I spent the last week up in Norway at the Oslofjord and did some running along the coast. It was just beautiful. I am still not back in the shape I was at the beginning of the year, because when I am injured and can’t run, I am frustrated and eat too much candy and that makes my running form go downhill, which makes me frustrated and… you get where I am going. Anyhow, I am trying to get out of this mess and try to run more. Maybe not as much as I need to compete in a 200 miler anytime soon, but I think I am slowly getting back into shape. Speaking of great shape, how many times did you watch the video of Josh Kerr running his personal best in the mile? What an achievement! Not that I want to compare myself to him.

Here are my five picks for you to read!

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Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’

The track world, I discovered, has coined a name for this much-discussed phenomenon of kids getting ultra-fast: trackflation. In June 2025 at the New Balance Nationals, an annual championship that draws around 6,000 top youth athletes, more than 100 kids beat previous meet records. “There might now be a hundred kids that run under 4:10 in the full mile,” says Will Rodgers, who ran track at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the early 2010s and now co-owns RunningLane, a coaching and events business. “Back when we were competing in high school, it might’ve been like 20 at max.”

I had to know why kids today are essentially breaking track. And that meant trying to understand the dramatic shift happening at the sport’s roots.

The kids are alright! And fast, too.

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Aiming for My Fastest Marathon, I Turned to Distance Running’s Mecca

On my first morning in Iten, I stood along the main road as packs of runners bounded past along the red dirt paths, like flocks of birds gliding in formation, their strides smooth, their posture straight. They moved with an envious efficiency. Almost every runner looked exceptionally fit.

This is a village where few people run recreationally. Most are hoping to win prize money in major competitions or, like the team I trained with, are trying to win scholarships to run college track in the United States.

Running there with all these very talented runners must be a really amazing experience. This is something I would very much like to do for a runcation. No destractions, just running.

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How to Juggle Life & Work to Train for a 200-Miler

The 200-mile distance is no longer a niche anomaly—it’s on a meteoric rise. In 2025, Aravaipa’s Cocodona 250 livestream captured a level of engagement that even rivaled the iconic Western States 100. Whether it’s a feat of promotional excellence or a collective desire to push past the once unthinkable, the ultrarunning world is moving the finish line another 100 miles out (and beyond.)

Watching the Cocodona 250 livestream this past year, it was easy to feel a spark of inspiration, thinking, I want to do that, followed immediately by a wave of, there’s no way I can. You might assume these runnersare all elite professionals with endless time to train, but the reality is much more encouraging: the 200-mile finish line is far more attainable for the everyday athlete than it appears from behind the screen.

I read through all three profiles and honestly, I don’t think training for a 200 miler is the right thing for me. I just don’t have the time…

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Is Josh Kerr Running’s Greatest Storyteller?

The great thing about this whole story is how Josh is telling his own story. He’s got a newspaper column in The Telegraph and he’s releasing video documentation via his own YouTube channel, gaining tens of thousands of views for each clip. This is the notable part because usually it’s the brand sponsoring the athlete that tries to own the storytelling, but Brooks started releasing their own content much later in the process.

Brooks are more central to the question of where those 3.34 seconds are going to come from. When Josh Kerr stands in front of a British crowd on Saturday, hiding behind those famous Oakley lenses, he’ll be confident in the ground-breaking technology that’s been created for him.

Brilliantly executed by Josh Kerr. I’ve seen the race video everywhere on social media and watched it many times. What an accomplishment!

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For 24 Years, Horses Dominated the Man vs. Horse Marathon. Now, Humans Are Starting to Win

For the first 24 years of the Man vs. Horse Marathon, the outcome was never in doubt. The mounted side of the race crossed the line first at Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales, every single time, from the inaugural race in 1980 through 2003. The debate that started it all had played out at the Neuadd Arms Hotel, where landlord Gordon Green bet a group of local huntsmen that a man could outlast a horse over rough, uneven ground. The huntsmen took the other side, and Green turned the disagreement into an annual fixture. Pour enough pints into a pub argument, and eventually someone proposes settling it outside.

Then, something shifted. Since 2004, five different runners have crossed the finish line ahead of every horse in the field: Huw Lobb, who beat 565 runners and 47 horses to end the 24-year streak, followed by Florien Holtinger in 2007, Ricky Lightfoot in 2022, Daniel Connolly in 2023, and Dewi Griffiths in 2025. When three of those five wins came within a single four-year stretch, observers started to wonder whether the balance of nature had finally tipped in man’s favor.

Why would anyone start racing with horses in the first place? And now humans are outracing horses? Let’s wait until the trackflation kids run longer distances!

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

This last week I ran in Sweden and in Norway - just short runs, but great scenery on the coasts of the Baltic Sea. I love it do run in new places where I really don’t know where the next steps might lead me and it is a great way to explore a city. Also, when you sit in a car all day long, a morning run is just wonderful.

Hopefully I’ll get a few nice runs in along in the Oslofjord, it is just beautiful here.

I also did some reading about running last week, so please dig in and read the five articles I picked out for you!

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The Norwegian Training Method Promises Faster Long-Distance Running and Better Recovery—Here’s How

In short, the idea is to do as much volume at sub-threshold pace (done at 80 to 87 percent of max heart rate) as possible without working so hard that you break your body down, upping the risk for injury and burnout, according to Bakken, who is now a physician in Norway.

A former elite runner himself, Bakken first started employing this method in the late 1990s. “Splitting the work into two sub-threshold sessions on the same day, morning and evening, dropped recovery from days to hours and let me roughly double the threshold volume I could repeat,” he says.

Since he started employing the method himself, Bakken competed in two Olympics as well as two World Championship finals, and set Norwegian records at 2,000, 3,000, and 5,000 meters.

I’m currently in Norway and I will try this out as it probably works better when applied on Norwegian soil. Or maybe it is the weather here…

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How Everyone Became Obsessed With Running

Gen Z might be getting into running, but we are still bored, lonely, and anxious. Perhaps it is no accident that we neurotics are drawn to running, a uniquely trackable sport, where every minor improvement incrementally increases your predicted race times on Strava. Every element of your diet, sleep schedule, and social life can be adapted to it. “Healthy is beautiful” is repeated ad nauseam and we become walking public health campaigns. We are slowly outsourcing intuition to optimizable metrics. Every unforeseen life event or ingested substance can throw off the regimen; complete lack of resilience to any outside stimulus is reframed as health. “Holistic” just means adapting everything to fit your workout routine.

Whatever the motives, I think it is good people are finding running as an outlet.

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Tapping out of running at 28 weeks

I didn’t know what to expect from pregnancy. I’d heard lots of horror stories: months of sickness, constant discomfort, fatigue that never stopped, sofa-bound for weeks on end, insomnia, night sweats, swollen ankles… the list went on. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, people on my Instagram feed were winning parkrun the day they went into labour.

I’ve landed somewhere inbetween. For the most part I’ve had an extremely straightforward ride and feel basically fine. Or, I would think that if I was somebody whose hobbies didn’t usually involve going for 20+ mile runs on a Saturday and fastpacking off a long-distance trail for a relaxing week’s holiday. As it is, my social life and free time look pretty different to how they did this time a year ago, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t found that hard.

It must be a total challenge to figure how long into a pregnancy running still makes sense.

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The Best Running Shoes You Can’t Get Your Hands On

As someone whose lifetime mileage to date tops 130,000 and who writes about running, I had personal and professional reasons to look into this phenomenon, and I’m a convert too. I paid $90, shipping and tariff included, for the Li-Ning Red Hare 9 Pro. It’s the equivalent of the Puma Deviate Nitro 4 ($170) and Saucony Endorphin Speed 5 ($175). The BMAI Jingtan 3.0 Turbo cost me $161, again including shipping and tariff. The shoe is akin—but superior—to racing shoes such as the Brooks Hyperion Elite 5 ($275). I’ve run in hundreds of models from dozens of brands over the past 47 years, and the BMAI model and a few other Chinese shoes are among my all-time favorites because of their combination of ride (the feel underfoot), versatility, durability, and price.

Actually, I don’t really care about Chinese running shoes. I’d rather pay more for a shoe manufactured in Europe.

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To Get More From Your Run, Try This Training Strategy

Modern running watches and fitness trackers can be wonderful tools, making it easy to analyze metrics like pace, distance, heart rate and more. But all that data can lead some runners to fixate on their stats, which can be counterproductive.

“It can easily become paralysis by analysis,” said Mario Fraioli, a running coach in the Bay Area who works with athletes of all levels. “There’s an overwhelming amount of data, and people don’t know how to make sense of it or have a healthy relationship with it.”

I think it is refreshing to not look at the watch when I am on a run, but I guess this is one of the topics where there really is no right or wrong, it’s up to you.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Summer vacation is approaching rapidly and I am still not in any shape to do longer runs. I do hope to get some nice runs in along the Oslofjord.
Did you catch any coverage of Hardrock 100? That’s a race I’d love to attend, either as a runner, a pace or a spectator. Just like Western States, which I also want to see live. It’s just that the logistics are a bit insane from over here in Germany, and also I’d need to get some serious running in before and I do not find the time for that currently.

What’s the most expensive piece you are wearing on a run? Your shoes, your watch or your shirt? If it is the shirt, then I do think you have a spending problem, but if it makes you happy, then just run along in your moth-tech shirt!

Enjoy these Five Things Running!

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2026 Hardrock 100 Results: Ludo Pommeret and Courtney Dauwalter Set Records

It was with this seemingly carefree attitude that Pommeret, who turns 51 in less than two weeks, toed the line of the race he’s come to dominate in recent years. But don’t let his lighthearted approach fool you. As he did in previous years, Pommeret spent a month in Colorado preparing specifically for this race and its unique demands, completing two-and-a-half full loops of the course across multi-day trips known as “Softrocks.”

He is just a tad younger than I am. Now I feel old. Thanks, Ludo. What an impressive undertaking, yet again! And Courtney Dauwalter is the GOAT.

