I’ve been trying to figure out why I obsess over Western States the way I do. This year I realized it contradicts a lot of what I’ve argued in the past.

Western States owns my imagination the way the Masters did during Tiger Woods’ prime. Or the Kentucky Derby, where most people couldn’t name a horse in the field but can imagine the hats and mint juleps.

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The common thread is place.

The Masters is inseparable from Augusta National. The audience knows every hole, every disaster, every triumph. History accumulates in the same corners of the course year after year.

The Kentucky Derby has Churchill Downs. The hats, the bourbon, the traditions only work because they’re rooted somewhere.

Western States has the course.

2026 may give us the greatest field the race has ever seen. I’d follow those athletes anywhere. But 2025 and 2026 Chianti had incredible fields too, and I lost sleep over neither.

I lose sleep over Western States because I know the course. I know where dreams end. I know where legends are made. The course is the main character, and it isn’t there to help anyone. It’s there to punish the best runners in the world and make them earn a place in its history.

Trail running, endurance culture, product, media, ambition, identity, and the strange little signals that explain where the sport is going.

Contents
On the Cost of Being Seen
When Trail Running Went Public
From the Wide(r) World of Trail
From Borderlands

On the Cost of Being Seen

Every once in a while, trail running has a moment that escapes the sport.

Rachel Entrekin just gave us one. A woman winning Cocodona outright is exactly the kind of story that makes me proud of this strange little world. It is also the kind of story that makes me wonder what happens when more people start looking our way.

I’ve been living in Paris for two years, and soon I’m heading back to the Wasatch, to the trails I love most. Caleb Olson recently said they’re already overcrowded. I don’t want to admit how much that bothers me.

Because fundamentally, I want trail running to grow. If the sport has given me so much, why wouldn’t I want more people to find it?

But I also trail run because I want to be alone. I want quiet. I want renewal. I want access to something that mass attention always threatens to change.

That’s the tension this week: the joy of seeing trail running reach the wider world, and the quiet fear that the thing we love might not survive being fully discovered.

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When Trail Running Went Public

Leadville 1994 on CBS’ Eye on Sports
Dean Karnazes on David Letterman
Rachel Entrekin on BBC
Courtney Dauwalter on Joe Rogan
Laz Lake in the Guardian
Scott Jurek on National Geographic

From the Wide(r) World of Trail

Aurélien Sanchez is attempting the Pacific Crest Trail FKT
Western States has an Agenda
Analysis on Cocodona 250 Lottery Results
Is Trail Running Dirtbag Simple? Or Corporate Complex?
A Solid Harvest of University of Colorado Buffaloes

From Borderlands

Podcast | Why Western States is America’s Most Important Race
Podcast | Trail Running Shoe Sea of Sameness
Essay | Kilian’s Western States Gamble by Bryce Carlson
Almanac | theROCKER, the Most Misunderstood Trail Shoe by Inky Steve

Our Tools and Experiments
Wylde (iOS + Android) - we built a mobile app for run clubs
LoC (beta) - An intelligence layer for ultra-trail races
Goat Rodeo 100 - An 8-Bit trail running game

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Sorry, desktop only. Also, if you encounter problems, let us know in the comments on this post.

The premise is simple. You are attempting to finish a 100-mile trail race while managing fuel, energy, hydration, caffeine, aid stations, bad decisions, and the slow unraveling of your own judgment.

You can choose between two runners. Both are totally random and have no connection to the outside world. Completely original.

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The game is free to play. Your email is the ticket in, mostly because Borderlands is building an independent media platform and email is still the cleanest way to stay connected without depending entirely on algorithms.

Help build the leaderboard - go play Goat Rodeo 100.

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For years, I thought the athletes were the reason I cared about Western States. This week I realized I had it backwards.

Trail running talks endlessly about who is racing. But in sports, the events that stay with us tend to be rooted in a place. Augusta. Churchill Downs. Places where history accumulates and every new performance is measured against the ones that came before.

Western States is that. I know where the race unravels. I know where legends can be made. Long before the athletes arrive, the course is already waiting.

How much of what we love about sports is actually about the competitors, and how much is about the stage they’re forced to perform on?

How much of what we love about sports is actually about the competitors, and how much is about the stage they're forced to perform on?

