Issue 021:

Runner Reform

Trail running has never been one thing. That’s been its strength and, increasingly, its tension.

It began in different places for different people: fell running in the UK, skyrunning in the Alps, ultras in the American West, mountain running as a federation-led discipline. What united them wasn’t format or distance, but a loose agreement that running could be slower, wilder, less controlled — and that effort, terrain, and environment mattered as much as time.

In 2026, the sport is thriving by almost every visible metric. Participation is high. The industry is strong. More athletes than ever can call themselves professional. And yet, beneath that growth, trail running is negotiating an identity crisis that feels subtle but persistent. Not a collapse — more like a quiet reformation.

The Olympic Mirror

Every few years, the Olympic question resurfaces, carrying with it the same promise: legitimacy, funding, global visibility. And the same fear: simplification.

History offers a useful caution. When sports enter the Olympic system, they rarely arrive unchanged. They adapt to broadcast windows, spectator density, fixed rulesets. Trail running, by its nature, resists all three. Its most meaningful races are long, remote, irregular, and difficult to package.

An Olympic trail race would almost certainly be short, looped, standardized, and relatively non-technical — a format designed not for mountains, but for cameras. That doesn’t make it illegitimate. It just makes it different.

The real question isn’t whether trail running should become Olympic. It’s whether it needs to. The sport already has participation, economy, and cultural relevance. An Olympic version could coexist — much like Olympic triathlon exists alongside Ironman — without defining the whole. The risk isn’t inclusion. It’s confusion, when the televised version becomes mistaken for the entirety of the sport.

How Elite Runners Actually Get Paid

From the outside, prize money feels like the obvious marker of professionalism. Inside trail running, it’s mostly a distraction.

The financial reality is that sponsorships — not race winnings — pay the bills. Most iconic trail races are run by non-profit organizations or local associations. Their budgets are built around volunteers, not television rights. There is no scalable prize-money engine waiting to be unlocked.

Attempts to “buy” competition through large purses have rarely worked long-term. Prestige still matters more than payouts, because prestige aligns with sponsor storytelling — and sponsors remain the economic backbone of the sport. This creates a strange dynamic: trail running looks increasingly professional, yet remains structurally closer to mountaineering than to stadium sport. The money flows through narratives, not results alone.

The Quiet Disappearance of Technical Terrain

Perhaps the most significant shift isn’t economic or institutional, but geographic.

Highly technical, exposed mountain races — once central to the sport’s identity — are fading. Not because they lack beauty or challenge, but because they’re difficult to insure, regulate, and make safe for large, diverse fields.

Trail running has democratized rapidly. Thousands of new participants arrive each year, many from road or track backgrounds. That’s not a problem — until races can no longer reliably assess who is prepared for exposure, scrambling, or objective mountain risk.

Difficulty metrics haven’t helped. Distance and elevation are easy to quantify; technicality is not. As a result, many of the most meaningful skills — foot placement, route finding, movement under exposure — have quietly fallen out of official calculations. When what isn’t measured stops mattering, courses adapt accordingly.

What remains increasingly resembles long, hilly cross-country. Still demanding. Still athletic. But disconnected from the terrain literacy that once defined trail running as a mountain sport.

Anti-Doping Grows Up

For years, trail running lived in a grey zone: visible enough to attract incentives, fragmented enough to avoid unified controls. That phase is ending.

In-competition testing exists, but the absence of coordinated off-competition testing has been the sport’s weakest link. Governance fragmentation — federations, private circuits, independent races — made collective action difficult.

That landscape is changing. The major stakeholders are now established enough to talk to each other without fighting for legitimacy. A unified anti-doping framework for elite athletes feels less like an aspiration and more like an inevitability. This won’t affect most runners directly. But it will shape trust — and trust is what allows a practitioner sport to remain honest with itself.

When Trail Running Starts to Look Like Triathlon

There’s no polite way to say it: trail running is getting expensive.

