Trail Running Isn’t an Environmental Sport

“We went cupless!” Trail running traded preservation for conservation, and learned to call its consumption a love of the land.

Trail running takes a selfie thousands of times every weekend. Dawn on a ridgeline and wave of fog settling in the valley. A lone figure dwarfed against ancient trees and rocks. It is accompanied by a caption about silence and wildness, and feeling close to something the rest of the world forgot existed and that is why it is our solemn duty to protect these lands. It’s a good photograph. It is catchy. Ironically, the runner that is in the photo likely took a plane or drove hundreds of miles to the trailhead.

That’s the argument in a single frame. Trail and ultra running thinks of itself as the environmental sport, and its community as nature’s stewards. It keeps Edward Abbey on the nightstand. It talks about stewardship and leaving no trace, about the privilege of crossing wild country on its own two feet. Then it runs on air travel to far-off start lines, on shoes built to die inside a few hundred miles [1], on races that bolt new distances and whole continents onto the calendar every year. The self-image is preservation. The machine underneath, however, is unbridled consumption. For two decades the sport has been building a sincere, expensive, well-staffed apparatus whose real job is to keep anyone from noticing the difference.

I want to be careful, because the lazy version of this essay isn’t worth your time. The lazy version says flying is bad, runners are hypocrites, everybody should feel worse. You already know the sport’s footprint is big. The sport says so itself, in press releases and fancy charts. The stranger question is the one worth asking. Why has a community that genuinely loves wild places built a kind of environmentalism that lets it consume more of them every year and feel holy doing it? Because what it built never asks it to do less.

Two ways to love a mountain

American conservation split over this more than a century ago, and the crack still runs through every cupless aid station. On one side stood Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service, who held that nature was a resource to manage wisely for human use, the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run. His approach establishes humans as the masters, standing tall in the middle of nature. That’s conservation in the original sense. Use the land, but use it efficiently and forever.

On the other side stood John Muir, who believed wild places carry worth in themselves, apart from any use we can wring from them, and should be left mostly alone. Muir believed man was not the master of nature and if anything, it was man’s responsibility to protect it. That’s preservation. The two men were friends until this broke them, and the fight they had over a drowned valley called Hetch Hetchy is more or less the fight the sport is still having with itself, mostly without knowing it. [2]

Edward Abbey lived at Muir’s end of the spectrum and then kept walking. Desert Solitaire, the book that made him a patron saint to people who run in the desert, is largely a sustained attack on what he called “industrial tourism”: the paving of the wild, the turning of canyons into drive-through attractions, the conversion of places you used to earn into places you consume from a car seat. [3] Abbey wanted fewer roads and fewer people, and less of everything that lets a thing scale. When push came to shove, the preservation of nature would always take precedence over profit. There is no doubt he would have hated today’s race expos.

So the sport holds two incompatible things at once. Its soul, the part it prints on the merch and tattoos on its calves, runs on preservation: Abbey, wildness, restraint, the holy unpeopled dawn. Its body, the part that pays the bills, runs on conservation in Pinchot’s most managerial key: measure the impact, buy the offset, recycle the wrappers, and never stop growing. Almost nobody decided this on purpose. The sport simply learned to wear the soul as branding while running the body as a business. It quotes Muir and operates like Pinchot’s most aggressive heir. And conservation, as it happens, is the only environmental ethic a growth industry can actually afford.

“We went cupless!”

Watch the gestures up close. Aravaipa Running, the company behind some of the marquee races in the United States, prints a tidy environmental creed across its race pages. Explore, enjoy, protect. Be good stewards of the trail [4]. Cupless is the flagship: no paper cups for cold drinks at the aid stations, so bring your own and they’ll fill it.

I don’t want to be cheap about this. Pulling thousands of paper cups out of a race does real good. It is only a small good, but real. Now look at what the gesture covers and what it leaves out. The same races still hand out cups for coffee and broth and soup, so cupless isn’t actually cupless [5]. The reusable cup you’re urged to carry? They’ll sell you one, branded, at the start [5]. The green gesture doubles as merch. The program also collects gel wrappers through a recycling partner [6]. What none of it mentions is the thing that actually moves the needle at a destination race: the hundreds of runners and crews who drove and flew to reach the start. The gesture handles the litter and stays quiet about the footprint. Aravaipa is only offering gestures, like how a seafood restaurant only uses paper straws to protect sea life.

