Trail Running Loves Winners. Does it Love Competitors?

j (00:00.504)
You’re standing at the start line of Western states, camera in your face, and someone asks you what’s going through your head. And you say, I am the greatest. I said it before I even knew I was. I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m fast. I can’t possibly be beat. If you even dream of beating me, you better wake up and apologize. How does that land? I think most of us don’t like it in trail running, even if we love it in boxing. And that’s a problem.

That athlete didn’t say anything wrong. They didn’t say anything that every champion in this sport hasn’t had to believe at some point. They just said it out loud, and trail running doesn’t quite know what to do with that person. Most of the time, this sport holds two very different versions of itself together pretty comfortably. One version is about self-discovery, the other is about winning. One asks what you’re capable of, the other asks whether you’re better than the

Person standing next to you. Most of the time those coexist peacefully until they don’t. It’s the Borderlands Trail and Ultra Running podcast presented by Kip Run. My name is Josh Rosenthal. I’m the host and the founder of Borderlands. It’s Western State season, which means for the next several weeks, the trail running world will largely revolve around one race. We’re doing it here, and Bryce Carlson is doing human interest pieces on the starting lineup.

At borderlands.cc every week, starting with Molly Seidel. Every year we collectively become obsessed with trying to figure out what is going to happen before it happens. And honestly, that’s a big part of the fun for me. Because despite everything we know about these athletes, there’s still something fundamentally mysterious about competition. We can study splits and analyze their training, listen to their interviews, watch the race footage from

Previous races, and then somebody has the race of their life or blows up or surprises everyone, and that’s why we watch. Over the last few months on this podcast, I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the trail running fan experience, how it can improve, how it can become more engaging, how it can become more legible for people trying to follow the sport. But as I’ve been thinking about Western states, I’ve found myself returning to a different question.

j (02:22.144)
Not how we watch the sport, but how we talk about it. More specifically, how we talk about the people competing in it. Because the more I think about it, the more I wonder if trail running has a blind spot when it comes to competition itself. Not the results or the races, the actual competitive instincts that create those results. And that’s what I want to explore today, so let’s jump in. I think trail running contains two very different sports. And most of the confusion starts when we

Either forget that or we simply don’t see it. People talk about protecting trail culture. Well, which one? Which culture? There’s more than one. There’s an assumption that there’s just one culture, but everyone means something slightly different. Take a first-time 50K runner and then a Western states favorite, and both find themselves on a start line, ready for a big day outside, but they embody clearly and obviously different objectives.

One person is looking inward, self-discovery, challenge, growth, accomplishment. The other person is looking sideways. Competition and podiums, bonuses, neither is wrong. Both are valid. But both are beautiful, I’d even say. The problem begins when we try and collapse them together. And once you separate those two versions of trail running, a lot of contradictions inside the sport start making sense.

Let’s start with the version of trail running that most people actually experience. Think about why most people sign up for a race. It’s not to win, I’ll tell you that. Certainly not for me. Maybe it’s a bucket list item. There’s a race that I’ve always wanted to run. A personal milestone, or you know, we view it as a proving ground. Whatever it is, it’s not actually racing, even though it’s called a race, right? Most runners never check who won. I heard something like 90%.

Of runners don’t know who won the race they just ran. They care about their own race, their own story, their own finish line, maybe some of the runners around them. This is the version of trail running that built the culture. Encouragement, community, inclusion, helping people, you know, helping everybody succeed. But I don’t think that’s a problem. It’s just that’s what’s worth protecting. I I I completely agree.

j (04:45.782)
It’s the version I most resonate with personally and as a participant. It’s one of the sport’s genuine and genius strengths. It makes trailrun different from almost everything else in sport and endurance sport. The challenge is that those values don’t necessarily explain what happens at the very top of the sport. And here’s what I think actually happened. Trail running came from the participation world. That’s where it all started.

were the participation values, the people who built its media, its brand, its community, they mostly came from that world. So the language of participation became the default. The expectations of participation became the default. And eventually the lens through which we understand everyone in the sport, including the elites, became the participation lens. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what happens when one culture

Builds the stage that another culture performs on. But it creates a real problem because the values that make trail running welcoming to a first-time 50K runner are not the values that made Jim Walmsley elite. Elite sport has always operated under a different set of incentives. At the elite level, the scoreboard becomes unavoidable. The best athletes organize their lives entirely different than me.

