Western States Wants to Protect. UTMB Wants to Grow.

Josh (00:00)
Western states, a race that has spent decades refusing opportunities most organizations would kill for. More runners, more races, more revenue, just more of everything. Meanwhile, UTMB continues building perhaps the most ambitious expansion project the sport has ever seen. At first glance, this appears to be opposite philosophies. One is growing while the other constrains itself.

One sees scale as the future. One sees limits as a feature and not a bug. I see these two organizations as concerned with the same problem. Both believe trail running is worth protecting. They’ve simply arrived at very different conclusions about how to do it. It’s the Borderlands Trail and Ultrarunning podcast presented by Kip Run. My name is Josh Rosendahl, the host.

And the founder, Kip Run, is showing up right at Western States. They earned it through Thomas Cardin, Thomas Cardin, as we’d say in America. He won Chianti and he’s coming to Western States. And I’m just stoked to see how the Frenchman does ⁓ on race day, as I’m stoked to see the whole race in general. Also, we just released 8-bit trailrunning. It’s exactly what it says it is. We have a few 8-bit trail running games at play.borderlands.cc.

GOAT Rodeo 100 and the Aid Station Pediatrist. Go check it out. All right, here we go. UTMB believes trail running is so important that it must scale globally. And they see a way to do it. Their special sauce is in operations, execution, marketing, and runner experience. Clearly, clearly matters. I’ve seen it firsthand, the main event in Chamonix a few times, and I I can’t tell you it is.

It is just an unbelievable fan experience. And that’s something that you know if you follow this podcast, something that I’m always concerned about. I love to run. This is it’s in my blood. That’s why I do this. But I am also looking for more opportunities to be a fan, and UTMB provides that. Western states, though, on the other hand, believes trail running is so important that its future depends on protecting the conditions that made it special in the first place.

So UTMB thinks it’s protecting through scale. Western states thinks it’s protecting through limitation. And that raises a question that extends far beyond trail running. When something becomes successful, how do you protect it? The easy version of this conversation is to just pick a side. Because UTMB represents a a a massive way of thinking within this sport.

While Western states does the same and it seems to be on the other end more or less. Now there is a third way, of course, but for the sake of discussion, it’s easy to pick a side and say that UTMB is ruining trail and Western states is the one who’s preserving it. Neither position, though, is particularly interesting to me because I think that this is a is should have more nuance. Both organizations are confronting a legitimate problem. Let’s start with UTMB.

I think trail running has a strange, strange relationship with growth. Many people seem to view growth itself as suspicious. They believe that the way that they found it, the way that they arrived at trail running, is the way that it should be forever preserved. As though success is somehow evidence of corruption, as though popularity is evidence of decline. I don’t buy it. Healthy things.

Tend to grow. Perhaps you can find examples of some unhealthy things that have grown. But in general, when you look in nature, it’s the healthy things that are growing, that are flowering, that are becoming something. People vote with participation. They don’t have to pay the fees and travel around the world for UTMB. People vote with attention. We don’t, the million plus the how whatever the numbers that UTMB put out, tens of millions of eyes and ears that paid attention to UTMB in 2025.

That’s a vote. Every person that chooses to watch that is a vote. And then people vote with their money, like I said, for the travel, for the race registration fees. The fact that more people want to run trails today than 20 years ago is not evidence that something is broken.

It’s evidence that something valuable is happening. UTMB looked at that reality and came to a conclusion. More people should be able to experience this. And this for UTMB is not only just running on the trail, it’s running on the trail in the way that they facilitate it in a special way. More countries should have access to world-class trail races. More athletes should have professional opportunities. More fans should have something coherent.

To follow. More sponsors should be willing to invest and media should be willing to cover it. UTMB looked at trail running and saw something too valuable to remain niche. Value. Their answer was expansion. Before anyone jumps to private equity as the explanation, I think that misses what’s actually happening because money is everywhere. When you get to the point where you’re building businesses and you’re working things out and you’re doing ha finding that the people really like what you’re doing.

Money is actually the thing that is everywhere. Private equity isn’t sitting around looking for hobbies to ruin. Capital often chases the operators. It chases the people who are executing. So private equity coming in and writing a check for UTMB is because ⁓ the operators are worth investing in. Capital chases execution.

And UTMB’s case, investment followed success rather than creating it. That money didn’t make UTMB great. It just allowed it to expand.

They built something that people wanted, something that could scale. The investors showed up later. That distinction matters. At the same time, scale creates its own pressures. The larger an organization becomes,

The more consistency matters, the more standardization follows. Operations become repeatable, experiences become repeatable, and now you have brand standards that are required across every event around the world and because it has to become repeatable. Because you’re trying to bring back the thing that happened at the at the main event and you’re trying to transfer that around the world. That’s not inherently bad to me. And in many ways, it’s what makes growth.

Possible, but it’s the source of a very legitimate concern because every sport eventually has to ask whether consistency and character are pulling in the same direction. Western states looked at the same sport and reached a very different conclusion. The easiest thing in the world would be for Western states to grow, like I mentioned in the opening. The demand exists.

want to run it. You take my money, have all of it. Like I wanna tow the line at Olympic Valley and finish at that high school. I I want it. The demand is there.

But Western states has spent decades saying no. No larger field. Sure, we know the well-known permitting challenges, the granite chief wilderness, all of that. We know also that they haven’t tried to do a whole lot to change that or fight that. They could have created more races.

For elites, more races for everyday runners. And you know, it would be on my bucket list, even if it’s not the marquee one that happens at the end of June. Just like I want to run a UTMB race, but it doesn’t have to be the marquee one at the end of July or the end of August in Chamonix. They could have built a Western States World Series. They didn’t. They didn’t maximize revenue. Yes, they do extract as much out of that event as they can.