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Inside Western States: How the Oldest 100-Mile Trail Race on Earth Became the Most Sought-After Ticket in Endurance Sports

Over 50 years on from Ainsleigh’s pioneering effort, the Western States Endurance Run (or WSER, for short) is one of the most sought-after races in global trail running. With only around 370 bibs doled out each year, runners must enter a lottery to secure a spot on the start line, with some runners waiting for a decade or more before they are finally selected to race. Not only do prospective runners have to enter the lottery every single year, but they must also run one of WSER’s qualifying races, usually 100K or longer, just for the privilege of entering the lottery. In 2026, over 11,000 people entered the lottery. The race is a lifelong goal for many amateur trail runners, but for the pros, WSER is one of the biggest races, if not the biggest race, on the calendar.

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I Love Running Alone. That Doesn’t Make Me a Red Flag.

So when I hear the occasional implication that running alone is somehow a red flag, I have to laugh.

A red flag? For what, exactly? Enjoying my own company? Wanting 45 minutes where no one asks me where I’m going? If anything, solo running is one of the healthiest relationships in my life. It’s me, my music, my weird little route choices, and whatever emotional support anthem is carrying me through those miles.

Indeed. Run as you like.

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The Gym Brofication Of Running

Running feels different lately. Not everywhere, not all the time, but clearly enough wherever the sport becomes visible to a broad audience: filmed, sponsored, clipped, reposted and turned into identity.

For a long time, runners, ultrarunners in particular, had a different aura. Lauchs¹, basically. Thin arms, wild tan lines, awkward posture, quiet energy, salt stains everywhere, ten hours of suffering described later as “a good day out.” I say this with love. There was something disarming about a sport where the strongest people often looked like they had never won a fight in their life.

Of course this picture is romantic. The old running world was never innocent. It had plenty of sexism, gatekeeping, male self-importance and a habit of turning experience into ownership. I do not plan to beautify a golden age here.

Still, the vibe felt different, and so did the tone.

Methinks this is part of the growing pains a sport has to endure when it suddenly gains popularity. Still, I liked the old vibe better.

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As Seen On Dates, Never On Runs

If I look at a company like Satisfy, spending $200 on running shorts will, hopefully, always feel insane to me. Even as someone who runs five or six days a week and would probably get the full cost-per-wear. Same with another pair of sunglasses. Practical. Useful. Justifiable, technically.

But the jacket feels different.

Because at some point, running clothes stopped being just for running. And once athletic wear becomes clothing — real clothing, outfit clothing, be-seen-in-public clothing — the spending becomes much easier to rationalize.

Running brands are no longer only selling performance. They are selling proximity to performance. The idea that you are the kind of person who runs, or could run, or at minimum has excellent taste in clothing designed for people who run.

I’m happy for every runner who feels that whatever they are wearing is just the right thing for the moment. For me personally, I don’t think I need to overspend on anything else but the shoes. In fact, I am hoping for a revival of tennis socks and a white cotton t-shirt. We have overdone it in the last few years and we do not need the latest and most expensive hot shit to run 10 km around the local pond, unless of course it makes you feel better.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Trail running is the most selfish thing I do. Even if I don’t get around to doing it as often as I wish. It is also, somehow, the most communal.

You go out alone into something hard, for reasons nobody else can fully access, and then the moment you finish the whole thing belongs to everyone who has ever done it. That contradiction is the engine of the sport, and it is also the reason the sport is so hard to write about, sell, or scale without losing the plot. The five articles below circle it from different directions: culture and class, one runner’s absurd origin story, an elite training block, and the open question of who gets to tell these stories at all.

Enjoy these Five Things Running!

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The Trail was Always the Teacher

Trail running is simultaneously the most selfish and most selfless pursuit I know. You go alone into something hard. Profoundly alone, at 3 a.m., in the cold, with a headlamp and a list of things your body would prefer you not do. That’s selfish in the most elemental sense — a private reckoning. But here is what the elders taught me: the moment you finish — or don’t — that story belongs to the community. It becomes part of the shared library. The veteran at the aid station who looks you in the eye and says I’ve been here. I know what this is — that is culture operating exactly as designed.

This is why no FKT, no podium finish, no race series acquisition can touch the center of this thing. The center is a conversation between a person and a trail and, eventually, between that person and everyone else who has had the same conversation. That exchange is ancient. It is not going anywhere.

On point.

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C is for Community. C is for Culture.

There were repeated comparisons to skateboarding, and I reject them wholeheartedly based on the simple fact that skateboarders are cool. Skating is an anti-establishment subculture. Skaters challenge societal norms simply by using the built environment (parking lots, stairs, railings) for a secondary, often-destructive recreational activity.

Trail running on the other hand is just running through public lands with thousands of dollars of equipment, occasionally adding another hefty bill (entry, flights, hotel, crew) to run a race. The time and money required dictates that trail runners come from a different socio-economic class than those who take a board to a parking lot to grind curbs.

I am glad we have people like who continue to point out what we need to improve to make our sport more inclusive.

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I Ran A Marathon. Here’s Why I’m Dumb Enough To Do It Again.

It was Mick Jagger who got me into running. This sounds comical, not least because of all the hobbies one might plausibly inherit from the Rolling Stones frontman — from the music to his signature struts, to cocaine addiction — the one I picked up was much worse: long-distance running. But there he was, in an interview, explaining how he manages to stay in such preposterous shape well into his 70s while continuing to prance across stadium stages like a possessed aerobics instructor. His secret, apparently, is running.

What a great way to start an article about running a marathon. It got me hooked right away.

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How Vincent Bouillard Trained for Western States

As the coach of such an incredible athlete, my main job is just not to screw him up. Like many of us, Vincent enjoys smashing himself in training. Part of the reason he wanted to work together in the first place was to make sure he was doing that productively so that he could bounce back and do it again a few days later. The other part was that in addition to working part time on the innovation team at Hoka, he was going to be a dad soon and wanted to make the most of his training time so that he could still be a good employee, partner, and parent. Our relationship is very much a collaboration. I wrote out the training two weeks at a time, and his input and feedback were essential to making it work.

I honestly don’t know how people do this: running, job, family - I don’t have the discipline for that, let alone the urge to have the discipline for that. It’s impressive.

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The Return of Trail Running Journalism?

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.

Methinks that the trailrunning space is still too small for more independent and objective journalism that moves beyond tales by runners and sponsored shoe reviews.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I had the brilliant idea to go running during the most extreme heat wave we ever had in Northern Germany. I tried to go running early in the morning, but then life happened and I finally left the house around 11 and it was already getting hot outside. The heat and my general lack of fitness was not the best combination for a run, but I had a good time nonetheless, even though it felt as if I could drink buckets of water afterwards. Unfortunately I hadn’t read the really interesting article about hydration before my run, but you will be prepared if you read that article - and the other four.

I am still trying to get into the running flow again, but the late night soccer live broadcasts are not really helping with getting up early…

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2026 Western States 100 Results: Jenn Lichter and Vincent Bouillard Set Course Records in Cool Weather

It was safe to say that expectations were high for a new record or two this year as runners set out on the 100.2-mile journey across the Sierra Nevada over a course that challenges with its 18,000 feet of climbing and 22,000 feet of descent.

In a testament to the ideal race temperatures, and the exceptionally strong field, the second to fourth runners – Francesco Puppi of Italy, Ryan Montgomery, and Thomas Cardin of France, were also all under the previous men’s course record, with Zach Miller’s fifth-place time still the 10th fastest time in men’s race history.

I spent some time watching this and while I do not believe that these kind of races will ever become mainstream spectator events, the performances each year are nothing but extraordinary.

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‘Without Fear:’ Trail Running Is More Than a Sport for These Run Clubs

Between President Trump’s immigration crackdown and a rise of racially motivated hate crimes in recent years, it hasn’t been easy for people of color to feel safe, according to the runners interviewed for this story. But now trail running groups like Sin Miedo are popping up around the country, giving more Americans a chance to get outside.

“ICE was coming in May of last year and taking people away from their families,” Marrero said. “We made a conscious decision to say, ‘We’re going to show up.’ These things happening around us are awful and destroying our community, but we’re going to help people escape for an hour or two. And so many people have shown up in the group, providing help to those who need it. Places to stay, food, whatever… The trail running has been the catalyst for us to continue showing up for each other.”

It’s sad that this is necessary, but it is wonderful how run clubs can create community and make people feel better.

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Running Is Free Until You Become a Runner

The assumed cost of running is always physical. The repeated impact, the stress on your joints, multiplied across every stride. The average 5-mile run is 10,000 steps. Do the math on your own mileage and the strain we put ourselves through becomes hard to ignore. We keep going anyway, until we eventually need new knees - at least according to every non-runner with one podcast mic and zero medical credentials.

But lately I’ve been wondering about the other cost…

The financial one.

Running is supposed to be the simple sport. Basically free. A pair of shoes, a road, maybe a watch if you’re trying to flex online. But after five years of diving headfirst into the economy of running, I can say with confidence: this sport is not free.

I made a deliberate decision about a year ago to ignore all those in the runnings space who only talk about the latest products and want us to buy more and more. Turns out that I can run in last season’s shoes and in shorts I bought years ago.

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Is Hydration Just as Important as Your Carb Intake?

Hydration is not secondary to carbohydrates. They are equal partners in performance. Understanding your sweat rate and sweat sodium concentration gives you the tools to create a personalized hydration strategy that supports your training, keeps you safe, and helps you perform at your best.

Taking time to get hydration right pays off on every long run and every race.

Drink up!

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Unofficial Rules of the Trail

There are no official “Rules of the Trail.” No one hands you a rulebook when you take your first step onto the dirt, and there’s no pre-race briefing where someone explains that you should always pack an extra snack or jacket, that the best climbs are for hiking and soul-searching or that small clothing problems will, without exception, become very big clothing problems. These are things you learn the way most trail runners learn everything: slowly, stupidly and usually the hard way.

Spend enough time on trails – long runs, wrong turns, thunderstorms, the emotional rollercoaster of running for 10 or 20 or 30 hours – and you start to develop a set of rules. Not rules you have to follow, but rules that, if ignored, will eventually teach you why they exist.

Experience can be really helpful when you’re on the trail, so learn from others and havea look at these rules.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Sunday morning I saw a run club running by and I was appalled. They all ran around in the same white t-shirt with a sponsor logo on it. The person at the front was holding a flag with the same logo, a cosmetics company.

Seriously, this is what run clubs have turned into? Just some weird advertising campaign to reach a specific target audience? I don’t mind companies supporting and sponsoring run clubs, but I this takes it too far and I hope it will backfire. Running is such an individualistic sport, why would anyone try to make it all corporate?

