Trail Running’s Boom Has a Blind Spot
Ian - Skratch Labs - "What is trail running celebrating right now that we might look back on and realize was a warning sign?"
That question got me thinking and talking it out on a run, and then I let it marinate in my drafts folder.
I watched the bike industry ignore similar warning signs and drive itself straight into a wall. Many good people and strong brands paid the price for that denial.
Trail running is not there yet. But if you look hard enough, the patterns, as Ian alluded to in his post, are uncomfortably familiar.
Growth Has Become a Belief System
Right now, “trail is booming” is not a data point; it is a worldview.
More runners. More races. More brands. More content. More everything.
In cycling, that exact mindset turned a temporary spike in demand into a permanent planning assumption. Everyone built for more, and nobody modeled what “less” or even “normal” might look like. When demand came back to earth, the industry cratered: warehouses full of inventory, bottomless discounting, layoffs, bankruptcies, and an ugly reset.
If you are building a business focused on trail running right now and your plan does not include a sober downside case, you are not being optimistic. You are following a reckless cycling path. Growth is not the problem. Blind faith in uninterrupted growth is.
“Accessibility” Is Becoming a Convenient Excuse
You will hear a lot of people say, “We’re making trail running more accessible.” It sounds great. Who is going to argue against access?
But watch how that phrase gets used in pitches:
Justifying permanent discount cycles
Excusing margin erosion
Defending promotional sprawl that trains runners to never pay full price
Cycling has already proved how this story ends. Years of heavy discounting did not democratize the sport. They destroyed pricing power, gutted specialty retail, and left brands desperate to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves.
If your version of “accessibility” depends on conditioning consumers to expect 30 to 50 percent off as a baseline, you are not helping the sport. You are hollowing it out.
Community Is Being Treated Like a Hack, Not a Responsibility
“Community” might be the most abused word in endurance sports right now.
Run clubs, group runs, trail crews: done right, these are the soul of the sport. Done wrong, they are just a cheap acquisition channel with nicer photos. And you can already see the tension:
Branded clubs spun up in key cities to “own” the scene
Community programs run on quarterly KPIs
Experiences built more for social content than for the people on the ground
Here is the hard truth: if you treat community as a growth hack, do not be surprised when people eventually treat your brand like a transaction.
If you are going to use the word community, treat it like a long-term relationship. Budget for it when the numbers are great and when they are not. The fastest way to lose credibility in trail is to pull the plug the minute the funnel math gets tougher.
The Race Calendar Looks Healthy Until It Does Not
From the outside, the explosion in events looks robust: stacked calendars, new formats, new distances, new locations. More opportunity for everyone.
From the inside, anyone who has actually built or operated events knows the other side:
Crowding in key weekends and regions
Rising costs for permits, medical, logistics, and insurance
Organizers caught in a race to the bottom on price and perks
The early warning signs never show up in the headline numbers. They show up when:
Sellouts get a little slower
Repeat rates quietly slip
The best small races disappear without much noise
If you are cheering uncritically for more races, ask yourself a harder question: are we building a durable event ecosystem, or just setting up a wave of consolidation in which a handful of big properties survive and many of the culture-building ones do not?
We Are Overcomplicating Something People Love Because It Is Simple
This is the part that the business plans and spreadsheets never capture.
Scroll my Strava, and you will not see a “market segment.” You will see early morning solo runs in the woods. No audience except the bears, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and whatever else happens to be moving through the trees. That is the point.
The magic of trail is brutally simple:
Move your body.
Go somewhere beautiful or challenging.
Come back as a slightly different human.
Every time the industry adds another layer of noise: more tech, more content, more engagement, more monetization, we should ask: does this make the experience better for the runner or for the business model? Sometimes the answer is both. Often it is not.
If the sport starts to feel like it is built mainly for reels, dashboards, and revenue targets, pure trail runners will do the most rational thing in the world: they will go find quiet trails and leave the industry behind.
If This Feels Harsh, Good
This is not a “stop growing and go live in a cabin” manifesto. Growth is fine. Professionalization is fine. Ambition is fine.
What is not fine is collective amnesia. Cycling just gave us a very expensive case study in what happens when an industry confuses a hot cycle with permanent reality and uses “community” and “access” as covers for undisciplined decisions.
Trail running is in an extraordinary moment. The question is whether it uses this window to build something resilient, or whether it throws itself the same party the bike world did and acts surprised when the bill shows up.
So here is the challenge back to everyone questioning the growth and ‘what’s next?’ question:
What is one thing you are publicly celebrating that makes you nervous privately?
And what would it actually look like to act on that concern now, while you still have momentum, instead of after the reset?
If you cannot answer that, go for a long run and think about it. The trail usually tells the truth.