None of this is a scandal. It’s something quieter and more telling. This is the only environmentalism a growth business is allowed to have, the kind that aligns with corporations’ fiduciary responsibilities. It trims what doesn’t threaten the model, the cups and wrappers, and it says nothing about the thing that is the model, mass travel to a remote place. A cupless aid station doesn’t show a sport falling short of its values. It shows a sport that found the only values compatible with getting bigger.

Think about what an event the size of Cocodona really is. A 250-mile race isn’t a footrace so much as a slow motorized caravan that happens to contain runners. Crews drive ahead and leapfrog the course for most of a week, idling at trailheads across a quarter of Arizona. Pacers shuttle in and out. The whole apparatus is a rolling town that moves by engine while one person per crew moves on foot. That’s industrial tourism in Abbey’s exact sense, the wild consumed mostly through a windshield. The cup you carried 250 miles instead of tossing doesn’t begin to touch the real environmental harm.

Getting bigger is the stated plan. Aravaipa absorbed the Great Lakes Endurance races in 2025. This is a series of five small, self-consciously “ecologically mindful” events in the Upper Midwest that two founders had built over twenty-six years on environmental stewardship. When this was announced, the press release called the takeover a continuation of the “legacy” and described Aravaipa taking “stewardship” of the events. [7] “Stewardship.” The word the sport reaches for when it means protecting wild land now also does duty for a corporate acquisition. Aravaipa markets its sponsored athletes as “trail stewards, environmentalists, and community-builders.” All powered by HOKA. [8] The language of preservation has quietly become the marketing copy of a consolidating race company that sells shoes.

The honest giant

If Aravaipa shows you the small gesture, UTMB shows you the ceiling, and it makes the more damning case precisely because UTMB tries harder than anyone.

Give them their due, because they’ve earned it. UTMB hired outside consultants to measure the carbon footprint of its Mont-Blanc finals, then did the rare and creditable thing: it published the number and named the problem out loud. By UTMB’s own account, travel to and from the event drives nearly 86% of its total carbon footprint [9]. The number isn’t about cups or generators; it’s the plain fact of moving everyone to Chamonix. So UTMB pledged to cut emissions 20% by 2030, built a travel-planning tool, leaned on a shuttle network designed to make private cars unnecessary, partnered with the climate group Protect Our Winters, and added a 30% lottery bonus for runners who pick low-carbon travel [10]. Starting in 2026, every traveler to the finals pays a mandatory carbon contribution of €25 a ton, routed to a certified offset body [11]. This is, by a wide margin, the most serious environmental effort in the sport. They measured it, published it, and aimed at the right target.

Now watch where stewardship comes to a screeching halt. UTMB will tweak the shuttles, nudge the lottery odds, charge a carbon fee, and drop a carmaker as title sponsor [12]. It won’t touch the one thing generating the 86%: a global circuit engineered to make people travel. That circuit is the business. In 2021 UTMB Group joined the Ironman Group, the world’s largest organizer of endurance events, to launch the UTMB World Series, a calendar of qualifying races on six continents that funnels runners toward the Chamonix finals [13]. The people running the transition called it “an acquisition logic,” and told races they had to become “100% UTMB affiliated” to join [13]. The machine rewards flying by design. You earn your way toward Mont-Blanc by racing UTMB events around the world, which means boarding more planes. The Running Stones that fill the lottery hopper work as frequent-flyer miles for the soul.

One scientist who helped shape the plan said the quiet part out loud. Minimizing the footprint inside the existing model wasn’t enough, she warned. The group needed to examine the model itself, the structure that turns on athletes traveling the world to earn a shot at the finals [14]. The reforms can’t answer that sentence. UTMB has done everything an environmentally serious company can do, right up to the edge of its own growth, and then stopped there every time. When even the most honest actor in the sport treats its business model as the one thing it can’t move, you learn what the green program is for; it is to muffle, not slow, the economic engine.

Let’s look at the founding language, too. When UTMB and Ironman announced the World Series, they wrapped it in the brand’s values: “surpassing oneself; fair-play; respect for people and the environment; and solidarity” [13]. They stitched respect for the environment right into the launch of the most aggressive travel-generating expansion the sport had ever seen. They weren’t lying. That’s the unsettling part. They meant it. The conservation ethic lets you mean it.