And trail running isn’t special here. This is what happens in cycling and basketball and in swimming. Every elite sport works this way. The objective becomes simple: to beat competitors, to win. That’s not cynicism. That’s competition. That’s the game. And that’s where I think trail running often confuses two different kinds of athletes: not elite versus recreational, but elite versus professional.

Professional is a business category. These are runners who have sponsorships and contracts and content and media value. Elite is a performance category around results and winning and being among the best in the world. Sometimes they’re the same person. Often they overlap, but they are not the same thing. And the athletes I’m most interested in for today’s episode are the elite ones, the ones organizing their lives around winning, regardless of their profession.

j (07:06.06)
Regardless of their sponsorship deals, because once you start looking through that lens, their behavior makes more sense. Their decisions make more sense. Their competitive competitiveness becomes easier to understand. Jim is one of the most interesting case studies in modern trail running for me. Think back to how people talked about Jim 10 years ago. Swagger and confidence and cockiness and arrogance. Before the wrong turn at Western States in 2016, he received

Strong reactions from the community. Then think about how people talk about Jim today. He’s measured and and humbled, he’s respected, he’s a fit for the culture. Part of that is obvious. He got older, he matured, he gained experience. Winning changes people. UTMB humbles the best athletes in the world from arrogance to humility. But I’ve always wondered about something else. Did Jim change or did the culture shape what became visible of Jim? Did he learn?

What gets rewarded? Because when Jim won UTMB later, I was there at the finish line, tears, screaming, emotion, pressure release, all of the things that come with the life that’s built around winning that race specifically. The competitor was very much alive in there still. My favorite moment in elite sports happens immediately after someone wins, because you watch an athlete in the seconds after victory.

And the crying, the screaming, the collapsing, the disbelief. What makes that moment so interesting is that they’re impossible to fake. The mask disappears. You saw the release on Caleb Olsen’s face when he won last year. The investment becomes visible. We spend months hearing polished interviews, gratitude, process, perspective. Then the finish line arrives and it’s raw emotion. Years condensed into

One moment. The outcome mattered. And suddenly you understand something. It wasn’t casual. This wasn’t a healthy, balanced life. You heard Caleb talk about it at the finish line where his wife was doing disproportionate parenting of their child to make room for him to chase this dream with his sponsor, Nike. It meant everything to him. Think about what Michael Jordan said about himself.

j (09:30.839)
Not after a championship, not in retirement speech, just casually talking about who he is. I will not let anything get in the way of me and my competitive enthusiasm to win. My innate personality is to win at all costs. We didn’t flinch. I bet jersey sales even increased from it. We made documentaries about it. We put him on a pedestal. Tiger Woods said he wanted to be dominant. He said, I expect to win every tournament I play. He said, I’m aware.

If I’m playing at my best, I’m tough to beat, and I enjoy that. We didn’t ask him to reframe it. We didn’t wonder if he was missing the point of golf. We respected him more for it. Now imagine a trail runner saying any of those things on the start line of Western States before the race, into the camera, one of the biggest races in the world, the reaction would be different. Not because the sentiment is different, because the sport is different.

Or at least the culture around it is. Living in France for the last two years has made me think differently about how culture relates to greatness. France does a really great job of relating to greatness. Take Victor Weminyama, future NBA champion. We’ll see how that plays out. Future MVP, if not already, you know, national pride around this player. There are San Antonio Spurs shops in Paris that pop up occasionally. And France.

People don’t apologize for wanting greatness from him. They don’t apologize for wanting greatness from Matthew Blanchard. They don’t apologize for wanting it from their great athletes. They don’t soften the expectation. They don’t reframe the ambition. His greatness is the attraction. My French friends tell me now that hard rock is a French race because they own the podium. You know, compare that to the American trailrunning sentiment when an elite trailrunner shows that same quality, that same hunger.