Watch the Full Episode →
Listen →

Molly Seidel, Western States, and the Honest Kind of Starting Over

_{by Bryce Carlson}

The point is that I like stories of reinvention, especially when they are not born out of failure. Sometimes people start over because something went wrong. Sometimes people start over because the old thing worked, and staying there just doesn’t feel like the whole story.

Read more…

[Photo Essay] The Space Between Mastery and Uncertainty.

Photographer Christian Brecheis spent time with Seidel outside Flagstaff, Arizona, documenting a rare moment in an athlete’s career.

Full photo essay…

theROCKER: the Most Misunderstood Trail Running Shoe

_{by Inky Steve}

I’m not gonna tell you all it’s the best trail shoe on the market. It’s not. The grip isn’t great. It’s not the lightest thing you’ll ever put on your foot. It’s not gonna give you 5% extra bounce or whatever the spec sheet crowd are obsessing over this season.

Read more…

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LoC by Borderlands

After Mountain Outpost’s 2026 Cocodona 250 coverage, Borderlands released an episode called Cocodona Has a Fan Problem, pointing directly at areas of the live broadcast we believed could improve.

For a while now, we’ve had an idea we believe could better serve commentators, fans, the production team, and the race itself.

This is it and it’s best enjoyed on a computer but built for all devices.

Sincerely,

Josh Rosenthal
Founder

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It made sense to conflate these two when the sport was smaller.

It makes less sense now.

The runner showing up to their first 50k and the athlete trying to win Western States may be participating in the same type of event, but they are not participating in the same experience. Everything from training to race day are completely different. Motivations, incentives, desired outcomes. All of it.

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The first athlete is often pursuing some combination of challenge, community, self-discovery, health, adventure, personal transformation.

The second is trying to beat everyone else.

That distinction sounds obvious yet trail running often struggles to make it.

As a result, the values of the participation sport frequently become the values through which we interpret the elite sport.

That creates a strange dynamic.

Trail running loves winners. The most celebrated figures in the sport are celebrated because they win. Jim Walmsley, Courtney Dauwalter, Kilian Jornet, Scott Jurek, François D’Haene. Their accomplishments sit at the center of modern trail running culture and have been leveraged into creating new entrants and motivating veterans alike.

Yet the language surrounding those athletes often emphasizes traits adjacent to competition rather than competition itself. We talk about humility, gratitude, balance, community, environmental responsibility, and personal growth.

Those qualities may all be real.

The issue is not that they are false. The issue is that they are often easier for the culture to discuss than ambition, obsession, rivalry, competitiveness, or domination.

The result is a subtle distortion.

We celebrate the outcome while spending surprisingly little time examining the mindset required to produce it.

Nobody accidentally becomes Jim, Zach, Rachel, Kilian, or Courtney.

Those careers are built through thousands of decisions made in service of a singular objective: becoming better than everyone else in the field.

That objective is not unique to trail running. It is the defining characteristic of elite sport.

As long as trail running conflates these two sports, we'll continue filtering elite athletes through a lens that was never built to understand them.

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Jonathan’s recent article on Laurel got me thinking.

What if Laurel and [LoC] were combined?

Laurel knows where athletes are. LoC knows what people are seeing.

Race coverage relies heavily on cameras to find, explain, and show the story but cameras only see a small fraction of the race.

Meanwhile, spectators, crew, volunteers, and media are constantly observing things the broadcast never captures.

An athlete looks unusually relaxed. A stop is shorter than expected. Someone suddenly looks uncomfortable.

Most of those observations disappear. LoC was built around the idea that they don’t have to.

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Now imagine combining those observations with precise location intelligence.

Not a giant race map. More like a simple Mario Kart-like race strip showing where the leaders are relative to each other and how those positions are changing.

Suddenly, observations have more context.

Fans get a better sense of what’s happening between aid stations.

Commentators get signals they otherwise wouldn’t have.

The cameras no longer have to carry the entire story themselves.

Maybe it’s a terrible idea.

Maybe the signal-to-noise ratio falls apart.

But I keep coming back to the same question:

If thousands of people already understand small pieces of the race, what happens when you connect them together?

Jonathan's article addresses a far more important use case than anything discussed here. This is simply an attempt to explore whether some of the same ideas could improve how we understand build [LoC] live trail races.

