✳️ What does Good Growth look like?

Not all commercialisation in trail running is bad

Hey pals,

Hope your summer holidays are off to a good start! I’m bounding between weekend-aways, weddings (I’ve reached that age…), and late nights at work. I’m currently writing this from a hill off the shores of the river Clyde north of Glasgow and wrote this article on my phone on the way here, so there’s likely some errors and no graphics. Soz.

As always Brian Metzler’s piece on the growth of our sport that he observed at Tahoe Trail week (as we’re apparently calling the Broken Arrow, Trailcon, Western states week) was provocative and a nuanced development beyond the trope in our sport to simply frame ‘the sport is commercialising’ negatively as if all growth is bad.

Today I want to provide a framework to help interpret news in our sport, it’s not the definitive way, but a way to advance our discussions of the sport beyond binary good or bad news and interpret it’s effects on the sport.

I’d love to hear your perspective on this, comment, reply to the email, whatever you want.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

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The phrase that I’ve heard the most since starting Trailmix goes something like:
“Trail running is becoming too commercial.” It’s a familiar anxiety spoken at finish lines, muttered at Happy Hour at Trailcon, posted online whenever UTMB announces a new race or a shoe brand announces “the next big thing.” The worry isn’t new, but it’s accelerating. Largely for good reason.

The sport is changing fast. Races are selling out in minutes. Content creators are being flown across continents. Local events are being bought or copied. What once felt wild, niche, and lovingly amateur is now a marketplace, packaged, scalable, increasingly polished.

But here’s the thing: “commercialisation is bad” isn’t a useful framework. It’s a gut reaction, not a guide. It doesn’t help us parse what’s actually happening or decide what’s worth resisting, preserving, or welcoming in.

Because not all growth is bad. Not all sponsorships dilute the experience. And not all professionalization means selling out. Trail running is allowed to evolve. The real question is: what kind of growth do we want?

Two Models of Growth: Extractive vs Regenerative

One of the most useful distinctions I’ve come across comes from environmental economics and systems thinking:
Extractive vs. Regenerative growth.

An extractive model treats the sport as a resource to be mined: athletes as marketing tools, landscapes as backdrops, races as content engines. It prioritises short-term visibility and returns, often at the cost of long-term health, culture, or access. Growth in this model tends to centralise power, replicate itself endlessly, and leave less behind than it takes.

A regenerative model works differently. It sees the sport as a living system made up of people, places, stories, communities and asks how growth can strengthen those roots. It’s slower, more distributed, more collaborative. Regenerative growth prioritises the things that don’t scale well: care, culture, accountability, place.

It’s not a binary; no race, brand, or media outlet is purely one or the other. But once you see the difference, you start noticing it everywhere.

The question isn’t: Should trail running grow?

It’s “Is this growth extractive, or regenerative?”

We’re at a moment where the pressure for the sport to grow faster, bigger, louder is reaching new heights. Big players are consolidating events. Sponsorship budgets are ballooning. A handful of media platforms are shaping the narrative. And athletes, often stuck in the middle, are trying to balance being themselves with making algorithm-friendly content because their sponsor incentivises visibility ahead of athletic success.

Meanwhile, the culture that drew many of us in with its imperfect, gritty, handmade guise is at risk of being flattened into a brand aesthetic. The DIY ethos, the loose edges, the awkward generosity of the sport, what we now call vibes but are instead values. They can be lost if we don’t design for them.

That doesn’t mean resisting change. It means asking better questions about what kind of change we want and who it serves.

Four Questions to Ask As Trail Running Grows

Here’s a way to start. It’s a starter for ten, not a checklist, not a manifesto, just four questions that help frame whether something is growing the sport well.

1. Does it reflect the values that made trail running worth caring about?
Is this decision rooted in community, wildness, stewardship, and joy? Ir whatever values you attribute to the sport. Or does it feel like a race to become more “marketable”? The best growth makes the sport feel more like itself, not less.

2. Does it expand access or narrow it?
Who’s being welcomed in? Who’s being priced out, pushed aside, or left invisible? If only the elite, affluent, or algorithm-savvy get to participate, something’s off.

3. Who owns it and who benefits?
long time readers know this is my guiding question in the sport - ‘who benefits?’ Is the power and profit shared with communities, athletes, and local organisers? Or is it flowing upward to a handful of brands or investors? Ownership shapes incentives. And incentives shape outcomes.

4. Is it leaving the sport stronger than it found it?
Does this initiative invest in trails, athletes, or culture? Or does it burn people out, degrade places, and produce disposable hype? Regenerative growth takes the long view.

The point isn’t to stay small - It’s to grow well. There’s a real risk in this moment, not just that we’ll commercialise the sport, but that we’ll flatten it. That we’ll lose the messy, beautiful plurality of trail running: the backyard ultras and mountain slogs, the elite races and weird local loops, the dirtbags, the dreamers, the lifelong volunteers.

Some consolidation is inevitable. Some professionalism is good. But if we want to keep what makes trail running feel alive, we have to shape its growth with intention—not just marketing budgets and media impressions.

It’s not about rejecting brands, money, ambition or everything UTMB does. It’s about asking:

Are we building a sport that regenerates the communities, cultures, and landscapes it depends on?

Or are we extracting whatever value we can, as fast as we can, before it all feels like something else?

That’s the conversation we need. And my god are we overdue for it.