Hey pals,
Ooft hope you’ve all recovered from the post-WSER blues.
We’ve got two stories for today - the revival of TrailRunner, and hopefully journalism in trail, and a change of hearts at Naak.
And, If you’re UK based, I also wrote an article for Athletics Weekly on the growth of 200 milers, so pick that up at your local WHSmith!
Anyway, here’s to more long summer days ahead,
Matt
TrailRunner is back! The site and long lost brand that just two years ago was hollowed out of staff and zombified to only repost Outside Run articles has been revived to live another day.
Abby Levene, a lone survivor from the previous incarnation of TrailRunner, has been promoted from senior editor of Outside Run to Managing Editor of the brand to lead the charge. The stated rationale in Abby’s piece and the press releases leans heavily on participation data: Outside Interactive announced an expanded editorial direction for Trail Runner, framing the shift around how runners engage with trails beyond competition and training, into travel, community, storytelling, and everyday life, citing Outdoor Industry Association figures showing trail running reached 17.2 million participants in 2025, up 6.6 percent year over year, with the largest increase in core participants of any tracked outdoor activity. The brand’s official framing pairs editorial ambition with product integration, pairing storytelling with Trailforks route discovery so readers can move from inspiration to participation, positioning this as much as a funnel strategy as an editorial one.
Where the commentary from Outside diverges is in tone and candor. Levene’s own launch essay is unapologetically playful, describing the redesigned TrailRunner as “bolder, louder, deeper, and weirder than before,” a home for everything from hard-hitting journalism and brutally honest gear reviews to trail-obsessed poems, doodles, and cartoons, and explicitly signaling that some stories will be serious and some will be silly. Outside’s Chief Media Officer, Heather Dietrick, gave a blunter commercial account in trade coverage: the expansion targets runners who are less interested in performance and more interested in the broader experience of being outdoors, growth fueled largely by younger audiences, particularly Gen Z women, with weekly content cadence set to double. That same coverage noted the relaunch landed after a period of scrutiny for Outside, following a public letter from 35 writers, editors, and photographers over layoffs of longtime editorial leadership and budget cuts, a link Dietrick explicitly rejected, insisting the expansion is about explosive growth in the activity, not a response to criticism. Monetization details were left vague throughout: it remains unclear how much of the expanded output will sit behind the Outside+ paywall, with Dietrick saying only that Outside regularly tests different gating strategies.
In practice, since the announcement, the site has shown a genuine format spread: a dedicated travel column, first-person culture essays, a cartoon, and personality-led profiles alongside continuing gear and training coverage. However the promised poems haven’t arrived yet. I’ll wait patiently.
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. That’s a crowded fight to pick. A problem made more different when you’re writing behind for a publication thats not your own and where your personality as a writer is secondary to that of the brand, issues that new personality driven media doesn’t face. The real differentiation isn’t going to be whether they can churn out more articles than the newsletterer or bring a “silliness” to the sport, it’s whether the irreverence is backed by actual reporting. Doodles and poems are fine, but only Trail Runner has the standing and resourcing to do sustained, well-researched, cross-race pattern journalism that a solo newsletter writer structurally can’t produce alone. It’s something this sport deeply needs.
Most media outlets whether they’re on Instagram, a podcast or a newsletter all suffer from the same disease - monetisation via brand sponsorships and “news” given to them by brand PR teams. Very few outlets source, corroborate, check or challenge these perspectives or stories fed to them by brands gagging for some free coverage. And no, podcast interviews don’t count as news when you’re not challenging what people are saying (dear god do we need some podcasters to learn to say “hold on” or even “i don’t think that’s right”).
Long time readers know I’ve been campaigning for people with a backbone and a dictaphone in trail media since 2023. All of what I’ve blathered on about today hasn’t changed since I’ve entered the sport. We certainly have more opinions, thats great, but we don’t have anything NEW that comes out of it. We’re all circling the same stories from slightly different perspectives, relying on hearsay and whatever our almighty brands and race organisations tell us.
Now I didn’t go to Trailcon, but from what I’ve gathered from conversations and the various podcasts and newsletters on it is that it suffered from the same ailment - great for networking, not that great at advocating for progress or difference.
The revival of TrailRunner could be a great thing for our sport if it brings newness and doesn’t lose itself in it’s proposed irreverence. Abby reassured me in a voice note last week that we’re on the same page, that trail has lacked journalism since the collapse of TrailRunner and through this relaunch she is hoping to keep that as a central spine in their output.
The next challenge is whether anyone will read it.
As an example of our reliance on rumour in our sport, there were mutterings online and at Trailcon that Naak was struggling in the US and might not be able to make it’s UTMB sponsorship requirements. As always there is usually some truth but more nuance than the rumours suggest.
The French-Canadian nutrition brand, official on-course fueling partner of the UTMB World Series, is restructuring its US B2B operations, moving from a direct-sales-and-delivery model to a distributor-led one. Co-founder Minh-Anh Pham framed the shift in an email to me in efficiency terms: Näak is not shutting down, remains committed to UTMB, and is evolving its go-to-market strategy to “better support our partners and scale the brand more efficiently in the US.”
That’s the version aimed to schmucks like me. The version co-founder and CEO William Walcker posted to his own LinkedIn network was more concrete, and considerably harder to spin as pure strategy. In it, Walcker confirmed that Näak’s entire in-house US team (Country Manager Michael Ambrose, along with Jackie Hoffman and Tom Mi) is departing as part of the restructuring. Ambrose will stay on for a 90-day transition period to keep existing accounts serviced while Näak looks for what Walcker’s post calls “a specialized Distributor or National Sales Agency” to take over. As of the post, no such partner has been named.
Eight months ago, Näak was telling a very different story about the same market. A November 2025 announcement had the brand “doubling down” on the US: a new country headquarters in Ogden, Utah, at the foot of the Wasatch range; Ambrose overseeing two additional full-time hires; and a field sales team of 12 reps spread across the country. Walcker was quoted at the time calling the US a market Näak had “deliberately” prioritized since founding the company in 2016.
That structure is now being dismantled before its replacement exists. A distributor-led model built around a signed partner, announced alongside a wind-down of the direct team, would read as a clean strategic pivot. What’s happened instead is the reverse sequence, the in-house team is leaving first, fast, with a 90-day bridge to cover the gap while Näak recruits for the role. That ordering of events is the nugget of the story - it suggests the decision to cut costs came before the plan for what replaces them, which is generally what a reaction to underperformance looks like, not what a considered channel-strategy evolution looks like.
Considering the size of the US market, underperformance there rarely is a good sign for the company as a whole. What happens to their presence at UTMB events in the US, and why they cut sales before a distributor was found is also unclear (I’ve asked William and will update once I’ve heard back).
Look, I’m no journalist, I just know how to use Google and have an email account. Trailrunner has the resourcing to do this sort of thing on a much bigger scale. I just hope they too use Google to cut through the rumour mill that perpetually is churning in our sport.
Skyline Scotland is now a UTMB event. Great to see Shane Ohly, founder of the now defunct Ourea, found his feet again with this announcement.
Raziq had a cutting piece on the lack of diversity at Trailcon and the continued peculiar comparisons of this moment in trail running to skateboarding by industry folk. Very much worth a read.
Can we admit WSERs livestream was visually great, but experientially poor? It felt like half the commentary was Dylan and Corrine guessing who they were looking at on screen and the ordering of racers. Why do we not have better systems for confirming this?
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