The price of a clear conscience

Here the word neoliberal earns its keep, and I mean it precisely, not as a slur. The conservation model the sport adopted is the market’s way of caring for nature: it turns a moral problem into a transaction and profit. You can’t easily stop flying, so you buy a ton of offset for the price of a good dinner and the ledger balances. The damage stays put. What changes is how you feel about it.

These are indulgences, in the old and literal sense. The medieval church sold relief from the consequences of sin without the inconvenience of changing how you lived, and the carbon offset performs the same service for the modern endurance athlete. UTMB’s €25-a-ton fee is the cleanest example precisely because it’s so reasonable and so cheap [11]. For a runner flying from the States, it runs about the cost of a checked bag. Pay it, and the flight that drives 86% of the problem reads, in the moral ledger, as settled. The system works because it’s real. The money goes somewhere, projects get funded, and that realness is exactly what buys the quiet conscience. A fake offset would nag at you. A real one settles the matter, which is worse, because a settled conscience books the next flight without blinking.

Commercialization didn’t just tolerate this ethic. It was selected for it. A sport built around endless growth needs an environmentalism it can buy, not one it has to obey, and the offset market exists to sell exactly that. You can’t purchase preservation. You can only practice it, usually by doing less. Conservation, in its neoliberal form, comes shrink-wrapped. Of course the industry reached for the product.

From dirtbag to Gordon Gekko

It wasn’t always like this, and the distance traveled is the whole story.

The American sport’s origin myth is the opposite of a circuit. In 1974 a man named Gordy Ainsleigh ran the Western States Trail Ride, a hundred-mile horse race, on foot after his horse came up lame, finishing in under twenty-four hours. The Western States 100 grew out of that run and took its formal shape in 1977 [15]. Marketing has buffed the myth to a shine since, and it was always more legend than history, but the shape is the point. A guy. A trail. No plan, no sponsor, no expo, no app. The culture that grew up around it ran on a dirtbag ethic at least cousin to Abbey’s: anti-materialist, suspicious of money, half in love with discomfort, rooted in one particular place you came to know on foot over years. You slept in your car. You crewed for beer. Business scaling was never the point.

The sport today is a global industry with a corporate center of gravity, and the people inside it know it. When the UTMB-Ironman deal landed, runners didn’t celebrate. They winced. Critics called it the “ultra-Starbuckization” of trail running and griped about investors who didn’t care about the sport buying up its crown jewels [16]. They had the direction right. We went from a man running a horse trail in cutoffs to a multi-tier franchise that sells you qualifying races on six continents, a $250 pair of shoes good for a few hundred miles [1], a four-figure entry, and a race director’s morning-routine reel. The romance stayed dirtbag. The economics turned Gekko.

Running gear tells the same story in miniature. The super shoe landed in 2017 and rewired how the sport treats its own equipment. A carbon-plated racer holds its edge for somewhere between 150 and 250 miles before the foam quits. One peer-reviewed study clocked the advantage gone by 280 miles, while an ordinary trainer of the same age hadn’t lost a thing [1]. A normal shoe lasts 300 to 500 miles. So the flagship product of the modern sport is, by design, a thing you use up and toss at roughly twice the rate of what it replaced, for two or three times the money. That’s not a sport at peace with restraint. That’s a sport that consumes on a schedule and calls it progress.

This is the engine under everything, and it’s why conservation won by default. A sport bent on getting bigger every year, more runners and events and countries and gear cycles, can’t adopt an environmentalism that would make it get smaller. Take preservation seriously and it works like a brake: fewer races, smaller fields, less travel, less stuff. No growth business runs on a brake. So the sport reached, almost without thinking, for the one green ethic that fits inside a growth mandate. Measure, offset, recycle, expand. It didn’t betray its values so much as pick the ones that let it keep its plans. That’s worse, in its way. A betrayal you can repent. This was only optimization.

The accounting we won’t run

The sport polices the paper cup and never looks at the cow, on the plate or on its own feet.

Start with the plate. Walk any aid station and you’ll find quesadillas, grilled cheese, bacon, chicken broth. Standard fare, and nobody blinks. But run the carbon math and the food is perhaps the loudest thing on the table. Animal products supply 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of its protein while taking up 83% of its farmland and producing 56 to 58% of all food-related emissions. Even the lowest-impact meat and dairy beat almost no plant option anywhere on Earth, and the scientists behind the largest study of the question put it plainly: cutting animal products is the single biggest move one person can make to shrink a food footprint [17]. The same arithmetic rides along in the whey of the recovery shake and the collagen stirred into the morning coffee.

