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the zugspitz ultratrail itself has become a useful lens for
watching what happened to trail running after covid.
when i ran it the first time, you could decide on a tuesday that
you were racing that friday. show up friday afternoon, register,
line up that night. free european trail energy. plenty of spots.
the following year, registration filled in february.
in 2025 registration was open a few weeks before it was filled,
and that was after zuggy introduced a 100-mile distance to meet
demand.
for 2026, the race was acquired by UTMB. nearly all distances sold
out in under ten minutes. i was up at 4am pacific time in
washington state to register before spots disappeared. friends of
ours in garmisch, who live ten minutes from the start line, didn't
get in.
this isn't just a zugspitz theme. in 2024, global road race
finishers grew 17% year over year. half-marathon finishers rose
nearly 21%. run club participation on strava increased 59%. and
UTMB index races surpassed 800,000 race starts in just the first
six months of 2025, with 42% of those runners competing in their
first-ever trail event. this isn't a bounce-back from covid lows.
the sport found a new ceiling and keeps raising it.
and the brands making serious gear before any of this happened?
they didn't pivot when running got popular. they were already
there.
dynafit has been dressing alpinists and ski mountaineers in the
bavarian alps since 1950. they didn't need the trail running boom
to validate them. funny enough, dynafit sponsors a local trail
race in leavenworth, washington, which makes a strange kind of
sense when you realize that leavenworth is a bavarian-themed town
sitting in the cascades and dynafit was founded in bavaria. the
mountain culture travelled and so did the brand.
nnormal was built by kilian jornet to make gear that holds up at
the sharp end of the sport. saysky started in copenhagen in 2013
with $30,000 and a design philosophy borrowed from surf and skate
culture, not the running industry. none of these brands needed
american runners to discover them. but american runners are
discovering them anyway, because the sport outgrew its old supply
chains.
when you show up to a european mountain race and look around at
the start line, you're looking at a gear ecosystem that doesn't
have a flagship store in the us, doesn't run tv ads, and doesn't
particularly care what the big players think about it. that
ecosystem is where syndicate lives. we didn't build a list of
brands we thought would look good on a website. we ran the races,
looked around at what serious people were wearing, and started
writing about it.
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