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Midlife is the perfect time to start trail running – here’s how to get into it

Trail running takes place on dirt trails as opposed to paved roads or measured flat tracks. Races longer than marathon distance (26.2 miles) are called ultramarathons, or “ultras” for short. While some ultras are held on tracks or paved surfaces, most follow trail routes. Hence, “ultrarunning” typically refers to extra-long-distance trail running.

Trail running, especially at ultra distances, differs significantly in practice and culture from traditional road-and-track running. Trail races tend to be smaller and more intimate than metropolitan road races.

I actually think any time is a good time to start trail running and if you think about it, it is really not that strange an idea to run outside in nature.

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Running at Night

If you’ve ever struggled with finding the confidence and knowledge to embrace the nocturnal world, guided by nothing but the glow of your headlamp (and, hopefully, a well-planned GPS route), keep reading. A disproportionate number of women fears running on trails, let alone running on trails at night. The main threat to female runners in any environment is harassment from men, and that is a very valid fear. Although this threat is exponentially higher in a more populated area, it exists on roads and trails alike.

While various threats exist on the trail (including our fellow humans), most Colorado runners keep a nervous eye out for mountain lions. We share the woods with black bears too, though they tend to be more skittish than lions; in my experience, bears make plenty of noise crashing through the brush just to stay clear of us. Of course, a mama bear with cubs is always a concern, but just because you haven’t seen a cougar doesn’t mean it hasn’t seen you. To put these fears into perspective, let’s look at the stats.

I am not a big fun of running in the dark, but then again where I run, there are no mountain lions, which really puts it into a different perspective.

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Sweat, tears and camaraderie as 20,000 runners take on world’s largest ultramarathon

That first year, 34 runners, all white men, lined up for the race, conceived by the first world war veteran Vic Clapham as a way of honouring his fallen comrades. Sixteen of them finished. More than a century later, on 14 June, more than 20,000 people stood outside Durban city hall, hoping to make it to Pietermaritzburg before the 12-hour cutoff.

What started as an all-white, all-male test of physical endurance has become part of the fabric of South African life, something so ordinary that you would be hard-pressed to find someone here who does not know a Comrades finisher.

Running clubs bus in from all over the country. Security guards and shop workers line up alongside bankers and celebrities. And, for one day, every June, South Africa’s searing racial inequality seems to melt away.

What an event. Every year I read about it and every year I am amazed how big this race is and what the runners endure to finish it.

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What I learnt from running 100 miles

The mind is a very odd thing. Generally speaking I have a lot of mental resilience and have never wanted to give up in a race. My mind is usually far stronger than my body. So it was a very weird feeling when self-doubt arrived very early on.

The first 10 miles to be precise. I started the race feeling really tired as I’d been up since 4 am and hadn’t slept well the week before. Plus I had only just got over jetlag from my recent Easter Island trip.

I love these write-ups about amazing achievements as a runner.
Running 100 miles is truly a big deal and I am sure it changes a lot in a person’s life.

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O is for Offline

The easy solution to being constantly connected to an ecosystem of running apparel pyramid schemes is to do more things that are offline. You have a very distinct number of hours in your day. If you use them for something purposeful that makes you feel good, you simply won’t have time to be on your phone or computer.

It’s like if you eat a lot of vegetables and whole foods, you don’t have space in your belly to overeat highly-processed foods. Start with a positive act and you will organically live better. Leave a little space for a chicken nugget, of course.

Yes. Don’t buy so much apparel you don’t need, you’re just going to sweat in it anyhow and I remember when cotton t-shirts where all we had for sports and it didn’t kill us… also, buy This is Running - it is such a great book!

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Running looks like a solo sport. This week makes the case that it never really was. One million parkrun events. A champion who chose to crew another champion instead of racing. A 32-mile loop around an entire island, run for no medal and no prize. The five stories below have almost nothing to do with personal bests and everything to do with the people who show up: the ones who hand you a gel at mile 62, the tribe that turns a Saturday morning into a reason to drive across town, and the women rewriting whose race counts in the first place.

Read on, and then send this to the friend who keeps telling you they want to start.

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‘A huge spectrum of people coming together’: how parkrun made it to its millionth event

Initially a single timed run, the event now operates at 2,800 locations worldwide, with more than 12 million people registered to take part.

Every Saturday morning, tens of thousands of runners and walkers turn up to jog, push prams or simply complete the course at their own pace.

These events, which are entirely volunteer-run at a local level, have seen bridal showers in matching headdresses, milestone birthday parties, and even engagements at the finish line.

I have never attended one of these runs, but I think the whole concept is marvelous! People run for different reasons and if you like to run with a whole lot of people every Sunday, this is probably your tribe!

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The Best Race is the One You Don’t Run

I was admittedly a little nervous about screwing something up, especially considering Devon’s résumé. She’s one of the most accomplished athletes in our sport, and while I knew how it felt to be the one racing, I wasn’t nearly as confident in my ability to support someone else through their race.

Still, I had a few things going for me. I’d spent enough time in the sport to understand what runners need when things get hard, and I’d been fortunate to have some excellent crews of my own over the years (mostly at multi-days). I knew what had worked for me: the right encouragement at the right moment, practical help before it was requested, and the ability to read the difference between a runner who needed snacks, opinions, a kick in the pants, or simply a quiet presence.

The rest, I figured, I could learn as I went.

I think the aspect of crewing is still being overlooked when comparing trail and ultra running with other running events. Here we have one of the top athletes in the field supporting another top athlete, which I find really cool.

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Running and Feminism: What Does It Mean to Support Women?

The feminism of trail running—assuming that’s what we can even call it—consists of women using the playbook they inherited from (mostly white) men, but inserting (mostly white) women.

This same ole same ole playbook heavily prioritizes elite athletes. The focus is results, popularity, and profitability—over values. It focuses on the most famous events over championing the events that are best for women. It champions likes and followers and downloads over people and community. It doesn’t criticize or hold anyone accountable (like, say, a race director who features a confederate flag at their very famous race). And it leaves behind women of color—as well as women who don’t fit within the narrow swath of those who are competitive in the competitions it deems most important. Being fast and popular is worth more than—anything else.

It also means that that’s why Entrekin’s win is as much or more about her beating men as it is about an incredible athletic performance—this was a playbook written by men, for men, and men are the default standard bearers. Everything ultimately is compared to them.

I think this is a gradual change that is going on and unfortunately we need patience to witness the necessary change. I wish things would change faster.

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Their Idea of a Fun Run? A 32-Mile Loop Around Manhattan.

Running the perimeter is an old tradition: It was a regular route for Ted Corbitt, the Olympic marathoner and founding president of New York Road Runners. Sometimes, when he was training for an ultramarathon, he’d run the perimeter twice in a row, said his son, Gary Corbitt, who is 75 and lives in Jacksonville, Fla.

But in recent years, the perimeter run has become more popular, particularly among runners in the city seeking a fresh — and free — challenge. According to data collected by Strava, the fitness tracking app, the number of runs uploaded to the app with a map matching the perimeter of Manhattan increased in 2025 by 30 percent compared with 2024.

To me this sounds like the ultimate sightseeing run. While I don’t like running in the city as much as running through the woods, I enjoy exploring a city by taking runs into areas I haven’t been to. That’ what I do on my business trips, but I probably won’t do 32 miles casually in the morning before meetings…

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Running Cool at Western States

The canyons at Western States don’t care how fit you are or how much time you spend in the sauna. By the time you hit Foresthill at mile 62, your core temperature has been climbing for hours, the air is still hot and the trail offers no shade.

Heat acclimation prepares your physiology for heat stress. Cooling strategies manage it in real time. Both matter of these matter, and they’re not interchangeable. This piece is about the third part of that equation.

While I continue to think I could run 100 miles with enough training, I am not so sure about getting through the sun and the heat. I’d be in dehydrated lobster-looking mode real quick and it amazes me how runner battle the sun and the heat while running fast on a really long distance up and down the mountains.

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

There is a strange new category of travel where suffering is the souvenir. Ultrarunning has a name for it, the darecation, and the growth is wild. UTMB went from 50,000 participants in 2022 to 170,000, most of them not elites, but amateurs who turn themselves into engineers of their own bodies just to spend 30 hours moving through the mountains - and bring their support crews along. This week pulls at that contradiction from a few angles: the months of prep that quietly become a darecation of their own, the uncomfortable fact that the self-styled environmental sport actually runs on air travel and shoes built to die in a few hundred miles, who is really betting money on trail running and who is just dabbling, and a reminder from Frozen Head State Park that even the cruelest race on earth can somehow turn out to be just lovely. You just have to train a lot for it, I guess…

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Inside the ‘darecation’: Why travellers are choosing holidays that hurt

At UTMB World Series, one of the world’s leading organisers of trail running and mountain races, business is booming. Since launching with a single race around the Mont Blanc Massif in 2003, it expanded to 25 ultramarathon events in 2022 and now hosts more than 60 races globally. Annual participation has risen from 50,000 in 2022 to 170,000, most of whom aren’t elite athletes but highly committed amateurs.

“People become engineers of themselves for these races,” said Florian Lamblin, executive director of UTMB International and an ultrarunner himself. “They are trying to achieve something complex and, at the end, deliver something extraordinary, which is running up to 30 hours in nature.”

While I envy people who can take those vacations, I also ask myself: “don’t they have kids? or partners who want sightseeing or the beach? how do they do this? do they do a vacation afterwards to get some relaxation as well?”

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Becoming BFFs with the WSER course

We certainly trained; I ran 167 miles in seven days and felt better as camp progressed (since I’m Strava dark, this is your teaser for how training is going:P). We pushed hard and asked a lot of our bodies. But we also fell over laughing, put on baseball gloves and played catch, and met the guy who runs the Greengate aid station (who is also a butterfly dealer?!). Critically, the hard work was done in a context of fun, friends, and discovery. But an easy-to-miss part of training was strengthening our relationship with this 100-mile thread of trail through the California hills. I feel like I befriended the course, learning more of its quirks and paying it respect that is impossible to do while racing.

Wow, that preparation sounds like a darecation of its own, but it is just the buildup before the race.