Here is the part that should sting a sport that is fixated on travel. For food, the journey barely matters. Transport is a tiny slice of what a meal costs the planet; what you eat dwarfs how far it traveled to reach you [17]. So the sport that agonizes over every runner’s flight, and builds an entire carbon program around it, lays out the one thing at its own aid stations where the miles are almost beside the point and the only lever that moves is the animal. It polices the cup it can see and plates the cow it won’t count.

Then look down at the gear again, because the animal shows up there too, and the sport tells an even fonder story about it. Merino wool is the fabric trail running treats as its conscience: the natural fiber, the planet-friendly base layer, the socks sold beside photos of unspoiled alpine meadows. The footprint says otherwise. Sheep are ruminants, so they belch methane, and they need land, a great deal of it. A life-cycle assessment puts fine merino near 25 to 31 kilograms of CO2-equivalent for every kilogram of greasy wool [18], a figure driven by that methane and grazing land, not by any factory. The natural fiber the sport reaches for to feel clean carries a farm-gate footprint the meadow photos never mention. Leather says it louder still: the bulk of its impact is the animal itself, racked up long before a tannery opens, and by most accounting it runs to tens of kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per square meter [19].

I’ll be fair, because the numbers deserve it. Allocation is genuinely contested, synthetics shed microplastics and run on oil, and good wool lasts and biodegrades. There’s no clean material, the way there’s no real clean sport. The point is narrower and harder to wriggle out of. The sport keeps reaching for the animal-derived option that feels natural and virtuous, then sells the feeling, while the production ledger comes out a wash at best and a loss at worst. Merino as eco-virtue is the cupless aid station in fabric form, the gesture that flatters instead of the one that counts.

The animal on the plate and in the kit is the one large line on the ledger that moves at no cost to the growth model. A race can’t relocate a mountain or un-invent the plane. It can cater a finish and stock an aid station, and it chooses beef and dairy and sells wool as conscience. That isn’t an emissions problem the sport is failing to solve. It’s one that declines to look at the full and complete picture.

I’m not writing this from above it. I wrote a good part of this with an AI assistant whose data centers slurp power and water at a scale that makes any cup I ever refused look like a rounding error on a rounding error. I burned electricity to complain about burning electricity, and naming that doesn’t cancel it. The offset doesn’t absolve the flight, the cup doesn’t absolve the circuit, and this paragraph doesn’t absolve me. The point was never that anyone’s hands come out clean. It’s that the sport keeps polishing the one corner of the ledger that asks nothing of it and turning the page on the rest.

The “commune with nature” story doesn’t survive scrutiny. Not the transatlantic flight, not the shoe that’s landfill by autumn, not the wool bought to feel responsible, not the plate at the aid station, not the sentence you’re reading. The sport keeps choosing which parts of the ledger to look at, and it picks, every time, the parts that ask nothing of anyone.

The case for the defense

The strongest version of the other side deserves a real hearing, because a lot of it holds up.

Mountains sit where they sit. A sport about wild places will involve getting to wild places, and most wild places are far from most people. Destination travel isn’t a bug bolted onto trail running. It’s close to the definition of it. UTMB can fairly note that 79% of its runners come from inside Europe, and that plenty of them drive when a train would do, so a real chunk of the footprint is fixable without anyone giving up the sport [20]. The carbon contributions fund actual work. The audits are real and public, which beats almost every other corner of endurance sport. UTMB caps the field instead of letting it grow without limit [20]. A committed runner’s yearly footprint may well come in under a golfer’s, or a powerboater’s, or a frequent business flyer’s. And the sport pours money and labor into trail work and conservation partnerships that wouldn’t exist otherwise. None of that is nothing.

All true. And none of it touches the actual charge. Every line of the defense argues for the sport carrying on, and I’m not arguing the sport should end. I’m arguing it should stop lying about what it is.

Pick a story and live in it

A carbon-heavy sport can still be an honest one. It just can’t be carbon-heavy and self-righteous in the same breath, which is the exact posture trail running has talked itself into. The offsets and the cupless aid stations and the stewardship talk aren’t crimes. They’re fine, as far as they go. The dishonesty is in dressing a managed-consumption business in the robes of a preservation faith, printing the desert philosopher on the start-line banner of the industrial tourism he spent his life fighting.

