Tag Archives: trail running trends

trail running trends 2016

Disclaimer: my version of trendwatching is largely an effort to detect patterns in the echo chamber of my interests. I’ve written a couple of posts on trends in trailrunning, as well as various pretentious reflections on running in general. The atrocious performance record of the trendwatching species is well known and doesn’t need further elaboration, but with the hedge that trends perceived are as much created by the searching eye as being ‘pre-existing’ realities, I feel I’ve sufficiently covered my ass to continue making a fool of myself while pretending to be intellectually honest. Continue reading

trail running trends 2015

 

For two years in a row I reviewed my armchair trail running impressions. Haven’t got much to add. Most trends have deepened (more business, more attention to FKTs and its variations, more extreme events, many more races) rather than much new emerging. So I didn’t bother for 2015. Continue reading

trail running trends 2014a

 

Trends in trailrunning has been my subject in earlier posts (here and here). The question at stake in this post is how important the trails – read landscape, natural beauty – really are to the way it seems to be developing as a sport.

Continue reading

trail running trends

For a while I joined the crowds assessing the trends of the year (nearly) gone by.

First of those was a 2013 review of trail running in Nepal, that included observations on general trends in ultra-trail running that my armchair running self had noticed (increasing number of races, increasing number of races beyond the 100 mile distance, heaps of young fast runners entering this formely geriatric  discipline, and the growing prominence of Fastest Known Times (FTK) efforts.

Followed that up with a ‘proper’ 2013 review.

Then did two! 2014 reviews, this one and this one.

Which left me with little for 2015.

And a bit more of the same in 2016.

My trail running is massively rooted in Nepalese soil. Its trails and I go back 40 years. However, I wasn’t particularly aware of it until my last stint in Kathmandu, that my urban trail thing also goes back to thoses first weeks in 1978.