The Problem

A few weeks ago I released an episode about friction in the Cocodona 250 live coverage.

Not because the coverage was bad. Mountain Outpost proved there is real demand for long-form live ultra running coverage. Cocodona specifically brought tens of thousands of people into a 250-mile race across Arizona for multiple days.

The issue was friction.

The race regularly became difficult to follow between checkpoints. Viewers would enter the stream and struggle to understand who they were watching, what mattered, what had changed, or why a moment was important.

The audience assembled the race themselves.

The Idea

So I built a working prototype.

It’s called [LoC].

[LoC] is a live race intelligence system for ultra running built around distributed human observation.

People positioned throughout the course submit short field reports in real time about athlete condition, tactical shifts, weather, crew behavior, atmosphere, emotional moments, and developing race situations.

The system is designed around human moderation, verification, editorial judgment, and routing before information reaches commentators or viewers.

Fans get a public-facing live wire that they can dub ‘hot’ where the top 10 wires move to the hot wire.

Commentators and producers get a deeper intelligence layer designed to help them better understand what is happening between checkpoints before cameras or GPS trackers fully explain it.

Not X (Twitter)

Most people will immediately think this is just X for races.

It’s not.

X forces the audience to determine what is true, what matters, and what is noise.

LoC is designed around moderation, verification, editorial judgment, and routing before information reaches commentators or viewers.

Furniture in Coverage

One concept that came to mind while building this was “furniture.”

In another life I was a professional and mediocre musician and songwriter. Good songs have furniture. Small details that let you live inside them.

Furniture is the texture cameras often miss. Volunteers sensing someone is cracking before the splits show it. Tension building at an aid station before the leader arrives. A runner taking ice for the first time all day.

There’s an entire ecosystem in those details.

Why This Matters

The system is less about catching singular historic moments and more about sustaining meaningful coverage for 60+ straight hours without the race emotionally flattening between checkpoints.

I think ultra running’s athletes are outgrowing the current fan experience.

Better coverage keeps viewers connected longer. It slows exits. It makes races easier to enter midway through. It helps commentators become authorities on the race instead of reacting to scattered information in chats and group texts.

This model potentially allows ultra running to become more professional without removing the community layer that makes the sport unique.

About [LoC]

I modeled LoC more like a Bloomberg Terminal than a social platform.

Dense information, monotype fonts, low bandwidth, fast load times, text-first design.

Fans can follow incoming field reports and elevate the most important updates onto the hot wire.

But the system is really optimized for moderators and commentators.

The goal is simple:

MISS THE COVERAGE, MISS THE RACE.

The live broadcast should become the deepest live layer of race intelligence happening on the course.

Link + Final Notes

Explore → [LoC].

While it does have a mobile version, it is best experienced on desktop.

The product roadmap is public, along with a breakdown of how the system works and the ways I think it could fail.

We understand there could be questions about athlete dignity and athlete strategy.

I want feedback for this. Where does this work? Where does it fall apart? What makes it better? Tell me in the comments.

Disclosures

This prototype was built almost entirely with modern AI tooling.

LoC is functional right now. It is not race-ready.

I don’t know if this becomes a real company, a broadcast tool, or something else entirely. I mostly wanted to see whether the idea could exist outside criticism.

If LoC eventually proves valuable, I’ll build a sustainable business model around it. For now, I want to test whether it actually improves live race coverage.

We also understand that increased real-time visibility could eventually influence race dynamics themselves, particularly around athlete strategy and crew behavior. Part of this project is exploring where better coverage improves the sport and where visibility may need boundaries.

Trail running has never been better at generating attention. But the local races that turn spectators into trail runners are becoming harder to sustain.

Nowadays, the curiosity starts online → someone watches UTMB, Western States, or Cocodona → the algorithm serves them a beautiful piece of trail running media and something clicks.

The fan experience matters. Better storytelling and better media absolutely bring more people into the sport.

But what does it mean to be in the sport?

Right now, it means to actually run an ultra.

And those people are not running Cocodona, WSER, or UTMB as their first race.

The Conversion Layer

Google → Ultrasignup → type in the city they live in → find a local ultra with 53 runners and a race director answering emails at midnight after work.