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Trail Running Isn’t an Environmental Sport

That’s the argument in a single frame. Trail and ultra running thinks of itself as the environmental sport, and its community as nature’s stewards. It keeps Edward Abbey on the nightstand. It talks about stewardship and leaving no trace, about the privilege of crossing wild country on its own two feet. Then it runs on air travel to far-off start lines, on shoes built to die inside a few hundred miles [1], on races that bolt new distances and whole continents onto the calendar every year. The self-image is preservation. The machine underneath, however, is unbridled consumption. For two decades the sport has been building a sincere, expensive, well-staffed apparatus whose real job is to keep anyone from noticing the difference.

True, and everyone is aware of this, but doesn’t really want to change it. Just look at all the new products trail runners are supposed to buy to make the runs better.

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Who’s Actually Betting on Trail Running?

The framework reveals a bet that’s easy to miss. Concentrated brands, those that are fully run-focused or that separately report running/outdoor segments, can’t pull back on trail investments without it showing up in consolidated results. Diversified parents like Nike and adidas can dial trail spending up or down without materially affecting their financials.

The high-conviction brands are the canaries in the coal mine. They signal whether trail running continues to grow and remain a profitable category. Watch closely if Nike starts disclosing more on ACG, or breaks it out as a separate segment. That would be a clear sign the relaunch is yielding real financial results.

I am still rooting for the niche players and I love it that there are so many new brands building on this sport.

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Why the notorious Barkley Marathons is ‘nicer than you think’, according to a man who’s run it three times

It’s the world’s toughest foot race. The statistics speak for themselves: 20 finishers in 39 years. The leg-slashing sawbriars. The Blair Witch woods. The freezing fog and mocking lack of assistance (‘No help is coming’). But after my third visit, I need to tell you all that Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee, home of the Barkley Marathons, is simply one of the loveliest and most welcoming places I’ve ever been.

So, it’s just a fun darecation after all?

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If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I am a bit bummed. We had a referendum in Hamburg to apply to become a host city for the Olympic Games in 2040 or 2044. The overwhelming majority turned it down.
It would have been so cool and so great for the city. We just hosted the Iron Man triathlon right in the middle of the city and I think we would have been such a great host city with most venues nearby and also near the water. Not to mention the 6 billion € that would have been invested into infrastructure, housing and sports facilities.

Well, now some other city will benefit from this.

Hrmpf.

Anyhow, read these carefully selected articles about running now and then go running!

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Runners turned into Mean Girls: Satisfy x Adidas

Satisfy now has almost half a million followers on Instagram. It has also truly crossed over into fashion. Revenues were around €11 million in 2025—still a speck compared to Nike’s $50 billion—and it’s now sold at Mr Porter, End., SSENSE, etc. Its tees in particular are popular; they’re often worn with trousers and jeans. Satisfy might be rooted in trail running, but its customers are also firmly in the city.

When sports brands try to plug “lifestyle” collections and when luxury fashion brands try (and constantly fail) to launch fitness collections, no one can deny that this organic global acquisition of the fashion customer is impressive.

I love it. Satisfy x Adidas is the one collab everyone is talking about. Who will top this with a collab nobody thought about?

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The race I couldn’t miss

I remember it as if it were yesterday: listening to friends and teammates like Xavi Cadena, Anna Serra or Agusti Roc describe what it was like to run through the wall of sound at Sancti Spiritu. “It’s the Alpe d’Huez of trail running,” they said. “Nothing compares to it; you have to experience it.”That was 2007, my first year racing internationally in the Skyrunning World Series. At the time, Zegama was the series finale in September. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of spectators. Despite the rain and the bitter cold on the summits, thousands had hiked for hours just to stand there, cheer for every runner, and celebrate the sport.

Some runner from Spain is now also on Substack and writes about some race. So awesome to have him here!

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Are men or women more durable runners?

Women are traditionally better at pacing than men – data shows that women are 18.3% better at keeping an even pace than men – and men have a reputation for going out too quickly, then fading as the distance goes on. Instead, women can stick to a consistent pace for longer, leading to a consistent race where they end up overtaking many men who went off too quickly.

As the study explains, this is because women’s bodies can handle fatigue better than men’s. Despite both men and women seeing similar reductions in running economy, which refers to how efficiently your body uses oxygen to maintain a certain pace, women had better fatigue resistance, less force loss and a more stable metabolism. Perceived effort was also lower in women than in men, with men’s perceived effort levels rising more steeply than women’s.

I find this research really fascinating. Also, women are probably just tougher and can endure more pain than men…

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‘Maybe the suffering is the point’: what does it take to run 163km up and down a mountain?

“You start looking at the course map, and the elevation profile, and you start to have impostor syndrome.”

These thoughts can creep back in when you are so tired that putting one foot in front of the other becomes a herculean task. “You just think, no way – no way I can do this.”

The race begins before dawn on Friday at Scenic World in Katoomba. By 11am on Saturday, she has been running for 30 hours.

As her GPS watch buzzes, telling her she has just passed the 117km marker, the warm confines of an aid station – a checkpoint providing water and food – awaits.

As I am currently just in the slog around the park phase again, trying to recover and get back into shape, I read these kinds of articles with so much awe and really want to be able to run that long.

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My First Ultra: Where "Me" Became "We"

“Isn’t this incredible? Can you believe we get to do this?”

I did not share his enthusiasm, but his knee was shot and he couldn’t run either, and we fell in step together, talking about our reasons for being out there. Somehow the last few miles dissolved and the finish line appeared. We ran across it together, into a crowd of finishers who cheered like we’d won the whole thing, despite the fact that I’d missed the official cutoff by 30 minutes.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know at mile 20: I would have stopped there. The race would have ended quietly, a private failure nobody would have noticed but me, but Dean showed up. Then the volunteers. Then the man with the bad knee. Each of them carried a little of what I didn’t have. Each of them took me a little further than I could have gone alone. The version of me that crossed the finish line didn’t exist that morning.I did not finish this race – we did. It was a 50k, for cancer, together.

Yes, it is. It’ really something else. And it is incredible.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Running is simple. One foot in front of the other. And yet: we perform it, brand it, suit up for it, fuel it to the edge of human possibility, and break ourselves doing it. This week, five pieces that pull at the threads. I spent some time reading last week and less actually running, but this will be my week of

Satisfy and Adidas went digging in punk and hardcore for credibility, and whether that heist lands depends entirely on who you ask. Adidas also built a full-body suit that might actually make you faster, which will not stop people from buying it for reasons that have nothing to do with biomechanics. The science behind breaking the two-hour marathon barrier turns out to hinge less on heroics and more on aggressive carbohydrate strategy going back a hundred years. And when the body finally gives out, the worst thing you can do is stop entirely. Training through injury is a discipline of its own. Five things worth your time this week. Read them and then go running!

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The Rise Of Performative Running Culture

Performative running cares more about the perception of running vs. actually running. It’s when the image of being a runner becomes more important than the experience of running itself. It’s what models do when they’re asked by ALO to run around the Eiffel tower to sell a trail shoe. It lacks depth and understanding.

[…]

The opposite of being performative is to run with intention. That looks different for everyone, but it’s rooted in something meaningful. It’s not about how long you’ve been a runner, how much mileage you do, or how fast you are. I think it’s quite simple—you care about the sport and the people in it. You care about evolving and learning about yourself through the defiant act of putting one foot in front of the other.

Ah well, this is an interesting discussion to have, which clearly shows that the running sphere matures and people run for different reasons. Of course everyone involved thinks they are running for the right reasons.

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The Satisfy x Adidas Subculture Heist

Brice Partouche may have his own history with punk, hardcore, and Straight Edge. But Satisfy as a brand does not operate like a punk or hardcore project that somehow found running. It operates like a fashion brand that moved into performance running and repeatedly reaches into punk and hardcore for underground credibility.

And that difference matters.

Personal history does not automatically make every commercial use of that history accountable. Knowing the reference does not mean carrying the responsibility.

Because the issue is not biography. It is behavior.

It is what a brand does with the things it claims to understand. It is whether it contributes to the culture or only uses it as an archive of underground credibility. It is whether the people, bands, shirts, codes, and histories remain part of a living world, or get turned into expensive proof that a product has edge.

Actually, I beg to differ. Satisfy x Adidas certainly broke some rules and that’s why it is successful. And I say that with all my skatepunk knowledge from back when we started skating right after the war when we didn’t have anything and I had to take the bus to Hamburg to buy an outrageously priced copy of thrasher magazine and these days kids wear hoodies with a thrasher logo and they just like the style or whatever. We have enough boring collabs, this one is fun.

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This Suit Makes You Faster. But Will Runners Wear It?

About four years ago, Jessica G. Hunter, a manager of athlete performance at Adidas, started looking into the effect of “stiffening elements” in suits for endurance runners. There was skepticism within the company that clothing could make much of a difference in a marathon. “Leadership didn’t think we would be able to improve running economy with apparel,” Hunter said. “Because nobody had ever done it successfully before.”

Hunter found that the stabilizing elements made runners faster for longer. “What we were trying to do was exploit the connection between the muscles that stabilize the pelvis and trunk and the muscles that stabilize the hip, and how those muscles tend to work together from a pelvic and hip stability,” she said. “In order to do that, you have to have something that crosses the whole body. And the only way to do that is with a full, connected suit.”

While it seems to make sense to wear the absolutely latest tect apparel for elite athletes, I am sure that many people will buy this kit in the weird hope that it will matter in achieving a personal best. And if they can afford it and it makes them happy, by all means go for it! I am running in shoes with carbon and I am probably not finishing on a podium any time soon.

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Inside the Fueling of the First Sub 2 Hour Marathon

The sub-2-hour marathon is a remarkable convergence of factors from shoe technology to mindset shifts to training theory to fueling strategy. In this newsletter, I want to focus on the last one.

Aggressive carbohydrate feeding has been a quiet revolution building in the sports science world for over a century. It dates back to the 1923 Boston Marathon, when researchers drew blood from exhausted finishers and discovered that post-race collapse was linked to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). The idea that carbohydrate mattered was, at that point, a genuine revelation. London 2026 is where that revolution finally arrived and landed in the public spotlight.

It is fascinating to see how elite runners reach their absolute best performance levels. I rather opt for the a that doesn’t taste like old feet.