There are additional expectations waiting for them. They need to be humble. They have to have community values. They have to be this cultural fit. And I’m not saying one culture is right and the other is wrong, but I do think those expectations shape how athletes present themselves. And when athletes learn what gets rewarded, they start presenting accordingly, which is how you get a sport full of elite competitors who all sound remarkably similar in their interviews.

j (11:54.371)
We say we want athletes with personality, but I’m not sure we reward it. Think about what gets amplified in trail running: humility, gratitude, inspiration, great views. Then think about what gets sanded down. Rivalry gets sanded down. Competitiveness, ambition. Look, I’m not naive about this. These are elite competitors. The trash talk exists when the cameras are not rolling. I guarantee you. Even if they don’t.

Talk directly to the person with whom they are talking trash about. The rivalries are real. The obsession with beating specific people is there. You don’t run a hundred miles at that pace because you’re at peace with finishing second. But somewhere between the training room and the microphone, it all gets edited out because the athlete has learned, consciously or not, what this sport rewards and what it tolerates.

So you get the grateful version, the processed focused version, the version that knows how to talk about suffering without making anyone uncomfortable. Over time, something starts to happen, though. Athletes sound similar, interviews sound similar, stories sound similar. And I think I know why. Endurance sports have always had a framing problem. We tell the story as man versus himself, woman versus the distance, athlete versus the mountain.

And the participation side of the sport, that’s that that is completely true. That is it for me. It is me versus the distance and the mountain and myself. That’s the whole point. But somewhere along the way, that framing colonized the elite side of the sport too. And that’s a mistake. Serena Williams wasn’t competing against herself. The Texas Rangers don’t compete with themselves. The reason Iron Man never scaled the way people expected it to isn’t a mystery to me.

You can only sell personal transformation for so long before the audience needs someone to root for and someone to root against. Drama requires stakes. Stakes require opponents. And opponents require athletes who are allowed to actually want to beat each other. Trail running has the same problem. We keep telling an inward story about an outward competition. And the sport stays smaller than it should because of it.

j (14:20.748)
And that’s a problem, not just for the sport, but for the athletes themselves, because the thing that gets edited out is usually the most interesting thing about them: the hunger, the obsession, the specific person they wanted to beat, and why. That’s the story, and that’s what leads to bigger contracts. That’s what makes someone worth following for years. And without it, even the greatest performances start to feel interchangeable. They become less memorable.

It’s hard to build stars, it’s hard to build rivalries, hard to build the kind of attachment that turns a casual viewer into a fan who never misses a race. And I think this is a direct consequence of what I was saying earlier. When participation culture becomes the default lens, the qualities that make elite athletes start to feel like liabilities. Confidence reads as arrogance. Rivalry reads as unsportsmanlike.

Ambition reads as missing the point. So athletes learn to present differently, and we lose something real in the process, not just for us as fans, but for them as competitors. Because there’s something flattening about never being allowed to be exactly what and who you are. I don’t think this conversation is really about ambition. If this was just about ambition, the episode would have been over already.

Course, elite athletes are ambitious. That’s no secret. Nobody accidentally wins Western states. Nobody accidentally becomes Killian or Courtney or Rachel, who now gets to not you no longer have to say Rachel intrican, you can just say Rachel.

The question that bothers me is different. What values are we using to understand our elite athletes? Are they the right values? Where did those values come from? I come back to the participation sport. Beautiful culture, welcoming culture, one that I’ve oriented my life and career around. It’s worth protecting. But the participation sport didn’t make Jim Walmsley elite. Competition did. Outcomes did.

j (16:36.746)
Obsession did. His desire to win did. And I wonder how many stories we’re leaving on the table right now. How many athletes are flattened into archetypes? Competitive, how much competitiveness is edited out? How much of the rivalries that we could have are being softened? The interesting parts never fully explored in our athletes because ultimately this.

Isn’t about whether athletes are good people. It’s not about morality. It’s not about authenticity. It’s not about role models. It’s about whether we’re seeing the humans clearly, the people who are out competing and entertaining us. Full humanity, their contradictions, their complexity, their competitive identity. As long as trail running uses participation values as the default lens for athletes, we’ll keep asking those athletes to be understood through a framework that

didn’t make them elite in the first place. Every champion we ever celebrated had to become the kind of person capable of winning. We just never rewarded them for it. And what do you think? Do you even want to reward a version of the athlete that feels incompatible with the culture that built the sport? Let me know in the comments. Welcome to Western States season.