Race day arrives.

They expect road marathon vibes. Instead they find the thing veterans of the sport will fight to preserve.

Folksiness at the starting line.
Volunteers at the aid stations who just want to see them succeed.
The guy who runs it every year and finishes last.
The winner who is an engineer or school teacher.

No Standard Operating Procedures.
No branded hospitality tent.
No performance optimization culture.

Just people building an experience because they love trail running.

The local race teaches people the ropes.
The etiquette.
What matters to the community.

Whether they embrace those values or reject them, this is where they first encounter the culture of trail running.

Participation comes before fandom in trail running.

Most people do not become trail running fans first.
They become runners first.

Then they get pulled deeper into the sport through awe, suffering, community, competition, identity, or service. Then they start following athletes, races, brands, and media.

The local race is the conversion layer of the funnel.

UTMB and Cocodona build intrigue. The local race is where someone decides to become part of the sport.

The Economics Problem

That makes local races incredibly important to the entire ecosystem, including the biggest organizations in trail running.

Aravaipa and UTMB need new runners. Every major race series depends on a somewhat predictable pipeline of people entering the sport. Most of those runners are not entering through destination races. They are entering through local races.

The problem is that local races are becoming economically fragile.

At the same time, runners increasingly compare every race against globally produced experiences consumed online. Expectations rise while the economics of small races become harder to sustain.

Western States qualification is part of this tension.

Western States demand keeps many races alive because runners need qualifiers. But qualification systems also centralize attention toward larger races and larger organizations.

Smaller races struggle unless they become attached to bigger systems.

What The Sport Needs

A healthy culture produces organizers, not just consumers.

Trail running needs race directors whose ambition is to put on a race for 80 people because they love the sport enough to do it. That kind of ambition is becoming harder to sustain financially and culturally.

Large organizations should not just market trail running. They should help preserve the local races that make trail running durable in the first place.

If the local race disappears, the entire ecosystem upstream weakens with it.

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A few weeks ago I wrote a piece called Who Decides What Trail Running Becomes?

The core idea was that runners are no longer the only force shaping the future of the sport. Brands, race organizations, media companies, and investors are increasingly influencing where trail running goes and what gets amplified along the way.

After publishing it, I flew to Stockholm to test the idea against two people actively building inside the sport:

Billy White, founder of Sörmlands 100, one of the largest independent trail races in Sweden, and Gonz Ferrero, CEO of Klättermusen, a 50-year-old heritage outdoor brand entering trail running intentionally.

The conversation became less about whether growth is good or bad and more about what happens when trail running starts optimizing for two very different things at the same time: A professional spectator sport and a grassroots dirtbag culture.

Both require very different structures, incentives, and experiences. And the bigger one side gets, the harder it becomes to preserve the feeling of the other.

The people building around trail running are not necessarily trying to turn it into something bigger, cleaner, or more commercial.

Some are trying to figure out how the sport can grow without losing the strange, human qualities that made people fall in love with it in the first place.

That became the real conversation.

I genuinely did not expect the response to my Cocodona piece to become this charged.

Read the original Substack article→
Watch full video →

A lot of people agreed with the core argument that trail running’s live coverage still asks too much from the audience. But a lot of people also thought I completely missed the point of what makes this sport special in the first place.

And honestly, some of the counterarguments were good.

Underneath the debate about livestreams was a much deeper tension about what trail running actually wants to become.

My argument was basically this: the audience for trail running already exists, but the viewing experience still creates too much friction for people trying to stay connected to the race.

The strongest pushback was not you’re wrong about the production.

It was: maybe the friction is part of the culture.

Comment: “Even my mom who has 0 interest in this was hooked.”

This was probably the strongest direct challenge to my entire argument.

If someone completely outside trail running got emotionally invested in the coverage, then maybe the experience is already working better than I’m giving it credit for.

And honestly, I think there’s real truth in that.

The race itself was compelling.
Rachel’s run was compelling.
The scale of the event was compelling.

A lot of people clearly did get pulled in.

Ultra running might already be powerful enough as a spectacle that viewers are willing to work harder to stay connected than I assumed.

Comment: “The commentators not being professional is why it works.”

I understand this.

Because part of what people love about trail running coverage is that it still feels human. The commentators sound like people from the community, not polished broadcasters reading a production sheet.