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Train With, Not Through

Healing from injury often comes with the connotation of doing nothing. While rest is essential, allowing the mind-body system to go stale is a non-starter. That’s both for me as a person and for general practice.

In my experience, pulling the rug out from under athletes’ routines, support systems, social networks, and basic physical fitness is a recipe for a mess. Re-injury, new injury, or just being a miserable son of a bitch all seem to be the consequences of poorly managed return to performance.

And I want none of that. Not for others and certainly not for myself.

So what to do then? Train, of course.

I should have read this advice earlier and I sure hope I remember some of it when the next injury happens.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

A crazy thing happened to me last week: I went running. Twice. And pain-free.

Amazing. I think I will do that again. And hopefully even longer than just a few kilometers.

Also, the second run took place in Copenhagen, which is such an awesome city to run through. I just love running along the harbor to the little mermaid early in the morning. Of course, fashion-conscious that I am, I ran in my Saysky shorts and totally felt like a local without fear of cultural appropriation. In the back of the photo you can see Copen Hill and there is some unfinished business: I wanted to run up Copen Hill on my trip to Copenhagen in December and it was closed, so I guess I have to get in shape and come back for it. Also for the hot dogs with rød pølse.

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

Sawe’s secret sauce: inside the lab that fuelled historic sub-two hour marathon

When Sawe last month in London became the first person to run an official marathon in under two hours, much of the coverage focused on the Kenyan’s carbon-plated shoes. But here, on the west coast of Sweden, a team of scientists, nutritionists and technicians believe another factor was just as significant, if not more so.

“We don’t have the megaphone that the shoe industry has,” says Olof Sköld, co-founder and chief executive of the sports nutrition brand Maurten. “We are not that visible. But if you talk to the athletes and coaches, the elite world knows who we are.”

A glance at the feet on major marathon podiums reveals an array of brands from Adidas and Nike to Asics and On. Where shoe brands differ, there is only one constant among the very best runners: since 2018, every men’s and women’s marathon world record has been run by an athlete using Maurten nutrition products. Sawe’s extraordinary London Marathon time of 1hr 59min 30sec was the latest.

And I always thought people would use Maurten because of all the wonderful flavors it offers.

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‘It Just Wasn’t Fun Anymore’: Why Molly Seidel Stepped Away from Marathoning—and Is Thriving on the Trails

“It just wasn’t fun anymore,” she said. “It’s really hard to maintain that level in marathoning. It’s a steep peak that you have to remain on top of. I needed a change. I needed something different.”

With three strong ultra-distance races under her belt already in 2026, her foray into the competitive trail running scene has gone better than expected. She has already earned a place in the June 27 Western States 100—the most prominent trail race in the U.S.—where she humbly hopes to compete for a top-10 finish.

That is exactly why I am not running marathons anymore. All kidding aside, I can totally understand her reasoning.

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Western States is Not Just a Race

It might seem dry, but public filings are often where you can learn the most about what’s going on inside an organization that won’t necessarily make it into a press release. So what do the numbers tell us about what the WSER Foundation, and the race itself, have been up to or where they’re going?

Most people think of Western States as an iconic, point-to-point, 100-mile foot race from Lake Tahoe to Auburn, California. Many people also know the WSER Foundation as the organization that manages and puts on Western States. Which it is, but that’s not all it is.

This is a really interesting write-up of the budget behind the oldest 100-mile race in the world.

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Yes, You Can Run That Slow

So what’s really going on when runners complain of discomfort at paces slower than their normal easy pace? I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an example of somatization, or “the unconscious process of converting mental, emotional, or psychological distress into physical symptoms, such as pain, fatigue, or nausea.” This doesn’t mean the resistance is entirely in runners’ heads. Research shows that runners are less efficient when they run slower (or faster) than their habitual speeds, and we can feel that. But the rest is psychological. The complainers simply don’t want to slow down and are not bought in to the idea that slowing down will benefit them, so they seize on the slightly unfamiliar sensations they experience at slower paces and turn them into a five-alarm fire.

Running slow really is weird. But so effective.

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Rachel Entrekin Wins the Cocodona 250 in $30 Shorts and a Party Shirt

One thing I find appealing about the trail and ultra scene is the way it rejects the standard performance “look” that’s so pervasive on the roads. Rachel ran most of Cocodona in a button-down “Party Shirt” for god’s sake! Trend-conscious amateur road-runners would NEVER. It’s become virtually unthinkable for runners to attempt a 3:00 marathon in anything other than bonded seams. Real talk: most of us don’t need gear built for running 4-minute miles. Shorts that can handle 3 days of running, though? That’s a serious testament to comfort, utility, and durability, even if you’re only logging 5-10 miles a day. Unsurprisingly, the Terignota Shorts are totally sold out.

And here is some fashion advice: you do not always need the latest and most expensive stuff to succeed.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Still no running for me, still foot pain, but I think, or hope, that it is getting better.

I am now officially in a slump and I compensate not running by eating more. The summer is coming and my bikini-figure really needs some work…

Who of you watched the whole Cocodona 250 race? I watched a few minutes. What a race. Unbelievable. How do you train for such a monster of a race?

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

She Ran 250 Miles in an Astonishing 56 Hours—Beating All the Men at Cocodona and Making History

Rachel Entrekin made history on Wednesday, winning the Cocodona 250 Mile in a new course record of 56 hours, 9 minutes, and 48 seconds. Entrekin won the race outright—holding off Kilian Korth, who set a men’s course record of 57:28:36—and she became the first woman in the race’s history to win the event overall.

Entrekin, 34, defended her women’s title from 2025 and took over seven hours off her time from last year. She won the women’s race in 2024, too.

So awesome.

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125 Hours vs. Zero

I continue to be amazed by what Aravaipa and Mountain Outpost pull off: continuous coverage of a 250-mile race, gaps at night aside, with the ability to rewind to key moments whenever I had a free minute. Every time I checked, somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 people were watching, with peaks above 40,000 during Rachel Entrekin’s record finish. We can debate how to make the coverage more compelling, but the demand for live trail running coverage is clearly at an all-time high.

Which is ironic, because what was probably the race of the year went down at the Canyons 100K the weekend of April 25th and none of us got to watch the drama unfold. One of the six Western States Golden Ticket races, and a UTMB umbrella event, didn’t have a livestream.

While I truly admire the runner who can run for 250 miles, I find it hard to pay attention to such a long race for longer than 5 minutes. It is just so very boring.

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Your bathtub might be the secret to surviving a hot race

Start by pairing the baths with easy runs, not hard workouts (but once you start feeling more comfortable with the process, heat training can follow a more intense, high-quality session). If you have a coach, they might tweak your plan according to your abilities and goals, but for most of us, it works to first, then sit in hot water soon afterward, while body temperature is still elevated. Water temperature is usually around 40 C, with runners submerged up to the chest if possible.

The sweet spot seems to be between 15 and 35 minutes. A lot of runners use heat sessions for about a week leading into a hot-weather race, then ease off a few days before race day. Since the adaptations do not disappear immediately, there is no real advantage to cramming it in at the last minute.

Our bodies are really interesting, aren’t they? Enjoy the hot bath!

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The Case For Public Tracks

Abundance doesn’t speak much about recreational infrastructure—its case studies focus on housing, transportation, and technology—however recreational infrastructure not only supports the health and well-being of Americans, they also afford communitarian thickness. Folks of all ages use tracks and pools, so people of different generations and socio-economic backgrounds tend to intermingle, building relationships and the foundations for healthier neighborhoods.

As much as I love run clubs, they self-select their members, usually catering to younger, urban, college-educated folks. What’s needed are spaces anyone can use, from small children to retirees. Tracks are accessible: they’re flat; they afford space free from cars; they complement multi-use playing fields and can be safely used with little oversight; they cater to differing abilities—from fast runners to children to folks in wheelchairs to anyone who wants a safe place to move.

totally has a point here. I live very close to a traditional track and field stadium, which is only open to those who belong to a sporting club. While these clubs perform a public service and cost just a few € a month, I still would prefer to be able to just use the track without joining a club.

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Speed is still a goddess

Jessie explains how even though they referred to themselves as “ungendered clothing,” it was female runners who connected most with their products. Lexy adds that through their “attention to detail, [Pruzan] resonated more heavily on the feminine side of the audience.” And they have since leaned into it.

“We are two women,” says Lexy. “Let’s lean into the fact that we have our perspective, and that it might not be everyone’s.”

The recent spring campaign had a tagline of ‘Speed Was a Goddess First,’ leaning on the story of mythical Greek figure Atalanta, celebrated as the fastest mortal. It’s something that Maggie Mertens wrote brilliantly about in her book Better, Faster, Farther, and women winning outright and overall is again in the headlines as Rachel Entrekin won Cocodona 250 with a course record, 79 minutes ahead of the fastest man.

I love it how so many new running brands are being created because there is so much demand for nice running apparel. I’m rooting for these upstart brands, always!

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Last week was very much dominated by the fact that a human ran faster than 2 hours for a marathon. I need twice as much time.
And yet, most people on earth are not capable of running 42 km at all.
It’s so weird.
What a phenomenal race!

And yes, I do feel even slower now, but I am in awe that Sabastian Sawe managed to run that fast a marathon.

Adidas also had a good week, I guess. Let’s see how this will play out for the next races - and how this will change the popularity of brands of the midpack racers.

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Enjoy these Five Things Running! 🏃🏻‍♂️

Is It the Shoes?

The feat was the culmination of a shift—or, perhaps more aptly, a total disruption—in marathoning over the past few years, in which the eventual breaking of the mythical two-hour mark went from an impossibility to a guarantee. When sports are young, they progress by leaps and bounds. The first marathon over the now-standard distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, contested at the 1908 London Olympics, was won in 2:55:19. Progress in the succeeding decades was rapid, but by 1991 the sport was mature, professionalized, and lucrative. When Joyner made his prediction, the world record was 2:06:50 andhad advanced by less than two minutes since the 1960s. Logic dictated that future decades would see even slower progress, as runners approached insurmountable limits in factors such as how much training they could handle and how much fuel their muscles could store.

What a race. And so many factor played a role and everything had to be perfect.

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The Super Shoe’s Step-by-Step Evolution

Shoes once relied on leather, wood or metal reinforcements that were heavy and stiff. The rise of the rubber sole added flexibility and waterproofing. Better durability and grip were bonuses.

