacement cycles may slow and traditional trail shoes may lose relevance and R&D attention. It’s notable that much of the innovation in trail shoes at last year’s TRE felt incremental; one plausible explanation is that development resources are being prioritised elsewhere.

Retail will be an early signal. Where gravel sits on the wall matters. Road, trail, hiking - each placement implies a different use case, customer and perception of opportunity. Gravel may also emerge as a test bed for midsoles and outsole concepts before they reach core trail models. If so, it becomes less a category and more an internal proving ground. With more brands releasing gravel shoes this year, the positioning, opportunity and additive value to the industry and runners will only become clearer.

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The mid-tier race squeeze

As UTMB continues to expand and destination races attract new entrants to the sport, mid-tier events are feeling pressure from both ends. Shane Ohly’s reflections on 2025 as Director of Ourea events, and his subsequent portfolio refinement for 2026, echo what many race directors are already experiencing and that I have been reporting: being “good” is no longer enough.

Races that thrive tend to have a clear role - seasonal advantage, feeder status, deep community roots, or an experience that can’t be easily substituted. Those without one are increasingly exposed. Consequently, marketing of events is going to become a specialty mid-tier races can ill-afford to sleep on, resulting in lower margins as they spend more on comms and seek to redefine the value of their race in the runner’s annual calendar. The likely outcome isn’t collapse, but consolidation: fewer events, more clearly defined, as organisers focus on what only they can deliver.

The splintering of trail running — and media’s role

“Trail running” has always been a generous, slightly imprecise term. It has comfortably housed ultrarunning, skyrunning, short-distance trail racing, backyards, FKTs, fell running, and the distinct cultures that sit alongside them. That breadth allowed media to cover a wide landscape under a single banner and helped the sport feel unified.

That unity is starting to strain. One of the most viewed endurance events of 2025, Nick Bare’s Go One More backyard, barely registered within traditional trail media channels. It’s a demonstration of a sport that is starting to strain under the ambiguity of ‘trail running’ as a definition. This is not fragmentation for its own sake, but formats and cultures becoming legible enough to stand on their own, accelerated by a swath of media outlets and creators making the distinctions between them visible. It’s a trend driven by the broader division of media consumption, the algorithmic siloing of who and what information you consume online.

This isn’t a warning sign, but a maturation signal. A recognition that one format cannot stand in for the whole, and that unity can’t be maintained through vibes alone. The risk now is speaking in generalities in a sport that has outgrown them. For race directors, brands, and media, this raises a practical question: who are you actually talking to?

Consensus becomes essential

The organisation of professional race series is frankly a mess. Overlapping calendars, irregular drug testing policies, inconsistent rules. It’s a sign of an immature sport that doesn’t quite know how to position itself. The talks between GTWS, UTMB, PTRA and WA towards the end of the year are sign that these difficulties might come to an end.

As I’ve mentioned in multiple articles last year, who benefits is the key story to come out of this reorganization at the top – and who these benefits serve. If the talks continue and we see consensus in calendars, doping, rules and importantly governance of these, the sport can stabilise and start to define itself more as a competitive sport and market. Clearer for athletes, legible for sponsors and credible on the world stage. The implications are vast on how trail running positions itself for the future, further legitimising it’s veracity and value as a sport, making it easier to be an Olympics contender and attract non-endemic sponsors. Without consensus, trail running will continue looking in the mirror, dwelling on it’s identity in years to come.

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Christmas time is an important time for me. From spending time with friends and family, reflecting on the past year and dreaming up plans for the next. It’s a month bookmarked by traditions that build up year after year.

Over the last couple of years I’ve published A Trail Running Media Gift Guide, a selection of ways you can gift the trail runner in your life a present that mutually shows your support for the media outlets and creators that give life to this community, whilst also helping you with last minute gifts.

This year I’ve updated the list with a few finds across the year.

Whether by subscribing to a publication directly, donating to their Patreon, purchasing their merch, or buying something using a discount code, we can all support the media outlets and creators in our industry this year by investing in them.

This list is by no means comprehensive, so please support your favourite trail running media publication/podcast/creator in any way you can :)

I hope you have a restful Christmas and a raucous New Year.

Matt

For the Reflective Runner

Like The Wind is for those that believe that running is more than a sport, but a way of being. Reading Simon and Julie Freeman’s Like The Wind magazine is truly an engrossing experience. Going from page to page you begin to realise how universal an experience running is and how through this lens we are able to empathise with whole other cultures, nations and societies.