So the community has two honest options, and right now it lives in a dishonest third.

It can take preservation seriously and pay the bill. That means smaller and fewer races. Regional fields instead of global circuits, and entry systems that don’t reward flying. An honest look at growth as the default setting. It means a sport that sometimes chooses not to expand, because the thing it says it loves outranks the next acquisition. That’s the Abbey option, and almost no one with the power to choose it actually wants it. Worth sitting with why.

Or it can keep the planes and the World Series and the shoe cycle and the four-figure entries, and just take off the preservation costume. Admit it’s a consumer sport that happens to run outdoors, that it loves nature about the way a cruise ship loves the sea, as a backdrop for an expensive experience it will burn a lot of fuel to deliver. No shame in being a consumer sport. Skiing is a consumer sport. Most of us made peace with that long ago. The only shame is pretending to be a church.

What the sport can’t keep doing is the thing it does now: bank the moral credit of preservation while running the carbon ledger of conservation, and call the gap stewardship. Go cupless, by all means. Just stop telling the mountain it’s a love letter. The mountain, the trees, and the animals can read the flight manifest.

Notes

[1] On super-shoe lifespan: a study led by Víctor Rodrigo-Carranza (University of Castilla-La Mancha), published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, pre-wore identical prototype shoes to 280 miles and found the PEBA super-foam shoe lost its performance advantage entirely (about a 2.2% drop), while a carbon-plated EVA shoe did not degrade. Reported in Alex Hutchinson, “How Long Do Super Shoes Last? Here’s What the Latest Data Says,” Outside, Nov. 17, 2023. (The durability research used road super-shoe prototypes; the same PEBA super-foams underpin trail super shoes, and the mechanism is foam compaction, not the running surface.) Carbon-plated racers are generally cited as holding peak performance roughly 150–250 miles versus 300–500 for daily trainers. Nike introduced the first carbon-plated racing shoe in 2016 (Vaporfly retail launch 2017). (https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/how-long-do-supershoes-last-research)

[2] On the conservation–preservation divide between Gifford Pinchot (utilitarian “wise use” of resources) and John Muir (preservation of wild land for its own sake), crystallized in the 1908–1913 fight over damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. See U.S. National Park Service, “The Fight to Save Hetch Hetchy,” nps.gov; and Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Island Press, 2001). (https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-fight-to-save-hetch-hetchy.htm)

[3] Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); the critique of mass motorized “industrial tourism” in the national parks appears in the chapter “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks.”

[4] Aravaipa Running race pages (Cocodona 250 and its sister events Sedona Canyons 125, Mingus Traverse, Flagstaff Crest): the environmental note reads “Explore, enjoy, protect!” and asks runners to be “good stewards of the trail,” defining the cupless policy (”There will be no paper cups for cold drinks at the aid stations. Runners will be responsible for carrying their own containers”). Accessed June 2026. (https://www.aravaiparunning.com/cocodona/)

[5] Same Aravaipa race pages: “We will provide hot cups for coffee, broth, and soup.” Reusable cups are sold as branded merchandise (the UltrAspire C2); Aravaipa’s TerraCycle-and-reusable-cup program received an award from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. (https://www.aravaiparunning.com/cocodona/sedona-canyons/); (https://ultraspire.com/c2-cup/)

[6] Same Aravaipa race pages: “We have paired with Terracycle to help collect and recycle gel packets, energy bar wrappers, and other generally non-recyclable materials.” (https://www.aravaiparunning.com/cocodona/sedona-canyons/)

[7] “Aravaipa Running to Continue the Legacy of Great Lakes Endurance,” Endurance Sportswire / Aravaipa Running, Sept. 5, 2025: “Aravaipa will take stewardship of five hallmark events”; the company is “honored to continue the legacy of Great Lakes Endurance”; for “26 years, founders Jeff Crumbaugh and Lois Bressette poured their energy into creating events that fused endurance with environmental stewardship,” races described as “ecologically mindful.” (https://www.endurancesportswire.com/aravaipa-running-to-continue-the-legacy-of-great-lakes-endurance/)