People could also run or walk in rubber soles without being heard. That’s why they’re called sneakers.

What a week for this shoe company from Herzogenaurach. Isn’t shoe tech fascinating? Can I still run in my shoes from last season?

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Runners Got Bored With the Road. So They Moved to the Trail.

This casualization of trail running spurred sneaker companies to expand a once-niche footwear category: gravel or road-to-trail shoes, which are being specifically marketed to beginner trail runners. Brands such as Brooks, Nike, Salomon and Adidas are rolling out more models designed to feel familiar underfoot while offering enough grip, protection and durability for all conditions.

Trail running is so much nicer than running through the streets. Now even the Wall Street Journal has found out.

(…continue reading.)

The superathletes who want to speed-run Mount Everest

Karl Egloff and Tyler Andrews are a study in contrasts. Egloff, 45 and inclined to metaphysical meditation, is Ecuadorian-born resident of Switzerland. His father was a mountain guide; he began climbing Ecuador’s giant peaks in pre-school and later became a world-class mountain bike racer. Andrews, who’s 35, grew up in the suburbs of Boston. He was a high school band geek before becoming, in college, a talented distance runner. Now a 2:15 marathoner, he lives in Quito, Ecuador, training in the same cragged Andes that shaped Egloff. He only dedicated himself to big mountain running when the pandemic shut down road racing, but then he went big. In 2021, he emblazoned his chest with a huge tattoo of Rucu Pichincha, the Ecuadorian volcano on which he frequently trains.

Obviously, they won’t really be running up the mountain, but still, they want to move quicker than anyone else.

(…continue reading.)

The Evolution of Courtney Dauwalter

Courtney and her basketball shorts broke onto the ultrarunning scene in 2016, back when trail runners worshipped at the altar of vibes. Mileage? Run as much or as little as you want. Carbs? Probably overrated, but you do you. Heat training? Maybe sit in your hot car until you feel like you’re going to pass out. Grittiness and problem-solving were the name of the game, and it was a game Courtney nailed.

Meanwhile, the sport has jetted toward professionalization and optimization. High carb, bicarb, heat training, cross-training—the list of data-driven training modalities being adopted at the pointy end of the field are endless. For a runner who is so clearly driven by a genuine love of running, how, if at all, has she come to terms with this new era?

The road marathon stint provides a clue.

She’s the GOAT.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

This Saturday the 40th anniversary of the Hamburg Marathon was celebrated with a course record. Of course I missed Othmane El-Goumri flying by near our house, on his way to finishing in 2:04:24, but I got to cheer on plenty of slower runners right at the 22km mark.

It was just a gorgeous day for running. So I also tried it and the stupid pain in my forefoot came back after 500m, so I clocked some 1,4 km or so and called it day.
Running sucks. Especially when you cannot run.

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The 2 hour barrier has been smashed.

Sabastian Sawe just ran 1:59:30 with crazy negative splits, closing the last half in 59:01....faster than the American Record in the half marathon.

One of the most mind blowing performances we’ve seen maybe in the history of any sport. How did we get here?

Every breakthrough is a mixture of belief and progress. It takes folks daring to see what’s possible, surrounding themselves with a quality team and doing the work to give themselves a shot.

You’ve got to bet on yourself in a big way. Which is exactly what Sawe did in multiple ways. When asked whether he believed he could run a sub-2-hour marathon before the race, Sawe answered with one word: “Yes.”

Ok, wow. That’s insane. I am in awe.

(…continue reading.)

If On Shoes Are for Everyone, Are They Still Ons?

In gyms, in malls, in airports and on sidewalks around the world, the shoes — with a sole that looks from the side like a happy kindergartner’s gaptoothed smile — are hard to miss. Hellen Obiri won the most recent New York City Marathon wearing a pair of Ons — and expects to don a new prototype on Sunday for the London Marathon. Middle-aged dads, with more modest athletic aspirations, fill their closets with the sneakers as well.

But having made the leap from start-up to established name in performance footwear, the company finds itself at a critical juncture: How does it stay true to its roots as a brand for serious athletes while keeping up its breakneck growth, which it can do only by appealing to the mainstream?

While I think On can also make good shoes, for me they will forever be the brand worn by wanna-be rich people strolling on the boardwalk of some beach resort in Germany, not for serious runners.

(…continue reading.)

How do you train for 250 miles?

Training 15-22 hours per week, not including commuting to trails or time spent in the gym, takes significant mental and emotional energy. Then add in caring for a pregnant wife on top of shipping orders and working to grow a brand…your nervous system will be maxed out.

My experience of this was high stress before a run, the stress generally leaving as the run progressed, and then coming back as soon as I hopped back in the car. I observed myself gravitating more towards mindless scrolling and cheap dopamine hits when feeling tired at home too. Sometimes I’d pull up into our carport and sit in the car for 10 minutes before heading inside. Even typing all of this out I can feel anxiety starting to flood my system.

Unfortunately, my dog is getting older, so training with her is no longer possible and I guess that’s why I cannot train for 250 miles. No, in all seriousness, I am always in awe when I read about people training for such endeavors.

(…continue reading.)

The Hardest Part of Injury Isn’t Physical

If belief shapes perception, and perception shapes experience, then the beliefs you reinforce—intentionally or not—start to define how you move through both training and recovery. That’s where self-belief becomes more than confidence. It becomes a skill. It’s not something you either have or don’t have, but something you practice by deciding what you pay attention to and what meaning you assign to your experience.

For me, that’s looked like a shift away from asking “what am I losing?” and toward asking “what is still here?” The fitness I’ve built doesn’t disappear overnight. The discipline, the consistency, the ability to show up—those are still there. The body that adapted to years of training is still capable of adapting again. That distinction matters, because it gives you something stable to anchor to when everything else feels uncertain.

Oh, totally.

(…continue reading.)

The Strange Rise of Denim in Running Culture

A couple of years ago, people wondered why 3sixteen, a menswear brand that specializes in meticulously produced denim, was hosting monthly summer runs from its Manhattan store, but a little dig into their lookbook reveals a niche of equally thoughtful running apparel. 3sixteen founder Andrew Chen is a regular at World’s Fair Run Crew in Queens, and the running bug runs deep throughout the company and among the brand’s fans it has amassed over two decades of business.

The way that 3sixteen seamlessly brings together two parts of its identity in the Jorts Mile is a fascinating case study on the explosion of running into mainstream culture.

Yeah, no. Just because it is possible, we don’t have to do it. Running in denim is just stupid.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I haven’t looked at my Strava in weeks, but I hope these days will be over soon. I was able to walk with less pain in the last few days and I’m hopeful that I can start running again this week.

We’ll see, but I sure miss running.

I kind of dread the moment I am getting out there again. It will be a long time until I reach the fitness level I like to have after not running for at least two months.

Well, I guess I’ll take it one step at a time, literally.

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Fast Women: More pro runners are having babies, but it’s not easy

Not long ago, many professional runners in the U.S. waited until the end of their careers to have children, if they had them at all. That has begun to change. In the past several years, an increasing number of high-level runners have announced pregnancies while still competing. Among the reasons for the shift? Stronger sponsor support, a better understanding of what training during pregnancy can look like, and a growing list of athletes showing what’s possible.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Raising young children is difficult to balance with any career. For professional runners, part of the challenge is that elite sport and pregnancy require the body to adapt in different, sometimes competing, ways. And every athlete’s path back to high-level running comes with its own set of obstacles.

I have so much admiration for mothers in the sport. I don’t know how they are getting this accomplished, but I am glad there are more and more female pro runners out there.

(…continue reading.)

Is Trail Running Actually Growing? Here’s What the Data Says.

This tells two things simultaneously. First, the sport is already vastly larger than its race scene. Millions of people run trails weekly without ever crossing a finish line. Second, the race ecosystem has enormous room to grow. If even a small percentage of that non-racing majority eventually finds its way to a start line, the race participation numbers look very different.

Read together, the floor and the ceiling are both expansion signals. The sport is bigger than we measure it, and the race scene hasn’t come close to capturing it.

Trailrunning is a fantastic sport, so it is only natural that it is growing.

(…continue reading.)

Ultrarunning Culture

Ultrarunning is a growing sport. It used to be a small group of oddballs who, for whatever reason, wanted to run far. Now it is a large group of oddballs who, for whatever reason, want to run far.

With the growth of ultrarunning has come significant changes. Training methods are more sophisticated. Media attention has increased, and there is more money in the sport. Events are bigger, except for the ones that remain the same size but now have lengthy waitlists. The variety of event distances, surfaces, and topography has increased, and there are more race opportunities than in the past. There are also more factions — dissenting groups with competing visions about what the sport is or might become.

It must be weird for runners who have been around in the sport for a while and then all the commercial stuff kicks in.

(…continue reading.)

Experience: I won the world’s deepest underground marathon

On the day of the marathon, I was nervous but excited. I’m not claustrophobic, but it was unnerving to know we were so far underground. I tried not to think about the 1,300 metres of solid rock over my head.

The mine was operational and I could hear the hum of machinery through the walls. As we were escorted to the starting point, I was fascinated to see vending machines and brightly lit offices. It was an entire underground world.

The tunnel was five metres wide and stretched for over a mile. To make up the distance of a full marathon, we would run to the end and back 11 times.

Would you want to participate in a race like that?

(…continue reading.)

We’re So Busy Making Running Cool, We Forgot Why We Love It

The through-line is that people are exhausted by optimization. Everything has been focus-grouped and content-strategized and given a brand identity, and at some point the rough edges start to look really good. At some point the thing that was just a thing (not a movement, not a platform, not an activation) starts to feel like what you actually miss.

Running used to be like that. Weird and lonely and slightly embarrassing in the best way, something you did because something in you needed to, not because it photographed well. I ran Ragnar back when it was chaotic and silly and you slept in a van and ate gas station food at two in the morning, and I loved it for exactly that scrappiness. Then it became a $2,000 entry fee with branded finish lines, so the Speed Project came along as a beautiful middle finger of a race, six people running LA to Vegas because why not. And then TSP did the exact same thing in about half the time. Even UTMB has a Hoka logo and a global points system. I still want to run it, and yes that makes me a hypocrite, but when I’m out on those trails in Chamonix one day I know I wont care.