There’s looseness to it.
Awkwardness sometimes.
Inside jokes.
Long pauses.
Tangents.

But also authenticity.

And I do think there’s a legitimate fear underneath a lot of the pushback to my piece:
that making the coverage more “professional” might also sand away the exact personality that makes the sport feel different from everything else.

Comment: “The real problem is a lack of patience.”

I think “viewers should simply try harder” can become an easy way to dismiss real friction in the experience itself.

There’s probably some truth here.

Ultra running is slow.
It’s repetitive.
It’s uncertain.
A lot of the meaning comes from accumulation over time.

And maybe part of the disconnect here is that modern audiences have become so conditioned by hyper-optimized sports media that sitting with ambiguity for hours now feels uncomfortable.

That may not entirely be the fault of the coverage.

Comment: “We’re just waiting for the documentaries. I’ll pop in and see how it’s going. But I’ve got work.”

This comment showed in different forms.

Not necessarily as criticism of the livestream itself. More as an admission that ultra running might fundamentally always only work better as a retrospective storytelling format than a live one.

There’s truth to that for sure.

But live coverage is different.

It asks viewers to sit inside uncertainty for hours at a time. Which is part of what makes ultra running interesting in the first place. But I also think some people used that’s just the nature of the sport to excuse friction that actually is solvable.

Those are two very different things.

Comment: “🍉🏀🍺💛🥖🦬⛰️. Ts was a whole language in the chat🙌”

People genuinely loved the livestream chat becoming its own insider ecosystem.

The coded language… IYKYK stuff.

And honestly, I always love that when I know what it means.

Part of what makes trail running feel special is that it still feels small enough to develop its own strange internet culture around these races.

A feeling that you’re inside something niche and that you belong.

But if the insider culture becomes required to understand the broadcast, that’s probably a problem.

The coverage itself should still be able to orient someone who hasn’t spent years inside the sport.

Comment: “To say the live coverage hasn’t advanced is insane to me... It was only just a few years ago that we didn’t even have live coverage.”

This was probably the fairest criticism because the coverage absolutely has improved.

But I also think trail running sometimes uses gratitude as a way to avoid standards.

“Look how far we’ve come” is true.

But it can also become an excuse not to demand better.

Production quality improving and the viewing experience becoming easier to follow are not automatically the same thing.

A beautiful drone shot of Rachel descending Elden still does not solve the underlying orientation problem if viewers are constantly asking:

Who are we watching?
Where are they in the race?
Why does this moment matter right now?

I still believe the core argument of the original piece: the audience for trail running is already larger and more emotionally invested than a lot of the sport realizes, and the viewing experience has not fully caught up to that reality yet.

But the comment section also made something else very clear. A lot of people are deeply protective of the friction, weirdness, intimacy, and insider culture that make trail running feel different from mainstream sports in the first place. And honestly, I understand that instinct.

The real challenge going forward is probably not “how do we make trail running more professional?” It’s whether the sport can improve the fan experience without flattening the culture that made people fall in love with it to begin with.

Here are some more comments for your enjoyment both in support and opposition to my piece.

“The chat knew more than the coverage.”

“Even my mom who has 0 interest in this was hooked.”

“We’re just waiting for the documentaries. I’ll pop in and see how it’s going. But I’ve got work.”

“The real problem is a lack of patience.”

“I couldn’t even tell if the race was still happening or if I was seeing old footage.”

“I had the livestream, Instagram, live tracking, and chat all open at the same time.”

“Black Canyon proved a lot of this is solvable.”

“The commentators not being professional is why it works.”

“The post race interview with Rachel on the livestream was embarrassing.”

“People don’t watch sports to see average performances.”

“This isn’t a production problem. It’s an orientation problem.”

“The stream kept making me work to stay connected.”

“The audience is there. The product just isn’t fully there yet.”

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

I spent the last day watching Cocodona coverage while tracking live concurrent viewers in real time. As I write this, Rachel Entrekin leads the field with 50 miles to go.

I watched to actively observe the audience behavior itself and one thing became impossible to ignore:

Cocodona does not have an awareness problem.
It has a conversion problem.

The demand exists.

