✳️ Cocodona and the Making of a New Form of Sports Entertainment

A Trailmix of news and opinions on the business and culture of trail running

Hey pals,

Living in South Wales I tend to split my trail running seasonally - the hills of Bannau Brycheiniog when the cold sets in and the Welsh Coastal Path when the sun pops out in spring and summer. So the past few week have featured some glorious sun-drenched coastal cruising on the cliffs of Pembrokeshire. Loving it.

The tabs in my browser this week have alternated between Cocodona and tariffs, so that’s what we have for you today (followed by a short rant on creativity in running).

Hope you have the best of weeks everyone,

Matt

Cocodona and the making of a new form of sports entertainment

Cocodona 250 (or coke donut 250 as all automated captions on social kept repeating) earned 840K views over the course of this week. A significant number for an event where nothing of interest happened for hours on end. Between aid stations catch-ups, periods where athletes were ‘closing the gap’ and were overtaking one another there was nothing you’d consider traditional sports entertainment.

There’s an art to building a story that takes place over the course of a few days. Race directors and their teams have experimented with this form by increasing the frequency you interact with runners.

The Spine have done this for a while with GPS trackers for dot watching, short form social video for character development, and daily recap videos for narrative formation. Aravaipa went one step further with a livestream to provide context to the race developments (to be frank, I don’t think that was needed – the difficulties of producing the event in a place with poor signal and narrating an event where little is happening and where the commentators often knew just as much as the people following made the livestream more of an endurance event that running the race itself, but maybe that’s just me).

We’re seeing the generation of a new form of sports entertainment, one that mirrors modern storytelling more than traditional sports media. Where the raw material of hundreds of miles and hundreds of runners, combined with thousands of tiny collapses and comebacks are shaped it into episodic storytelling. Not a sport to spectate passively, but a multi-day docuseries that plays out in real time made for our media age.

The fundamentals of storytelling are the same, but the focus is not on action, but arcs. Stakes, characters and rivalries, progress, score-keeping, rhythm, emotional payoff, ritualistic viewing, behind the scenes cuts – it’s all there, just like every other sport, but built over the course of a week, rather than 90 minutes.

I often found myself questioning why is this so popular? Sure there’s the cult of Jamil at play here and you had Courtney and Cameron Hanes, two people with significant social followings in the race. But they only draw you in, they don’t keep you following along. It’s the power of the arcs of the story –you want the reward, but you just have to wait a few days. It’s a long-term payoff in an age of short-term dopamine hits.

So what are we watching, really?

Not a sport, not exactly. Not a documentary, though it shares the shape. Cocodona is something stranger and more modern: a serialised, participatory narrative about voluntary suffering, unfolding over days. It’s a story told by the people inside it, shaped in real time by the people watching it. A long, slow burn in an era obsessed with immediacy.

Maybe that’s the draw. In a world where everything else is over in 15 seconds, Cocodona asks you to wait. To invest. To watch someone fall apart, stitch themselves back together, and move on - not in the span of a YouTube highlight, but across the days and nights of a desert trail. The arcs are subtle, the rhythm hypnotic, the payoff delayed. But it’s there.

And maybe that’s the future of sports media—not faster, but deeper. Not louder, but longer.

Thanks for reading Trailmix! This newsletter grows by people sharing it, so feel free to spread the love (or hate, I don’t mind as long as you’re sharing it).

The two sides to the tariffs

Norda recently spent $29,000 shipping $16,000 worth of shoes to a U.S. distributor. That math doesn’t work. So, on May 2nd, they pulled the plug: no more U.S. orders. No more absorbing losses in hopes the storm would pass.

But the storm hasn’t passed. It’s lingering.

On May 2nd, the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports kicked-in in full force, some categories now facing up to 145% duties. For brands built on Asian manufacturing (which is to say, most of the running industry), this wasn’t a speed bump. It was a wall.