Oh yes.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Yesterday when I walked through our city park with the dog, I noticed an unusual high number of people running around with running vests. They seem to be a thing now, aren’t they? I think it’s a great development, not just because runners should hydrate, but because I assume that more and more people are getting serious about running. Sure, people can run short distances and take running serious, but it is just two weeks until the Hamburg Marathon and so I assume that these runners are into their last stretches of Marathon training. I love it when I see the blue lines on the streets of Hamburg. Nope, I won’t run this year, I still have trouble walking. But I will cheer the runners on, that’s for sure!

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Why Is Japan so Much Better at Running Than Everyone Else?

Which brings us to Japan: There were more American women at every tier in the marathon, but among men, Japanese men were way ahead at every tier, beginning at sub-2:10—about 2:1 in many cases.

To put it another way: About one in six sub-2:35 performances by men worldwide were by a Japanese man. And though it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, the general population of Japanese men roughly accounts for only 1.5% men in the whole planet; meaning only one in every 65-70 men in the world are Japanese.

Which reminds me: I have to get back to that 10.000 page volume by Haruki Murakami which is waiting on my nightstand. Talking about endurance…

(…continue reading.)

Should you use AI for your training plan?

A generous reading of the literature is that chatbots (usually ChatGPT) might be a decent starting point for beginners who (i) don’t have access to professional services and (ii) don’t have underlying medical issues or complicated needs. In that narrow use case, AI would be better than taking a stab in the dark, as beginners are inclined to do. For everyone else, AI is, at best, an adjunct to professional services, but never a replacement for them.

That conclusion raises an obvious question: if we trust AI to optimize traffic flow, detect banking fraud and even drive our cars autonomously (an innovation about 15 years away, at most), why do they stumble on something relatively simple like writing a training plan? How can the same technology seem at once futuristic and strangely archaic? To understand why chatbots struggle in this space, let’s look under the hood at how they generate their responses.

I think this will change radically within the next 12 months. Right now, people are using a plain vanilla LLM and wonder why it is not as good they expected. Soonish, our personal running coach agent will know so much more about us than any human coach ever could. For better or worse.

(…continue reading.)

Yes, The Speed Project is Still a Beast

The Speed Project began, like many running feats do, with a couple of friends hyping up each other’s crazy ideas.

Nils Arend, the race’s charismatic, mohawked cofounder, had been considering what it might look like to run as fast as possible from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. With the help of coach Blue Benadum, the two brought together a team of six runners, rented an RV, and set off early in the morning on March 29, 2013.

The Speed Project is a really cool cultural and commercial phenomenon. Would you love to run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas?

(…continue reading.)

The Mountains Are Getting Crowded

It’s a bit like when that band you and your friends loved suddenly gets commercially successful. You’re happy for them, yes, honestly. They worked hard, got the talent, they deserve it. But the feeling shifts. What once felt like a shared secret now belongs to everyone. Something intimate becomes public domain.

Or think of what happened to skateboarding. Once a bunch of punks celebrating a counter-culture, then a youth movement, now a global industry with coaches, academies, Olympic medals, and million dollar brand partnerships. Nothing wrong with that. Growth is not betrayal. In fact, it’s the most natural process of all. But it changes the emotional geometry. When something expands, the space between its people rearranges too.

Trail and ultrarunning feel similar right now. The thing that used to feel a bit quirky and nerdy, misunderstood by many, loved by few, is suddenly everywhere. More visible, more accessible, more structured, more commercial, more crowded. Not worse. Not better. Just different. A niche discovering it isn’t a niche anymore.

Or to paraphrase Yogi Berra: The mountains are so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.

(…continue reading.)

The Authenticity Economy: Rendezvu and the Next Wave of Trail Running Sponsorships

The economics here are worth pausing on. Brand subscriptions create a revenue floor with compounding stickiness. The more a brand integrates its data and partnerships into the platform, the harder it becomes to leave, while the recurring revenue keeps stacking for Rendezvu. Transaction-based commissions create the ceiling. As sales volume through the platform grows, revenue grows with it for Rendezvu, for partner brands, and for hosts.

The deeper advantage is the flywheel. More brands attract more hosts. More hosts build more consumer trust. More consumer purchases generate better brand data. Better brand data attracts more brands. At scale, any athlete can recommend and earn from any partner brand. Any brand can efficiently reach the high-intent buyers in any sport. Any consumer can get trusted recommendations from the athletes they already follow. Each side makes the others more valuable, and that dynamic gets stronger, not weaker, as the platform grows.

Most readers probably do not know that I started blogging in 2003 and ran the first commercial blogger campaign in 2005, so I am always interested in new concepts to move influencer marketing forward. And as the trailrunning niche is growing, this makes so much sense now.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

While I am still not running, I noticed something. I am really not looking into the latest running shoe releases. That’s so healthy. Aside from the fact that my shoes last longer when I am not running, I think runners too often overemphasize on getting the latest stuff to run a second faster, but honestly: in most cases it won’t matter. Sure, I like buying and getting new stuff and it is exciting to try out new stuff, but I think runners do not need to buy new stuff all the time. Sure, if your shoes are worn out, then go ahead, but your shorts and t-shirt from last year are probably fine this year as well. And if you have found the ideal shorts, hang on to them for dear life as companies always phase out those shorts that you think are perfect.

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How to stay sane when you can’t run

If you’ve ever been injured, you’ve probably dealt with suggestions from others on how to cope. Friends or fellow runners might tell you to treat the time off as an opportunity to rest, or suggest that cross-training will fill the hole in your life left by not running. Those well-meaning ideas don’t address your late-night worries about losing fitness, or the sense that nothing quite replaces the calm you get from running.

Not being able to run sucks. Period.

(…continue reading.)

The Man Who Ran Out of This World

“3:56! Holy shit!” Spencer yelled in celebration and awe. The man we trekked three days to reach had just run a mile with almost 250 feet of vertical gain in under four minutes. Brendan trudged up the hill five minutes later and confirmed the start as legit. We looked at each other, unbelieving.

The fastest trail runner on the planet, perhaps even the greatest runner on earth, period, is a hermit in Northern Idaho.

We retraced the route and GPSed it again to confirm. One mile, 244 feet. One mile and 244 feet in under 4 minutes. Many elite athletes train their whole lives to break the 4 minute barrier on a track, and fewer than 2,000 have ever done it. Sandy did it uphill, at 8000 feet, on a trail.

He was laboring (and who wouldn’t be after a max effort) but quickly recovered his distant smile and springy posture.

Oh wow, what a story. Can you imagine that? Living in a hut somewhere in the mountains and just doing the simple life, including running? Reminds me of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, just with running instead of bears…

(…continue reading.)

Raziq Rauf on what running culture means to him

These days we might run to combat the hours we're sitting at a desk, or for simple competition – against others or simply against ourselves. That means that running isn't as mundane an act as breathing or driving any more. Running is a choice. It's a leisure pursuit. It's a necessary act of physical exertion. It's a place where people are more free to experiment. Sometimes that's testing their bodies and/or minds, or sometimes it's experimenting with building a community. Other times, it's understanding enough about how we run so that we know how to look for great stories.

Raz is on a roll here with his new book. Go buy it and read it!

(…continue reading.)

The Ultimate Guide to Hut-to-Hut Trail Running

For those familiar with backpacking, thru-hiking or even fastpacking, hut-to-hut running trips will require a mental shift from the slow grind of a two-mile-per-hour pace to a much faster tempo. On a backpacking trip, your mind often wanders during the long, slow miles, but trail running demands more attention to the next few steps on the trail, forcing you to be in the present. That immediacy is a big reason I love it a hut-to-hut.

On top of that, hut-to-hut trail running provides a newfound freedom — you know for a fact that a warm meal and bed are waiting for you miles ahead, as opposed to a tent and a long night on your back. This freedom also translates to tangible physical lightness; you get to trade a 50-plus liter pack for a running vest that is 20 liters or less. Instead of fighting pain in your shoulders and hips, you’ll have to train your lungs and quads for the adventure.

this is so on my bucket-list.

(…continue reading.)

No, Your Race Isn’t a Failure If You Miss Your Goal Time

Here’s what I’ve learned from that, and so many other races over the years: missing your goal time is not the same thing as failing. Not even close, actually. Sometimes the win is that you trained through a messy year. Sometimes the win is that you showed up and finished on a day your legs just didn’t want to cooperate. Sometimes the win is that you ran at all when it would’ve been easier to stay horizontal and doomscroll.

I’m right there with you: Goal times are fun. And PRs? Even more electric. But the finish line still counts even when the clock doesn’t match the fantasy.

Run the race you have and celebrate the work you did. Yeah, maybe you missed the number, but so what? Don’t miss the point.

I think a race is a race and you yourself define how well it went. If you miss your goal and had fun nonetheless, I guess that works :)

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

I am still not running as I feel pain in my left forefoot when I am walking and somehow don’t think it is wise to go running then. But do you know what? When you are not running 5 times a week, you have so much more time to do other things! I just realized that after a few weeks of not running and.I think I will actually start doing these other things soon…

Anyhow, spring is around somewhere and here in Hamburg the temperatures fluctuate a lot from day to day, which means you have to carefully evaluate your running outfit. You might even want to try out a fancy button down running shirt and look like you just escaped from your office. Or you try running in totally weird spaces like your frontyard or in your bathtub, if it is too cold outside.

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What Trail Running Teaches Us About Creativity

Running became much more freeing for me when I realised that every run doesn’t have to be the best run I’ve ever done. Fitness is the sum of many parts, practiced over many days, which takes the pressure off any one specific run. This was soothing to my perfectionist soul. Now at work, I don’t freak out if my initial ideas aren’t amazing, or a client has more feedback than I expected. It’s not a final grade, it’s just feedback. In running and in work, I trust that if I keep aiming for excellence, I’ll get there — just by dedicating myself to the practice.

Trail running is amazing for the mind, so much better than running through the streets. My take, please challenge me.

(…continue reading.)

The Prerequisites for Consistency

The deeper kind of consistency is rarer and harder to see. It shows up not in the training log but in the results and relationship with the sport — a sustained ability to operate at an individual’s highest level across years, through different environments, different competitive eras, and different versions of yourself.