Throughout the first 13 hours of coverage, the stream repeatedly sustained between 8,000 and 11,000 live viewers. But underneath those relatively stable numbers was constant and massive churn.

People were entering and exiting the stream continuously.

The coverage was being judged and re-judged every 15 to 30 seconds. Over time, the pattern became incredibly clear. When the stream delivered immediate value, viewers stayed. When it didn’t, sometimes as many 5 to 7% of viewers left.

That sounds obvious, but what was interesting was how consistent and measurable the behavior became.

A close-up of Courtney Dauwalter would stabilize the audience immediately.
A coherent commentary segment aligned with what was on screen held viewers.
A clear moment of anticipation would lift the stream by hundreds of concurrent viewers within minutes.

Then the coverage would cut to dead drone footage, inside jokes, inactive aid stations, awkward banter, audio issues, or meaningless wide shots of aid station pavement and the audience would begin bleeding out almost immediately.

At one point, the stream dropped from roughly 8,400 viewers to 7,900 in a few seconds during a low-signal segment. Later, during strong aligned coverage around Courtney and Hilary Yang, viewership climbed above 11,000.

The swings were too large and too reactive to dismiss as normal fluctuation.

The audience behavior was telling a very specific story:

The audience already knows what it wants.
The stream simply struggles to deliver it consistently.

The Most Important Problem

Most viewers arrive blind.

This became the single most important insight of the entire exercise.

People are not entering the stream with full (or sometimes any) race context. They are arriving mid-event from IG clips, YouTube recommendations, or general race awareness.

They enter cold.

And within seconds they are making a decision: Do I stay here or leave? The problem is that the stream is largely optimized for existing insiders.

It assumes familiarity.
It assumes patience.
It assumes emotional investment.

But most viewers do not initially have those things.

The coverage frequently failed to answer basic questions quickly enough:

Who is this?
Why does this matter?
What am I looking at?
What’s happening right now?

That lack of immediate orientation creates constant churn. The irony is that Cocodona clearly has real demand. People want to care. They keep checking back in. But the stream repeatedly fails to convert curiosity into sustained engagement.

Stars Didn’t Grow The Audience, They Slowed Exits

This distinction matters. The biggest names in the sport consistently stabilized viewership. Courtney Dauwalter and Max Jolliffe especially.

Whenever Courtney appeared in close-up shots with clear context, the stream stabilized almost immediately. Concurrent viewers would stop falling and often begin climbing.

Importantly, this was not always dependent on commentary.

Sometimes her presence alone was enough. That tells you something critical about where the audience already is psychologically. The audience is not looking for generic race coverage.

They are looking for emotional anchors.
People.
Narratives.
Faces.
Familiarity.

The same thing happened repeatedly with Hilary Yang.

Whenever Hilary was on screen explaining what was happening, viewership consistently stabilized, often outperforming live race footage itself.

That is not an accident.
Hilary became the strongest onboarding mechanism in the broadcast.

Not because her analysis was radically different, but because she created alignment between narrative, insight, familiarity, and a kind of behind-the-scenes access viewers found compelling.

The broader pattern became obvious. Stars slowed exits. Aligned commentary slowed exits. Narrative slowed exits.

Confusion accelerated them. Like when there were multiple scenes on screen with no clear hierarchy and commentators were talking about something unrelated.

The Sport Has Professionalized Faster Than The Coverage

This mismatch is becoming impossible to ignore. The athletes now look like professional athletes. Major sponsors. Major brands. Legitimate performance infrastructure. Legitimate competition.

But the presentation layer still often feels like local community television.

That is not meant as an insult.

In many ways the coverage still carries the warmth and accessibility trail running built itself on. But warmth is not the same thing as professionalism.

Too often the production language undermined the stakes of the race itself.

The stream drifted into:

• inside jokes

• campy banter

• self-referential commentary

• casual production mistakes

• audio failures

• unclear race state

• cluttered split screens

• low-information visuals

At times the coverage felt less like elite sport presentation and more like a morning show happening near a race.

Meanwhile, world-class athletes were actively suffering on screen. The disconnect became difficult to ignore. The product advanced. The presentation didn’t.

Commentary Often Ignored The Visuals

This was maybe the most fixable issue. The best moments happened when commentary and visuals aligned. When commentators discussed exactly what viewers were watching, the stream immediately felt more professional.