Entry fees, mandatory gear, international travel, qualification systems — the barrier to entry for major races now mirrors high-end triathlon. The unintended consequence is pressure on the grassroots events that once served as the sport’s entry point. As expectations rise, small volunteer-run races struggle to survive.

The irony is that while the elite field is becoming more diverse — geographically and culturally — the middle of the pack is not. Recreational participation increasingly skews older, wealthier, and more mobile.

One notable countercurrent stands out: women’s participation. Over the past two decades, trail running has seen one of the most dramatic gender-balance shifts in endurance sport. Progress is uneven — especially at longer distances — but real. Cultural framing, not physiology, remains the primary barrier, which means it’s a solvable one.

The Gravity of the Local

As the global trail calendar becomes louder and more commercial, something quieter is happening in parallel, local communities are reclaiming meaning. Informal races, FKTs, and local challenges matter more to participants than global narratives, reinforcing authenticity and accessibility.

Small races, informal challenges, FKTs, weekly meet-ups — these rarely register beyond their region, and that’s precisely the point. In a world saturated with content, credibility now comes from proximity. People trust what they can see, touch, and run themselves.

Trail running may be global, but belonging is local. And as large events become logistically and financially distant, local cultures are filling the gap — not as a rebellion, but as a return.

When Brands Become Teams

Professional trail running now looks less like a loose collection of individuals and more like a peloton. Sponsored athletes increasingly resemble pro cycling teams, with tighter brand control over race calendars and performance expectations. Contracts are better paid but less stable, and creative, exploratory projects are becoming rarer.

Teams provide resources: logistics, gear development, performance support. They also shape calendars. Athletes still have autonomy, but far less than before. Visibility, market priorities, and sponsor alignment increasingly dictate where and when athletes race.

Contracts are bigger — and shorter. Careers accelerate faster and end sooner. The space for exploratory projects, slow storytelling, or non-competitive adventure is shrinking at the top end of the sport.

The Athlete as Publisher

Athletes as media platforms - athletes have never had more narrative control then today. Athletes now operate as their own media houses, using blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and newsletters. Long-form storytelling is resurging, shifting sponsorships from brand-led content to athlete-owned platforms.

Blogging is back. Podcasts are thriving. YouTube channels belong to athletes, not brands. Long-form storytelling — once replaced by highlights and reels — is resurging. This shift changes sponsorship models. Brands don’t just sponsor runners; they sponsor platforms. The athlete is no longer only a performer, but a media node, curating audience and meaning in parallel with competition.

Looking East

Culturally, trail running still looks westward. Economically, it’s pivoting east. While the US and Europe still dominate culture and media, China is becoming the economic center of trail running, with massive participation, large prize money, and increasing elite depth. Other regions (Africa, South America) remain under-supported despite strong talent.

China has become the sport’s fastest-growing market, with massive participation numbers, significant prize money, and expanding elite depth. Major circuits are following the momentum. Other regions — Africa, South America — continue to produce talent without infrastructure. Until participation and industry align, athletes from those regions will remain underrepresented, not for lack of ability, but for lack of access.

Back to the Basics

Training Trends vs. Fundamentals. Every year brings new training trends: sensors, metrics, protocols, marginal gains. Some are useful. Many are noise. What endures is unglamorous: consistency, individualization, rest, nutrition, connection — to people, to terrain, to purpose. Technology can support those foundations, but it can’t replace them. New technologies and training fads will continue, but most performance still comes from basic, individualized training, good nutrition, lower stress, and connection to people and nature — not shortcuts or hype.

Core Takeaways

Trail running in 2026 isn’t lost. It’s negotiating. Between spectacle and solitude. Between global circuits and local trails. Between standardization and wildness. The sport doesn’t need to choose a single path. Its resilience lies in plurality — as long as we remember that not everything meaningful can be optimized, televised, or scaled. Some things only make sense when you’re out there, moving slowly through terrain that doesn’t care who you are, how fast you run, or how many people are watching.

-CB