Subscribe to Like the Wind here or browse their store for similar gifts.

For the Runner who wants Depth, not Volume

You could listen to more running podcasts. You’ve chosen not to. Freetrail is for runners who value signal over noise and would rather spend an hour with one good idea than skim ten forgettable ones. A subscription buys you access to media that respects your time, your intelligence, and the fact that trail running is more interesting than most coverage lets on.

Subscribe to Freetrail Pro here.

For the Runner who Loves their Training Advice with a Side of Joy

David and Megan Roche’s SWAP Podcast is probably the only podcast I listen to that sparkles with effervescent joy. You leave filled with practical training recommendations and a smile. For those that want more, their Patreon just keeps on giving. Subscribe here.

For the Ultrarunner in Need of some Downtime

If you just want your ultrarunner friend or partner to just sit down and stop running for just a hot minute, maybe get them subscribed to Ultrarunning magazine. It satisfies their need to become a better runner, whilst letting them put their feet up.

Subscribe here (US)

For the Runner who has a terrible time during milers and wants to keep doing more, but doesn’t know why

There are few people better at describing the experience and exploring the masochistic drive to run epic distances than Doug Mayer. Doug’s new graphic novel is an extraordinary creative exploration of what the mind and body goes through when running such long distances, written from the perspective of a fictional man called Sam Hill who runs the Tor De Geants (Doug has finished Tor three times, so he’s well qualified for these mental excavations).

For the Ultramarathoner in need of some 2026 inspiration

Immerse them in a world of breathtaking landscapes, thrilling race reports, and captivating stories from fellow ultrarunners in Ultra magazine (UK). Ultra not only delivers stunning photography that captures the essence of our sport but also provides valuable insights into upcoming races and events around the world, perfect for planning that 2026 race calendar…

Subscribe here

For the Runner in Search of an Alpine Adventure

This guidebook has become my go-to for planning my annual trip to Chamonix. If like me you want to cram in as much vert as you can when in the valley, Run the Alp’s guidebook is all you need. Buy the book direct here.

For the Literary Runner

Yes, you can gift newsletter subscriptions and there’s a newsletter for every type of Runner:

• For the thoughtful ponderer: Sarah Lavender Smith

• For the person that works in the ‘the industry’: Matt Trappe

• For the runner who enjoys more than just miles: Raziq Rauf

• For the runner that likes their training advice intermingled with philosophy: Mario Fraioli

• For the generous soul: Trailmix (well, someone’s got to advocate for me)

  Trailmix is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

  

It seemed the running world’s glitterati all made the annual migration to TRE this week. I did not, so no fuego takes from me, but one on some news that dropped in my inbox this week - Nike ACG’s sponsorship announcements. The conversation online swiftly veered into familiar territory for our small sport - can Nike own it?

Hope you have fantastic weeks,

Matt

As soon as the Nike ACG press release dropped this week, the chatter around trail running jumped to a question that has lingered around the sport for a few years: Nike has enough money that it could essentially buy the sport. Could it?

Over the past two weeks Nike ACG has announced sponsorships of Gorge Waterfalls giving a $75K prize purse, and Broken Arrow with a $150K prize purse. Alongside the announcements was a suite of programs and initiatives from each race including a Nike Trail Nationals, an adaptive athletes program, and more lactation stations on course. All in all, a huge investment from Nike in North America following on from their relaunch in the Asian market.

Let’s compare them to Hoka, a brand that dominates the marketing around professional trail running through their products and sponsorship of UTMB. Anyone au fait with Nike’s quarterly reports know they deal in magnitudes that dwarf Hoka. In three months, Nike earned $11.7B, Hoka produced $634M, a mere 18 times smaller.

If Nike wanted to start investing in the sport (which it historically hasn’t despite what our current revisionist historians tell you), it could change the entire playing field. Structurally, the brand landscape would reorganise around them almost by default. Nike’s scale would set new baselines for visibility, investment, and creative execution. Brands that previously competed on “authenticity”, “community touchpoints”, or technical credibility would suddenly be compared against a player capable of driving reach and frequency at a level no other brand can match. This would force a strategic split: some brands would double down on specialist positioning (technical terrain, fell running, niche IYKYK positioning, value, etc.), while others would attempt to scale their marketing to stay relevant, likely through partnerships, consolidation, or increased sponsorships to keep up. Sponsorship demands from top-end independent races would rise, increasing the distance between small and large races. Athlete rosters would also shift; prize money and exposure would draw more road and track athletes into trail, increasing competition for sponsorship and making it harder for smaller brands to secure top-tier talent.

