WorldTour Trail Team
Envisioning trailrunning as a cycling team
(skip to the divider line thing a bit down this page if you want to just get to the meat of it)
Since I last wrote, I:
Ran the Arches 50k as my first of several training races, where I like to practice racing with less pressure and on tired legs as a solid effort long run.
Did an ACG photo/video shoot the day after the race down in Moab, running back and forth pretending it was a warm summer day but putting on a down jacket between takes.
Watched Marshall master the art of crawling.
Traveled to Milan to ride the ACG Express. Nike really went all-out decorating a train that transported various audiences to The Wild (snowy trails above Lake Como). I shook hands, answered questions, met cool people including Jannik Sinner and Eliud Kipchoge, and wore lots of orange.
Spectated a couple of Olympic events. Italy won the gold medal in long track speed skating. The Canada v Switzerland women’s hockey game was a highlight.
Listened to Marshall master the art of saying dadadada.
Laid down my biggest vert week since August 2025, with a little of that being on some sweet new skis that I’m looking forward to putting to work.
Traveled to Palm Springs for an ACG team camp. Ate great food, ran many miles, smiled for the camera, tried products that I liked and that I didn’t like, let people know what I liked and didn’t like, spent time with teammates new and old, and the sports scientists set up a makeshift lab in the hotel for some testing. Now I better understand the way my body buffers lactate at various gradients, the amount of hemoglobin in my body, my current sweat rate and sodium concentration, the amount of tissue damage inflicted to my quads during a couple hours of running, and the rate at which my leg muscles consume oxygen.
Because of these things, and other unlisted things that also took up time, I haven’t sat down to write in over a month. As I sit writing this in the Palm Springs airport waiting to board my flight, team camp is freshest in my mind, so I’ll expand a little on a thought train I went down during that.
With a few tweaks, the lifestyle I enjoyed last week during team camp would be very conducive to reaching my absolute physical limit of performance. I acknowledge that what I’m about to describe is either utopian or dystopian, depending on what you’re into. It also requires extreme levels of financial investment. It is merely a thought experiment on the ultimate-dedication end of the spectrum.
Nearly the entire ACG trail running team spent the week at the Palm Springs Ritz-Carlton hotel. That means 30ish elite athletes, in a luxurious setting, with great trail access from the door, eating as much great food as we could. Add in the product, design, innovation, and science teams that were supporting this event, and you’ve got a recipe for some major fitness gains.
If you theoretically had the budget to keep all these athletes (plus their families) and staff in that setting indefinitely, what would happen? It might make sense for all of the ultra-focused athletes to focus on the same races, under the same coaching direction, to align on workouts and have a built-in training group. Each day, your responsibilities would be to train, eat, recover, spend time with family and/or socializing, and sleep. All meals would be prepared for you. Like specifically for you, factoring in your exact dietary needs based on your body, preferences, and workload. There would be a physio on standby for massage and bodywork. You’d test prototype innovations frequently, giving feedback and retesting updated versions until everything was perfectly dialed. As seasons change the home base would move, optimizing for drier conditions in winter and then shifting to higher altitude alpine trails in the spring and summer. You’d have sports scientists measuring various markers, helping you understand your results and adjusting your training, nutrition, and recovery accordingly. Does any of this sound familiar?
I don’t know a ton about cycling, but from what I understand this isn’t that far off how some of the WorldTour teams live. Sure it sounds sort of crazy, but I see the sport going in a direction where in the next decade it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are groups of ultrarunners doing something similar to this. It also wouldn’t surprise me if those groups are laughing at the times that we currently think are fast at the world’s biggest ultras.
The idea of a co-located team being beneficial isn’t novel. We see it in the road marathon scene, in cycling, in many other professional sports. The biggest challenge might be finding a source of funding for this endurance experiment. You’d need athletes to be paid enough that they would be willing to drop everything to relocate to a mutually agreed upon location. The staff and equipment and accommodations and catering would be expensive. In the current trailrunning environment, what’s the ROI on this sort of investment even if you assume that it totally works and you have a team dominating all the most important races? I don’t know the answer, but I imagine that in some not-so-distant future the marketing value of that team will justify the costs of this extreme training ecosystem. I kind of hope that future is soon enough that I’m still around to be part of it to really see how high this body can fly.
Whoever successful starts a team like this will have a first-mover advantage and will temporarily dominate the sport, then it will become necessary for anyone else who wants to compete to adapt and follow a similar model.
The question will always be there though: Is this a good thing for Trail Running?
Professionalism in cycling has bought with it a number of negatives, not just positives.