Why Trail Running Hides Competition

Trail running culture loves winners. That's obvious. The sport builds documentaries about them, fills Instagram feeds with them, and spends months debating who will win Western States. But the more Josh thinks about it, the more he wonders whether trail running is actually comfortable with the competitive mindset that creates those winners in the first place.

As Western States season begins, this conversation explores the difference between the participation version of trail running and the elite version, why those two worlds often get conflated, and what we miss when we use the values of one to understand the athletes competing in the other.

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Topics / Timestamps

• 00:00 Two Sports Sharing One Start Line
• 02:51 The Values That Make Champions
• 05:49 Elite, Professional, and Why It Matters
• 08:38 What Trail Running Rewards
• 11:26 Telling an Inward Story About an Outward Competition
• 14:22 Do We Actually Want Competitors?

Resources / Links

1. Borderlands.cc
2. Salt Lake Foothills Trail Races
3. Josh Rosenthal on IG

Related Episodes

1. Ultra Running isn't Just Running

Presented by Kiprun.

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Borderlands explores trail running through culture, media, and the forces shaping it.

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