Money can turn tides in sports, but it’s not a given.

Despite the influx of sponsorship money and high-profile activations, Nike’s path to dominating trail running is far less straightforward than it looks. Trail running is not a category that responds cleanly to scale; it’s a sport built on subculture, community, and credibility. The moment a brand moves too fast, the community tends to push back. You saw this with UTMB’s Ironman announcement, a technically strong commercial move that created backlash precisely because it felt imposed, commercial and degrading to the spirit of the sport. Nike risks a similar cultural rejection in a sport that has an allergy to heavy-handed commercialism.

Equally Nike’s history in trail resembles a yo-yo – they’ve ducked in with products that didn’t really land, thought they could walk in without investing in the grassroots and then retreated when they recognised growth wasn’t there. Sure trail running is growing and the landscape is saturated with a lot of small to medium sized businesses, so Nike recognises that they won’t have to put in a lot to ‘dominate’ – but it’s not a large market, this will always be a small part of their business. When Nike have treated the outdoors as something they can just dip in and out of when they see fit, building credibility will take more than big pockets.

Nike knows this, hence why they’re balancing its headline grabbing prize purses with more community investment. Their recent turnaround plan for running centres exactly on this: a recommitment to performance, rebuilding grassroots ties, and delivering a credible product. Following this week’s sponsorships and Zegama upgrade announcements at TRE, Nike seem to be running the same playbook. What matters more than money, is whether they decide that this time they’re going commit themselves to the sport for the long run.

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If we had a group chat…

No, i wasn’t at TRE this week, theres only so many flights to the US this year that i can afford, but the general consensus I heard was one of optimism. Sales are up from higher prices across the board, supported by a larger running population. 124 new brands at this years TRE demonstrates the diversity of ecosystem but oddly no one spoke of standout innovation in shoes, just more interesting updates and more foam (the chunk stack height is here to stay). SGB had a decent collection of perspectives from execs, Allison of “Not a Conversational Pace” and Raz of “Running Sucks” had more unique observational takes from the showroom floor

Allison

Shit I Saw At The Running Event (TRE)

Oh, you went to The Running Event? Name every running company…

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9 months ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Allison

Running Sucks

Missives from The Running Event

I’ve spent the week at The Running Event in San Antonio, Texas. It’s an industry-only event where all the brands – and I mean all of them — showcase their product lines for the next year, and running stores and media walk around a massive convention center taking a look to see what they want to stock in their shop or write about in their publications…

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9 months ago · 26 likes · 5 comments · Raziq Rauf

Fell runners are rejoicing at having another potential shoe that is actually suitable for the terrain. OMM, the OG mountain running brand who make the Classic mountain marathon bag, are venturing into fell running shoes with a chunky 8mm Vibram lug. Fell running is still an oddly untapped market that’s treated more as a quirky subculture of runners, than a discipline in itself. I’m glad it’s starting to get more of the attention it deserves.

Ironically this website that thought crowd-funding athlete prize purses was a good idea launched just before Nike ACG’s announcements. A terrible idea with unfortunate timing.

UTMB adds another US race to their World Series: Rothrock in Pennsylvania. I think this is race 65 for the series? I’d hard to keep up…

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I just got back from a long weekend in the Lakes where I moderated a panel on the future of trail running in the UK at the Adventure Sports Events Conference (ASEC). Some fascinating discussion but one of the main points (relevant to this article) is that UTMB is having a material impact on all RD’s races - and we only have two races on this archipelago of ours that are currently organised by UTMB.

I also found my article on the state of trail running and what athletics can learn from it was published in this month’s print issue of Athletics Weekly - UK folk can find it in WHSmiths.

Now to today’s piece.

Last week I wrote a post for paid subscribers that showed that almost half of all 1000+ finisher events in the world are organised by UTMB. Fabrice Perrin, Head of Sports, Community and Sustainability at UTMB, responded in a post on LinkedIn that outlined his view that UTMB are only a small % of all races globally and feed an ecosystem of smaller races through encouraging more people to run trails.