And what we’ve seen in the week since is not just a supply chain disruption - it’s a masterclass in scale. Every company had the same amount of time to prepare. But they didn’t have the same balance sheet. They didn’t have the same logistics teams, legal counsel, or capital cushions. They didn’t have the same size.

Size isn’t just vanity in business. It’s survival. When the punches land, the big can duck, weave, pivot. The small just absorb the blow.

Over the past week through quarterly updates and running journalism, we’ve seen the disparity between the effects of the same tariffs on the same industry. The only difference was size.

Across running media we’ve seen some of the best reporting on running businesses we’ve seen in some time, all getting the on the ground perspective from US small business owners. Michael Krajicek, the one man band behind Artreyu explained in a ‘Believe in the Run’ article that they simply can’t afford to develop their fall line due to the rise in development costs. Zoe Rom went into extensive detail on the wider ramifications on the running industry in an Irunfar piece.

Meanwhile, our corporate overlords have begun the quarterly cycle of reporting their investor updates where the whispers of the tariff’s effects are starting to be heard. The consensus? ‘We’ll be fine’.

Wolverine, owners of Saucony, expects there to be a $30m hit to profit and that they might have to make price increases, but Saucony still saw 13.2% YoY growth in Q1. Adidas’ CEO Bjørn Gulden effectively shrugged in their quarterly report stating that with only 20% revenue in the US and 3% of sourcing to the US from China, they instead will redirect their investments to the other 80% of markets and take a ‘wait and see’ position to see how the rest of the market and tariff wars play out. Brooks stayed silent on tariffs instead boasting the largest quarterly revenue they’ve ever had.

It could be said to be too early to be seeing the full impact on the US market when running is still in it’s glow-up era, evidenced by running shoe sales in the US growing 7% in Q1 despite the gloomy backdrop. But that’s only true for big businesses who can weave their way through the tariffs, whilst small businesses take a beating.

We like to imagine that the market is a meritocracy, that the best ideas, the best products, the boldest small companies will find their way to the top. But when policy shifts collide with global logistics, that illusion fractures. What we’re seeing in the running industry isn’t just a tariff story, it’s a test of its structural power.

Big companies can wait it out. They can shift production, raise prices, play defense in one market while investing in another. Small brands? They live or die on one shipment, one supplier, one season’s margins. And when governments start playing games with 145% tariffs, there's no margin wide enough to save them.

News this weekend from the China and US negotiations in Switzerland are looking promising, suggesting this storm may soon pass. However if this continues any longer, we’ll start to see more cracks opening in the industry’s veneer.

The glow-up era of running may continue on the surface - more growth, more headlines, more shoes. But underneath, we may be witnessing a quiet culling. Not of bad ideas, but of under-resourced ones. The industry will emerge from this, but smaller in spirit, narrower in diversity, and, ironically, more homogenous than the sport it's meant to serve.

If we had a group chat:

• I touched on the disparities between each country’s approach to the World Trail and Mountain Running Championships last year, but the differences reared their head again when in the same week I discovered that the UK trail team are crowdfunding their way to the event since UK athletic won’t fund them and the US team is fully funded. I’m sure the UK aren’t the only country having to fund this off their own backs. We’re 4 months away, but let’s give up on any notion that this event will be a fair competition.
  

• UTMB released their poster for the 2025 UTMB Mont-Blanc and it’s sick. Let’s have more illustration in running.

• Speaking of illustration, Doug Mayer is releasing a graphic novel about what can be learned from the experience of running Tor Des Geants. In his words the novel tries to ‘make sense of something that both makes no sense at all and all the sense in the world.’
  It ties into a rant I’ve had for a while – we need more variety in creative expression in running. We have race photography, interview podcasts and documentaries – but where’s the fictional audio-drama, the science of running documentary, the play about a race, the rock opera album about the Barkley? I’m sure it’s out there, so please send me all the weird and wonderful creative projects in running that are different to the usual quiver of creativity

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