Retention stabilized.
The audience relaxed.
The experience gained coherence.

But this alignment was surprisingly rare. Very often, commentators discussed things disconnected from what was happening visually. Interesting stories with no visual support. Important race developments not shown on screen.

Long conversations while static shots of parking lots or aid station tables filled the feed. The result was cognitive friction. Viewers were being asked to imagine significance rather than experience it directly.

In live sports, that is fatal. If something matters, show it.
If you cannot show it, do not build the segment around it.

Gratitude Culture May Be Limiting Growth

This part is uncomfortable but important. Trail running culture is deeply gratitude-oriented.

People are grateful the coverage exists at all.

And to be clear, that mindset helped build the sport. But audience forgiveness also changes incentives. When viewers consistently communicate that “anything is good enough,” evolution slows.

The result is a product that often feels under-pressured. Not maliciously. Not lazily.

Just comfortably. Meanwhile, the audience behavior is already signaling that expectations are changing.

The demand is already there.
The emotional investment is already there.
The curiosity is already there.
The audience is already raising its hand.
The product simply has not caught up to the size of the opportunity yet.

And honestly, that may be the most exciting part.

Because underneath all the churn, all the exits, all the confusion, one thing became very clear:

People want this to be great.

At Western States, here’s a scenario you will never see.

Hans goes to the front early.
Not to win. To break the race.

He pushes the pace past what’s sustainable.
For everyone, including himself.

The field stretches. Then cracks.
By mile 50 (half way), he’s gone.

But the damage is done.

Jim Walmsley is exactly where he needs to be.
Calm. Controlled. Fresh(er).

Hans burns out and fades.
Jim runs his way to the top of the podium.

That’s a team.

Now watch what actually happens.

Teammates line up and race each other.
No roles. No sacrifice. No shared outcome.

Hayden wants to win even if that means taking it from Hans.

Trail running calls itself selfless.
But no one is ever asked to give up their race.

So the image holds becuase there’s no way to truly stress test it.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s structure.

No one is paid to lose.
So no one does.

And the team never shows up.

But imagine if it did.

Imagine one brand actually commits to it.
One athlete lines up knowing their job is to burn the race down so another runner can win.

Would we celebrate that?

Or would it break what we think the sport is?

It’s hard to predict where trail running goes next because I’m not sure we understand what’s shaping it now.

The default answer is clean and widely accepted.

Brands shape it.
Races shape it.
Media shapes it.
Athletes shape it.
The community shapes it.

It sounds right because all of those actors are visible. You can point to them. You can watch them operate in real time.

But I think most of that is reaction, not origin.

• Brands follow what sells. They might position and package, but they rarely move far outside what the market is already signaling back to them.

• Races follow what fills up. Formats, distances, and experiences expand around participation patterns, not ahead of them.

• Media follows attention. It frames and amplifies, but it is constantly being pulled toward what people are already choosing to watch.

• Athletes follow incentives. Sponsorship, prize money, visibility, and relevance shape what gets pursued and how it gets presented.

• And the broader community sits even further downstream. Interpreting, adopting, reinforcing.

By the time something reaches most people, it’s already been shaped multiple times.

Which makes the whole ‘community-driven’ idea feel incomplete. Not wrong, but not precise enough to explain direction.

Because if every visible layer is reacting to something else, then none of them are true headwaters.

They are part of the system, but they are not where the system starts.

So what is upstream of all this?

In fashion, you can trace it more clearly.

Couture sets a direction. It experiments, it exaggerates, it pushes and pulls. Over time, that influence moves downstream. It softens, scales for wider adoption, and the 2016 influence eventually shows up in Old Navy in 2026.

There are identifiable origin points like them or not.

In trail running, it’s harder to locate.

There’s no obvious equivalent to couture. No single layer that consistently operates ahead of the rest and pulls everything forward.

There’s no clear origin point you can point to.

Which leaves a more useful question sitting underneath all of this:

If brands, races, media, athletes, and the community are all reacting…

What’s actually shaping what gets made, raced, and worn?

What are the headwaters here?

More races.
More brands.
More livestreams.

A big race pulls 5,000 viewers and it gets framed as momentum.

But if you step back, it’s worth asking a harder question.