It was a fair piece that I agree with in part, but thought a further discussion was needed to hear out UTMB’s position on competition and global governance. I’ve published the full messages below because I feel the points Fabrice makes needs the space to be read in full. It’s a lot, so i also give my perspective on the conversation in a brief analysis for paid subscribers.

Ultimately whether you agree or disagree with Fabrice’s perspective, these are the conversations our sport needs right now, so I’m grateful for Fabrice’s frank and open discussion.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

Matt: I think where the tension lies isn’t in the number of UTMB events versus the total number of races, but in where cultural gravity sits. When one group runs nearly half of the world’s biggest ultras, it inevitably shapes what runners, sponsors and media see as “the sport.” Curious how you think we keep that ecosystem diverse at the top end.

Fabrice: You’re right: the real tension isn’t in the raw number of events, it’s in the cultural gravity. When one group sits at the center of visibility - athletes, brands, media, storytelling - it inevitably influences what the outside world sees as “the sport.”

For me the key is this: if the top end grows, it has to pull others upward with it, not absorb everything around it.

A few concrete ways I think we can keep the ecosystem diverse:

1️⃣ Protect and amplify local identities
Even inside global circuits, races need to keep their own cultural DNA - volunteers, traditions, terrain, local stories. That’s the opposite of standardisation.

2️⃣ Strengthen independent races through visibility and pathways
The UTMB Index system is built to encourage runners to participate in smaller, regional events: it creates progression, and it keeps thousands of independent races relevant in a very direct way.

3️⃣ Open athlete pathways beyond a single circuit
A healthy sport means athletes can shine through multiple routes: championships, historic races, other circuits, community-driven events.

4️⃣ Ensure big events contribute back to territories
If the cultural gravity is strong at the top, the responsibility must be equally strong: environmental commitments, funding local partners, supporting rescue and safety infrastructures.

5️⃣ Keep the sport governed by the sport
This is why collaboration with organisations like Golden Trail Series, WTM, Marathon des Sables, Hardrock, WS100, World Athletics, PTRA, WMRA and ITRA matters. The sport shouldn’t be “owned”; it must be stewarded collectively.

In short, I don’t think the goal is to reduce gravity at the top - but to increase diversity around it, so the ecosystem stays plural, creative and alive.

Matt: Appreciate this, especially the point about stewarding the sport collectively.

One thing I’m curious about is the UTMB Index: it certainly creates progression, but it also creates a gravitational pull toward UTMB-labeled pathways. For many runners, “relevant” becomes defined by that system.

How do we balance the benefits of structure with ensuring that independent events aren’t gradually pulled into a single orbit?”

Fabrice: About your question on the UTMB Index: you’re right.
Any system that brings structure also creates a bit of gravity... that’s normal.
The Index only makes sense if it stays a tool for everyone, not something that pulls everything toward one place.

The goal has always been simple:
> help runners understand their level and progress,
> give visibility to thousands of independent races,
> and offer a common reference for the whole sport.

And to avoid what you’re describing - a system that becomes too central - the solution is clear to me: the sport has to be built and guided together.

Not by one organisation, but by a mix of actors: circuits, independent races, historic events, athletes, and the wider community...

There are already a lot of good conversations happening in the background about how we can share standards, share pathways, and keep the sport open.

The idea that if trail running is becoming global, it needs some common tools that everyone can use.

If big events have cultural gravity, then their role is to create space around them, not to shrink it.

Is this the discussion between UTMB, World Athletics and GTWS (and PTRA)? Can you elaborate on what the ambition is for the shared outcome of the negotiations?

Yes, there are conversations happening between several organisations in the sport, and they include some of the names you mention ☺️.

But they’re early-stage, informal, and not the kind of thing I can frame as “negotiations”.

Right now it’s more about sharing concerns, comparing visions, and exploring where common ground could exist...

So I can’t comment on anything specific or formal - there’s nothing official to announce, and I don’t want to speak on behalf of anyone else.

What I can say is what the ambition looks like from my point of view:
> the sport needs some shared foundations (basic standards, safety, ethics, anti-doping, athlete pathways),
> no single organisation should define the whole sport,
> and we need tools that are open, transparent, and useful to everyone, not owned culturally or politically by one actor.

If anything, the shared ambition is simply this: to make sure the sport grows without losing diversity, and without creating parallel systems that confuse athletes and weaken organisers.