[8] Aravaipa Running, “Aravaipa Racing Team Powered By HOKA,” describing team members as representing the mission of Aravaipa “as trail stewards, environmentalists, and community-builders.” Accessed June 2026. (https://www.aravaiparunning.com/racing-team/)

[9] UTMB’s own carbon-footprint figures. UTMB’s public mobility/emissions page states that “your travel to and from the Mont-Blanc valleys accounts for nearly 86% of the event’s total carbon footprint” (montblanc.utmb.world); Sports & Sustainability Director Fabrice Perrin likewise told The Green Runners (Iain Martin/Damian Hall, Sept. 17, 2025), “86% of our carbon footprint comes from travel to the event.” The underlying 2024 audit by the consultancy Utopies is reported as ~88% of total emissions from transport, with 86% of those transport emissions linked to travel to and from Chamonix (Endurance Sportswire, June 11, 2025; Advnture, June 12, 2025). This essay uses UTMB’s own “nearly 86% of total” framing. (https://thegreenrunners.com/is-the-utmb-taking-sustainability-seriously-at-last/)

[10] HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc’s pledge to cut emissions 20% by 2030 from a 2024 baseline; a four-pillar plan (commit, measure, reduce, offset/contribute) developed with Protect Our Winters and the Pro Trail Runners Association; the UTMB Go travel-routing tool; and a 30% lottery bonus for runners who commit to low-carbon, car-free travel (a Running Stones coefficient of 13 versus 10). UTMB also runs the UTMB Mobility shuttle network, in place since 2004 and comprising about 120 buses across 15 lines in 2024, to reduce private-car trips into the valleys. “HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc commits to a 20% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030,” Endurance Sportswire, June 11, 2025; “UTMB’s Environmental Travel Policy, Explained,” Outside, Aug. 19, 2025; montblanc.utmb.world. (https://run.outsideonline.com/trail/utmb-environmental-travel-policy-explained/)

[11] From 2026, UTMB makes the carbon contribution mandatory for all runners, calculated on round-trip travel emissions at €25 per metric ton of CO₂-equivalent and routed to a certified body (EcoAct in 2025); for a U.S. traveler the cost is estimated at roughly €45–75. UTMB’s own Q&A states: “In 2026, the carbon contribution becomes mandatory for all runners participating in the HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc.” Sources: montblanc.utmb.world (runner Q&A and registration conditions); “UTMB’s Environmental Travel Policy, Explained,” Outside, Aug. 19, 2025; “Can You Afford the True Cost of Running UTMB in 2026?”, Marathon Handbook, Jan. 21, 2026. (https://marathonhandbook.com/utmb-carbon-contribution/)

[12] UTMB dropped the Romanian carmaker Dacia as title sponsor after public criticism (including a campaign led by The Green Runners’ Damian Hall and supported by athletes such as Kilian Jornet), replacing it with the shoe brand Hoka. The Green Runners, Sept. 17, 2025; Advnture, June 12, 2025. (https://thegreenrunners.com/is-the-utmb-taking-sustainability-seriously-at-last/)

[13] UTMB Group and The IRONMAN Group announced a strategic partnership on May 6, 2021, launching the UTMB World Series (from 2022) across six continents. The official release describes creating “the future of trail running built around the values of UTMB®: surpassing oneself; fair-play; respect for people and the environment; and solidarity,” and frames IRONMAN as the world’s largest organizer of endurance events. On the consolidation model, Distances+ (May 20, 2021) quotes UTMB communications’ Hugo Joyeux that affiliated races “will need to be 100% UTMB affiliated,” and Ultra-Trail World Tour director Marie Sammons confirming, “Yes, it’s an acquisition logic.” “UTMB Group and The IRONMAN Group partner to launch the ground-breaking UTMB® World Series,” Endurance Sportswire, May 6, 2021; “To be part of the UTMB World Series Circuit, Races Must be Sold to Either UTMB or Ironman,” Distances+, May 20, 2021. (https://distances.plus/en/events/utmb-world-series-circuit-ironman-acquisition/)

[14] An environmental scientist involved in shaping the policy — with a background at the Research Center for Alpine Ecosystems (CREA Mont-Blanc) and speaking in connection with the Pro Trail Runners Association, which co-developed the plan — urged UTMB to examine the model itself, the structure that “pivots around athletes traveling to UTMB World Series races to earn a chance to then race at the Finals,” rather than only minimizing within it. Quoted in “UTMB’s Environmental Travel Policy, Explained,” Outside, Aug. 19, 2025. (https://run.outsideonline.com/trail/utmb-environmental-travel-policy-explained/)