Is this actually working?

Because 5,000 viewers isn’t a breakthrough.

It’s a signal that people are aware but not yet committed.

And that gap doesn’t come down to better media or more coverage.

It comes down to something deeper.

We talk about growth.
We talk about building the sport.
We talk about a bigger audience.

There is a group shaping the direction of trail running.

Not formally. Not intentionally.

But consistently.

And their preference is clear.

They prioritize preservation over accessibility.

You see it in small decisions.

What gets built.
What gets funded.
What gets protected.

Difficulty is treated as part of the identity.
The experience of the runner is sacred.
The rawness of the sport is something to defend.

None of that is wrong.

It’s part of what makes trail running meaningful in the first place.

But it has consequences.

There’s a fair argument that it shouldn’t change. That this sport is meant to be experienced, not watched. That making it more accessible risks losing what makes it meaningful.

That may be true.

But it’s not how the sport is being positioned.

The things that make the sport feel pure also make it hard to follow.

And if the sport stays hard to follow, it stays hard to care about at scale.

You don’t get real fandom.
You don’t get meaningful attention.
You don’t get a spectator layer that can support the rest of it.

You get participation.

Which is valuable, but limited.

You can preserve the experience as it is.
Or you can evolve it into something people can follow.
You can do both, but not without changing the product.

Right now, trail running is trying to hold both positions.

We say we want growth.
But most of the decisions being made ensure it never actually happens.

So the outcome shouldn’t be surprising.

Interest shows up.
It doesn’t stick.
And we call early signals success.

Then we wonder why it never compounds.

The sport isn’t stuck.

It’s being kept this way.
Not out of bad intent.
But out of a clear preference for what it should remain.

Are we trying to build something people do?

Or something people follow?

Right now, we’re saying both but only building for one.

Because on the surface, it looks undeniable. More people are running. More brands are entering. Trails are fuller.

More money is flowing into the sport.

But I’m not sure we’re looking at the right thing.

What we’re seeing is real.

But it’s participation. It’s product. It’s people doing the sport and buying into it. That’s different from building a sport people actually follow.

In most sports, the professional layer is sustained by fans. People watch. People care. People spend. That attention turns into money.

In trail running, it feels like that relationship is flipped.

Brands are funding the professional layer, but that layer isn’t yet being sustained by a deep fan base.

That creates a kind of fragility.

Participation has limits.

You can only run so much.

You can only buy so many pairs of shoes.

Fandom doesn’t work that way.

You age out of participation. But you don’t age out of fandom.

That’s the part I don’t think we’ve built yet. There’s no clear path from casual interest to becoming an invested fan.

The experience of following the sport feels unstructured.

Almost accidental and by design even.

I’m not even sure that’s entirely a mistake. Part of what makes trail running special is how close it feels. But there’s a tradeoff.

If everything is built for the runner, the fan stays on the outside.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to:

Trail running is clearly growing.

But is it actually scaling?

I don’t know yet but it passes the eye test.

I think you learn this after investment periods end at brands. Once the money stops coming in from investors, does it float on its own? What does floating on its own look like? Does it allow for a robust professional layer where contracts grow? Will I ever get to buy a Dan Green jersey from Salomon?

Will there ever be a Salt Lake City team where I can root root root for the home team?

Borderlands’ Substack is where ideas start. Less polished, more immediate. A place to think out loud, test arguments, and let ideas live before they’re fully shaped.

Performance is impressive.
But it’s not what sustains the sport.

In most sports, the system is built around the top.
The best players drive attention.
Attention drives money.
Money sustains everything else.

Trail running works in reverse.

The sport is funded by the people doing it.

We buy the shoes.
We pay the race fees.
We travel, train, and build our lives around it.

The audience is the participant.

That changes everything.

It’s why story matters more than results.
Not because storytelling is nice to have, but because it’s the only bridge between people inside the sport.

Athletes don’t just perform.
They translate the experience.

Because without that, there is nothing to follow.

Soccer can survive without participation.
Trail running can’t.

If everyone stopped playing, the sport disappears.

That’s the difference.

The question is whether that should change.

Whether trail running becomes something built for spectators, not just participants.

Or whether it stays what it is.

Until then, the heart of trail running isn’t performance.

It’s the people doing it.