A healthy sport needs strong independent events, strong circuits, strong championships. All coexisting. That’s the spirit of the conversations so far.

Between people who care about the sport... trying to understand how we can align on the big pieces.

What you describe makes sense, but it also highlights the key pressure point:
If the sport uses shared tools, then control of those tools also needs to be shared. Otherwise we end up with common infrastructure shaped by a single actor, even unintentionally.

I’d love to hear how you think shared control could realistically, and practically, work in trail running’s current landscape considering we’re in the situation we’re in now because trail running hasn’t had a strong independent governing body.

Thanks, you’re raising exactly the right pressure point.

And I completely agree with your premise: if the sport uses shared tools, then the governance of those tools has to be shared too. Otherwise, even with the best intentions, you end up with an imbalance.

Now… how to make that practical, in a sport that has grown without a strong independent governing body?

There is no perfect model on the table today, and anyone pretending otherwise is oversimplifying the reality. Trail running grew fast, organically, and often outside traditional structures. So we’re trying to build coordination on top of something that was never designed for it.

But here’s what I believe could work in a realistic way:

1/ Separate ownership from governance
A tool can be developed by one actor, but guided by a wider group.
Almost like a consortium or supervisory board that ensures the tool stays open, neutral, and useful to all.

2/ Build shared governance step by step, not in one big reform
Trail running isn’t ready for a “global authority”.
But it is ready for:
• shared standards,
• shared anti-doping alignment.
Piece by piece, not all at once.

3/ Involve multiple types of actors, not just institutions
If governance only includes federations, it misses half the sport.
If it only includes private organisers, it misses the other half.
A real structure needs:
• federations,
• major circuits,
• independent organisers,
• athlete.
That mix would reflect the actual ecosystem of trail running.

4/ Make the shared tools transparent and open
Whatever tools the sport relies on - Index, rankings, standards - need to be:
• documented,
• auditable,
• and usable by anyone, regardless of affiliation.
That’s the only way to prevent cultural or political capture.

5/ Accept that shared governance doesn’t mean bureaucracy
It can be something light, simple, and focused on the essentials.
We don’t need a massive organisation.
We need clarity, neutrality and collaboration.

For me, the ambition isn’t to create a “new authority”. It’s simply to ensure the sport has common foundations that no single actor shapes alone.

Fascinating. Put simply, what you’re describing sounds less like creating a central governing body and more like forming a standards consortium, something closer to what exists in surfing, skateboarding or even cycling. In those sports, no single organisation “owns” the landscape, but they still share rules, rankings, safety norms and athlete pathways because the major actors agree it’s in everyone’s interest.

That model feels like the closest precedent for trail: shared tools, shared oversight, distributed ownership. A coordinating layer, not an authority.

I think we could go on and on here, but It feels like where this conversation is heading isn’t about whether UTMB is too big or is swallowing independents, but about what model of shared stewardship the sport ultimately needs.

If we agree that trail needs both independence and shared tools, then the real (and my final) question becomes: What would a version of the sport look like where the top end can grow without creating dependency at the grassroots - where independent races remain genuinely independent, not relying on UTMB or ITRA systems for their visibility or long-term sustainability?

Really like the way you’re framing this, a coordinating layer instead of an authority. That’s exactly how I see it too.

Trail running doesn’t need a single “owner”. It needs shared foundations so that the sport stays READABLE, fair, and safe, while remaining culturally wild and independent.

And your last question is the most important one: what does growth at the top look like when it doesn’t create dependency at the grassroots?

For me, it looks something like this:

1/ Independent races stay truly independent
They keep their identity, their rules, their format, their pricing, their community.
They don’t need to “join” anything to exist or thrive.

2/ Shared tools remain optional, not mandatory
Rankings, index, calendars, safety guidelines…Useful, widely accessible, but not required. If a race wants to use them, great. If not, it should still have the same legitimacy.

3/ Visibility shouldn’t depend on one system
A healthy landscape means:
• strong local media,
• strong national federations,
• strong independent storytellers,
• and multiple circuits telling the story of the sport.
No single platform becomes “the only window”.

4/ Grassroots organisers access resources without being absorbed
Things like:
• shared medical protocols,
• environmental guidance,
• crisis management,
• safety frameworks.
Not as a condition to enter a system, but simply as shared knowledge for the whole sport.