I should say they get close to doing that. They probably do leave money on the table. no maximizing revenue. They they just they didn’t. And they they’re chasing growth for growth’s sake. You don’t see that. In fact, you see them constantly making decisions to limit it. Not because they hate growth, but because they believe limits have value, because they believe continuity matters. They believe scarcity creates meaning.

And they’re right. And I think that’s the part that most people miss. Western states is making a bet. There’s a lot of really smart people on that board. A remarkably unusual bet though in modern culture. It’s betting that not everything valuable should be optimized for access.

That’s frustrating. The scarcity is frustrating, and yet those same things are what makes Western states matter.

Western States is protecting trail running through constraint. UTMB is protecting trail running through expansion. And I think both positions are more rational than their critics want to admit. I have been a critic, honestly, of both, ⁓ for the reasons that I’m actually defending right now, but I believe in these after I’ve spent more time thinking about them. Because both come with trade-offs. The cost of UTMB’s approach.

Is obvious. As things scale, they become standardized and scrutinized and corporate and professional and interchangeable, and that’s the fear. And that fear is not growth itself, the fear is that in pursuit of growth, the thing that we love becomes unrecognizable. But Western states pays a price too. The cost of preservation is exclusion. Every act of preservation excludes someone.

Thousands of runners dream of Western states, and most of them will never run it. A larger field would solve that. A second race would solve that. Expansion would solve that. Western states knowingly chooses not to. That choice, though, is what creates mythology, but it also creates disappointment. And I think that’s an honest tension worth acknowledging. In fact, Western states has become something unusual.

A spectator sport that masquerades as a participation sport. Because for most people, Western states isn’t an experience that they’ll ever have, no matter how bad they want it. It’s a story though that they’ll follow. It’s a live stream that they’ll watch. It’s a race that they’ll discuss. A piece of mythology they’ll interact with from a distance,

The point is that both organizations are making trade-offs. Both are sacrificing something in service of protecting something. Which brings us to what I think is the real question: what are they protecting? We hear the phrase all the time: protect the soul of the sport. It feels very gatekeepy. I agree. Protect the culture, protect what makes trail running special. Okay.

What exactly are we talking about? Is it the buckle, the course, lottery, the field size, the history, the volunteers, the aid stations, the mountains? I’m not satisfied with any of those answers because all of them feel downstream, they’re all the the artifacts, they’re expressions, they’re containers. They’re not the thing itself. That’s the outcome of the thing itself. I don’t think trail running.

Is what it is because trails inherently create kinder people. I don’t think dirt has magical properties in this regard. I don’t think mountains automatically produce generosity. I don’t think putting people in the woods somehow transforms them into better humans in and of itself. I think trail running inherited its culture.

The outdoor culture that produced modern trail running carried a very specific set of values: volunteerism, environmental stewardship, community, helping strangers, a willingness to sacrifice your own outcome for somebody else’s well-being. I think the DNA of outdoor culture that we’re protecting in the is really that of the late 1960s.

Early 1970 70s, that was overwhelmingly hippie. I mean, the Tevis Cup, which later became Western States, ⁓ was a horse race starting in 1955. A few men ran it in 1972, and then Gordy ran it in 1974 on foot in California, the epicenter of that counter-cultural movement, the hippies. And I think that matters because it changes where the culture came from. The culture wasn’t created by the trails, it was brought

to the trails. Trail running wasn’t built by trails, it was built by people. And if that’s true, then neither UTMB nor Western states is really protecting races. They’re protecting culture. At least they’re trying to. The problem is that culture doesn’t behave like infrastructure. Infrastructure scales. Culture doesn’t. Infrastructure can be purchased, it can be copied and culture can’t. Culture is inherited.

Which leads to think what I to what I think is the most important question. How does culture survive? One of the reasons Western states fascinates me is that I think the organization understands something many institutions forget once they become successful. It understands that it is downstream. Western states did not create trail running culture, it inherited trail running culture.

The race only works because thousands of race directors, volunteers, and runners have already done the cultural work. Nobody starts at Western States. You can’t by definition. Nobody starts at UTMB. You got to get the stones first. A runner’s first experience with trail running is usually a local 5K, 10K, a fat ass, a community race put on by volunteers or a regional hundred with a

Few dozen volunteers and a f and even less runners sometimes. That’s where participation becomes belonging.

That’s where a new runner discovers whether this is a community or merely an activity. And what we are protecting is that this is a community that revolves around an activity. That’s where they learn what behavior gets rewarded. That putting others before you.

The culture of trail running is not created at Western states. It’s not created at UTMB. It’s created at the local race with AD runners. It’s created by race directors and volunteers.

That’s where trail running is manufactured. The small local race is the factory. Western states showcases that culture. UTMB showcases it. But neither one creates it.

And I think that’s where the risk is, not in private equity, not in sponsorship, not in live streams, not in growth. The real risk is that the sport grows faster than its culture can reproduce itself. That’s worth saying twice. The real risk is that the sport grows faster than its culture can reproduce itself. That we become so successful at attracting new runners.

That we failed to transmit the values that made the sport worth joining in the first place. Because if enough people entered trail running without ever touching those local institutions, eventually the supply chain of culture breaks. And if that happens, neither Western states nor UTMB will be able to fix it.

Maybe UTMB is right, maybe Western states is right. I suspect both are trying to solve legitimate problems. One is protecting trail running through growth, the other through constraint. But the future of trail running will not be determined by whether UTMB expands or whether or not Western states stays small. It will be determined by whether the behaviors that built this sport survived.

Runners helping other runners and volunteers and sacrificing your own outcome for someone else’s because tr trail running was never just trails, it was always people. And whatever future we build together, that’s the thing worth protecting.