[15] Gordy Ainsleigh ran the Western States Trail Ride (Tevis Cup) course on foot in 1974, finishing in 23 hours 42 minutes, after his horse came up lame the previous year; the Western States Endurance Run held its first official edition in 1977 (founder Wendell Robie). Ultrarunning historians note Ainsleigh was actually the eighth person to cover the course on foot — soldiers did so in 1972 — and that his “first” status was substantially a later marketing creation. Western States Endurance Run, “How it All Began,” wser.org; Davy Crockett, “Gordy Ainsleigh’s Western States Run,” ultrarunninghistory.com; “Western States Endurance Run,” Wikipedia. (https://www.wser.org/how-it-all-began/)

[16] Community reaction to the 2021 UTMB–Ironman deal, including the “ultra-Starbuckization” framing (Outside) and skepticism about corporate consolidation of independent races. “UTMB/Ironman partnership draws head shakes in trail running world,” Canadian Running Magazine, May 8, 2021. (https://runningmagazine.ca/trail-running/utmb-ironman-partnership-draws-head-shakes-in-trail-running-world/)

[17] Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,” Science 360 (2018): 987–992, doi:10.1126/science.aaq0216. The paper states that meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy “use ~83% of the world’s farmland and contribute 56–58% of food’s different emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories,” drawing on a dataset of ~38,700 farms across 119 countries and 40 products. Subsequent analyses note that even the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed plant protein sources in emissions. On transport: Our World in Data finds that for most foods, transport is a small share of total emissions and that what you eat matters far more than how far it traveled (Hannah Ritchie, “You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local,” Our World in Data). Lead author Poore, quoted in The Guardian (Damian Carrington, May 31, 2018): “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth.” (https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food)

[18] On wool’s production footprint: a life-cycle assessment puts the farm-gate footprint of Australian merino at ~24.9 kg CO₂e per kg of greasy wool (”How Sustainable Are Merino Wool Fabrics? A Life-Cycle Analysis,” Impactful Ninja), and fine merino at ~30.6 kg CO₂e per kg (Collective Fashion Justice, “Is cotton more sustainable than wool?”), driven largely by enteric methane from sheep and grazing-land use. This essay deliberately does not use the Higg Materials Sustainability Index’s wool-versus-synthetic comparison: the Higg MSI was the subject of a June 2022 New York Times investigation and was labeled “greenwashing” by the Norwegian Consumer Authority for favoring fossil-fuel synthetics over natural fibers, and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition suspended its consumer-facing use that month. The wool industry (IWTO) emphasizes wool’s durability and biodegradability over a garment’s full life; synthetic fibers carry their own burdens, notably microplastic pollution and fossil-fuel feedstock.

[19] On leather’s footprint: life-cycle estimates for finished cow leather range from roughly 17 to about 110 kg CO₂e per square meter depending on how emissions are allocated between meat and hide, with the large majority arising upstream in cattle farming (a UNIDO figure attributes ~93 of ~110 kg CO₂e/m² to raising the cattle; a separate LCA finds 68% of a 22.48 kg CO₂e/m² total from the upstream farming stage). Allocation method is contested because leather is a co-product of the meat industry. Sources: Carbonfact, “The Life Cycle Assessment of Leather,” Apr. 2025; Collective Fashion Justice, “The carbon cost of our leather goods, calculated”; Sustamize, “Animal, Vegan and Plant-Based Leather,” Jan. 2026, citing a UNIDO leather carbon-footprint report. (https://www.carbonfact.com/blog/knowledge/leather-carbon-impact)

[20] UTMB organizers report that 79% of runners come from inside Europe, that 60% of those travel by car despite available rail, and that the Mont-Blanc finals are capped at 10,000 entries to manage impact. “UTMB Mont Blanc runners will be rewarded for choosing low carbon travel options,” Advnture, June 12, 2025. (https://www.advnture.com/trail-running/running-events/were-taking-action-to-protect-the-environment-that-we-cherish-utmb-mont-blanc-runners-will-be-rewarded-for-choosing-low-carbon-travel-options-in-bid-to-reduce-race-emissions-by-20-percent)