5/ Athletes can progress through many pathways
A runner can reach the top by:
• circuits like GTWS or Skyrunning or WTM or UTMB or whatever,
• historic races,
• national or continental championships,
• or community-driven events.
No single ladder defines “the way in”.

6/ Big events act as amplifiers, not centres of gravity
They can bring visibility, elevate storytelling, inspire newcomers. But they shouldn’t define what is “legitimate” or “relevant”. Their role is to widen the space, not shape it in their image.

Reflection

What this whole exchange with Fabrice really surfaces is the core paradox of trail

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Trying to gauge the state of the running market is a difficult task full of contradictory numbers and statements: running revenues for brands are up, but their share prices are down; UTMB is filling out 1000+ person races, but race directors are starting to find their races aren’t filling up.

I guess we’ll never really know accurately, but I’ve got two articles today that talk to the shifting nature of running - Hoka’s slowdown might not be as bad as it seems and an analysis of UTMB’s consolidation of mega-races (paid subs).

Hope you have a fantastic week,

Matt

Hoka’s Slowdown Might Be a Warning, Not a Crisis

For the first time in years, Hoka isn’t the one setting the pace. The brand that defined the last decade of running’s “performance comfort” boom (max cushioning, bold design, meme-worthy midsoles) has reported its slowest growth since its breakout years. In Deckers’ latest quarter, Hoka’s revenue grew around 11%, down sharply from the 30–40% gains it’s become known for. More broadly, Deckers share price is down 60% year to date.

That would be fine if the whole market were cooling. But it’s not. Running revenues for Adidas is up 30%, On is up 30%, Nike’s up 20%, and Altra’s up 35%. For a brand that still punches below most of those names in absolute scale, that’s not a great look.

Now, Hoka isn’t a market leader in the global sense - Nike and Adidas still dwarf it many times over. But within running, it’s been the disruptor that forced the giants to change course. It turned maximal cushioning into mainstream design, and pulled trail running aesthetics into everyday wear.

Today that story’s harder to tell. Because what made Hoka special is now everywhere. Every brand has their maximal shoe. Every running store has multiple “Hoka alternatives.” Even the once-niche stack height has become regulation, not some unique innovation.

So when growth slows, it’s not just because of scale; it’s because their differentiation is eroding. Hoka feels less like the future and more like the standard.

That’s not necessarily a disaster, but it is a turning point. Deckers’ management has made clear that they’re doing all they should be doing - tightening operations, holding price integrity, and prioritising margins over reckless expansion. Those are mature moves, the kind Nike made in the 1990s, or On is just beginning to face now.

It’s also a recognition that the “easy” phase of growth is over. When you’re a challenger, every gain looks dramatic. When you’re a category fixture, every slowdown looks ominous.

This article from Trefis, which called the recent sell-off an overreaction, made the case that Hoka’s fundamentals are still sound: full-price sell-through, disciplined inventory, solid international growth. That’s all true but it also underlines the point. Hoka is no longer the upstart doubling every year. This could be the new normal.

For the rest of the running market, that’s the real story. Hoka’s slowdown doesn’t mean the category is cooling, if anything, it highlights how hot it still is. It shows that the “performance comfort” space Hoka created is now being shared, contested, and evolved by faster-growing competitors.

Also, If Nike and Adidas are starting to accelerate again, it’s not because they’ve suddenly become better innovators, it’s because they’ve figured out how to take what Hoka built and scale it globally. The imitators have learned the playbook.

So yes, the numbers look bad for Hoka. But maybe that’s just the price of being the brand everyone copied.

Half of the World’s Largest Ultras Are Now UTMB Owned

It won’t surprise you that UTMB have announced new races. One in Oman another in Germany (which maintains its Salomon sponsorship interestingly), taking their grand total of races to 62.

It also won’t surprise you that they’re continuing raising the prices of entry fees (want to run Canyons 100M? $466, please) and the number of entrants allowed in each race. For many races 1000+ entrants is the norm.

I’ve heard anecdotally this is already making an impact on independent race directors who are finding their races take longer to fill up, and in some cases races aren’t reaching capacity. I’ve always taken this as anecdotal because UTMB only takes up a very small proportion of the overall market. Sure their marketing is stronger and hence will likely pick up more new entrants to ultra running, and those transitioning from Ironman will find comfort in the UTMB system and comparatively low prices. But there are thousands of runners and thousands of races, so until i see the numbers, I’m remaining sceptical.

So, I did some maths.

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