That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident. And it doesn’t happen simply by training harder or longer. It happens when a specific set of prerequisites are in place — prerequisites that most athletes never fully develop, and that most training plans never explicitly address.

I really would like to get back to consistency in my training. Obviously, my training is on a whole different level, but still I value consistency a lot.

(…continue reading.)

The Modern Running Boom Is Changing What a Race Even Is

If everything is selling out, then races are no longer competing against the idea of not racing at all. They are competing against other races that are also full, and that changes how decisions get made.

You’re not asking whether someone will sign up. You’re asking why they’ll choose your event instead of another one that also has a waitlist. Will that be weather? Time of year? Medal? Expo? Race perks and swag?

That leads to bigger weekends, more built-out finish areas, more emphasis on the expo, and more effort put into making the event feel like something you’d want to spend time at beyond the actual race.

It’s great that runs are sold out, I guess we need to create more to meet demand! If you travel to a race, you might as well attend an event and have more fun while away from home.

(…continue reading.)

Would You Run a 5K in a Van? On a Plane? In the Tub?

The latest trick is recording a run in an unlikely location, the more cramped the better: a 5K in a police van, a marathon in a bathtub. One man kicked off a wave of online backlash after recording a 5K inside an airplane bathroom, over the course of nearly an hour, during a flight from Cape Town to Munich.

Using the infographic that Strava automatically generates, which overlays a run’s distance, pace and route onto a photo or a video, these posts have the same slick look as a sincere race recap — except the GPS track is an absurd scribble.

I am sure that Andy Warhol had running influencers in mind when he said that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”.

(…continue reading.)

Shacketology: A Runner’s Guide to Button Down Technical Shirts and Shackets

Similarly the “trail shirt” has long been a staple in trail ultra running and hiking. Before there were technical button ups, runners wore 100% cotton western shirts that kept them shaded from the sun and cool when soaked in ice cold mountain creeks. The snap buttons pop off if the shirt gets snagged. Ultra running fit god Cliff Young consistently wore cotton button downs.

They’re a significantly cooler looking than the UPF sun hoodies you can get for fishing (sunlight reflects off the water and you’re fully exposed out on a boat). So not only are they useful, but you can also just wear them out and about. If I can get extra mileage out of my running stuff, I’ll always opt for that option these days.

I think I’ll not take part in this trend. I’m not wearing a shirt to the office, why should I wear one to go running?

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

Aaaaand we are back to the newsletter about running written by a guy who is currently not running. And he hates it.
Now I have some stupid inflamation in my left foot and I am limping more than walking, not to mention running.
To add insult to injury, I got moved from the waiting list to actually being able to sign up for a backyard ultra, but I don’t think I will be running a really stupid long run at the end of May.
Oh well.

Anyhow, it feels springy out there and I hope I am getting back on my feet and into a better mood while writing about running. 🤓

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The Digital Treadmill

The rise of the “influencer runner” has reshaped aspirations within the sport. For many new runners, the goal isn’t simply to improve. It’s to become sponsored, to receive free gear, to join ambassador programs.

This shift from internal to external motivation has profound implications. Training decisions become influenced by what will generate engagement rather than what will generate results. Runners chase trends over training wisdom. The fundamental question “what will make me better?” gets replaced by “what will make me more marketable?”

I often think about this. It would make me sick to my stomach to constantly produce text, photos and videos to endorse something and show off my running form. It probably started as a nice thing and then some free shoes and all of a sudden you’re sucked into the influencer spiral where you constantly have to produce content, no matter what.

(…continue reading.)

The Trail Running Investment Thesis

The room is skeptical. The investors see a niche outdoor sport, not a business opportunity. Trail running? Isn’t that just glorified hiking?

Your job is to change their mind.

What follows is my attempt to help you do just that. A thought experiment that doubles as a genuine investment thesis. The format is a creative device, but the data and arguments are real.

Trail running is exploding. And it’s here to stay.

I have been tinkering with some ideas about this myself, so it is refreshing to see what others think. And yes, there is great potential in trail running!

(…continue reading.)

Freshening

Where is there space for freshening up, for opening the window a bit and letting in new air, in the stoic practice? Where is the space for that in running practice? If your purpose is to increase your mental and physical fitness, which I imagine is most of the audience of this newsletter, how does that purpose have any variation beyond what is logical? How and when and to what extent do you break out of plans? Can you, even?

Well.

(…continue reading.)

Why Some Runs Feel Effortless

The same legs, the same trail, the same level of fitness, but suddenly the run feels light. Your stride feels rhythmic. There’s a bounce to it. Instead of forcing yourself forward, it almost feels as if the ground is helping you along.

Many runners assume the difference must be fitness.

But often it isn’t.

Very often the difference is elasticity.

I need to get there again.

(…continue reading.)

‘StravaLeaks’: France’s aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

Arthur had a profile on the Strava fitness app that anyone could view, because it was set to "public." As a result, the young officer almost instantly revealed the exact location of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean Sea as it traveled northwest of Cyprus, together with its escort, about 100 kilometers off the coast of Turkey, Le Monde found.

While I am surprised that people still accidently reveal their locations through Strava and other apps when they shouldn’t, I am pretty sure that an aircraft carrier cannot sail across the oceans unnoticed…

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

🏃🏻‍♂️

No running for me last week. Just no time, but I have a great excuse: my American parents were in town and we had a wonderful time. I did do some reading about running and here is what I found: Harry Styles chats with Haruki Murakami about running as the ultimate reset, stripping away fame's gaze to just you, shoes, and the road, echoing Murakami's empty-minded flow that primes the creative vessel. Ciele Athletics' Jeremy Bresnen geeks out on soft-brim, breathable hats revolutionizing run kits beyond black basics, Nike dangles a dream paid ultra-training gig in Beaverton with full kit and science squad, Longrun Labs skewers carbon-plated shoe hype and daily supertrainer misuse fueling injuries, and smart tweaks like hill sprints shake ruts without overhauling plans, all tempting me to ditch the desk for trails before running topless season season hits.

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Harry Styles Is One of Us

HM: When I’m running, I’m just running. I don’t think much. I listen to music mostly.

When I come back to sit in front of the desk I begin thinking, but when I’m running, I’m kind of empty. Something comes into me, but I don’t notice it.

To be empty is my one of my purposes with running. I feel that training your body is the way to create the perfect vessel, building a foundation for the ideas to come into.

HS: For me, one of the things that can be complicated is that, as an artist, say if you’re a novelist or a musician or a filmmaker, you’re an observer—but when you become a known person, you become the observed. You know you’re still the same, but other people can begin to view you as something different.

So something I love so much about running is the simplicity of it. You are the observer once more, and you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.

That’s what I love about it: You don’t need anything, just a pair of shoes.

This really is a fantastic conversation between Harry Styles and Haruki Murakami - and suddenly I remember that I have a really big book by Murakami waiting for me on my nightstand. I don’t even find the time to run, how am I going to tackle these 800 something pages? Also, I think I need some new shorts and maybe I should take up running shirtless?

(…continue reading.)

A Conversation with Jeremy Bresnen, Co-Founder of Ciele Athletics

We came into the market as a headwear brand and we had a product that visually obviously was different. It hit the right note in terms of silhouette. The five panel has been sort of meaningful on the skate side. In the 80s, it was pretty meaningful on the outdoor side. Color-wise, we came with something that was different, and that was purposeful. We knew that we weren’t going to get attention if we just came with a black hat. We had to come with something different, even though to this day, an all-black hat is our best-selling hat by miles and miles.

The flip side is that if you looked at everything on the market from a headwear standpoint, nobody was doing anything technical. Nobody was actually thinking through the design of the hat. 95% of the hats in the run space had a hard brim. Our soft brim is definitely more comfortable. It’s packable. And every hat on the market was a woven fabric throughout. Maybe they had a little mesh window to give you this idea that it was breathable, but they weren’t breathable.

Aside from shoes and shorts, I think a hat is the most important part of a running outfit. So I really appreciate this talk about Ciele and hats and all that.

(…continue reading.)

Nike Will Pay You To Move To Beaverton And Run Yourself Into The Ground

The Nike Sport Research Lab is accepting applications for a new research project focused on ultra-distance running. Selected runners will be relocated to Beaverton, Oregon, where they’ll spend roughly 15 weeks training full-time under Nike’s Applied Performance Scientists — with housing, financial compensation, and a full kit of footwear and apparel covered by the company.

The program, listed on Nike’s innovation platform, is described as a “brand-new, one-of-a-kind research project.” Nike says it’s looking for high-mileage runners who regularly log big weeks, because it wants to study how athletes adapt across a complete training cycle.

This sounds like a lot of fun! I’d do it in a heartbeat, but I currently have a self-imposed travelban to the USA as long as Agent Orange is in charge.

(…continue reading.)

Why the Running Industry Is Getting Injury Prevention Wrong

Almost no one in the market understands what a carbon plate actually does. That includes many of the people reviewing and selling the shoes.

When influencers demonstrate a carbon plate shoe by flexing it and watching it spring back, they are showing a shoe performing incorrectly. The carbon plate’s job is to make the shoe stiff. That stiffness creates a longer lever at takeoff, transferring energy more efficiently through the ankle and calf. A carbon plate shoe that bends easily is not working as designed.

Gelindo put it plainly: the wrong message is going out to consumers every week, and it is coming from people with large audiences who have not been told what they are actually looking at.

Beyond the mechanics, there is a training load problem. Recreational runners are wearing their fastest shoes every day and wondering why injury rates are climbing. The shoe that helps you run your fastest race cannot also be your daily trainer.

I know the guy is out there promoting shoes, but I found this insightful nonetheless.

(…continue reading.)

How to get out of your running rut

Mixing things up doesn’t mean reinventing your training plan every month. Sometimes it’s just a small shift in focus, and a runner who spends the winter logging steady miles might add hill workouts in the spring. Someone training for a longer race might gradually stretch their long run a little farther as the season goes on.

Those kinds of changes keep your body adapting, and they also keep training from feeling like you’re stuck on repeat. Over time, switching the emphasis of your workouts can help build strength and endurance while keeping running interesting.

I’ll keep reading and posting these kinds of stories until I am back into running for good.

(…continue reading.)

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here:

Now, go running!

— Nico

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