If you talk about trail running today, concepts from five years ago already feel dated — and that’s doubly true at the elite end. The reason is simple:Trail running has evolved too fast.

Whether men or women, and regardless of distance,2021 over recent years the so‑called limits have been repeatedly knocked down; performance and competitive intensity have fed each other and kept climbing. TheTOP10, and today’sTOP10, are no longer the same concept.

The split between short and long distances has become increasingly fine‑grained and extreme. So when assessing an athlete’s competitiveness at international events, the most useful benchmark isn’t what he won three years ago, but what distance he now focuses on and what level his rivals have reached.

This is something that should have been recognized beforeUTMB : “Can today’s Chinese athletes still enter today’s global competition?”

In the past, top trail runners mostly came up through the trail community itself — for example, prize hunters in outdoor multi‑events.

Now, world trail running is drawing more and more talent from traditional endurance events — most clearly the marathon. This is the change most easily underestimated; it’s a fact some people are unwilling to face, even internally resistant to.

WithMolly Seidel Represented by these types of athletes, more and more runners originally from the road-running and track & field systems are starting to try trail running — China is of course no exception.

The significance isn't merely that "a few marathoners showed up"; it means trail running is shifting from a relatively closed discipline into an open talent market.

As a result, the sources for world-class trail runners are multiplying. The long-established veterans shouldn't devalue themselves, but they also can't ignore outsiders who parachute in and adapt rapidly, taking root on the trails.

This change means competition in the trail world is expanding from internal rivalry to external. In international races, opponents now include not only long-established names but also an increasing number of converts from the global endurance system.

The Alps do differ from most places at home: long sustained climbs and long descents are extremely taxing on the body. Different climate, surface conditions, gradients, even culture can affect performance — that's indisputable.

But I don't accept using that as the main explanation for poor results, because China doesn't completely lack such environments.Those places tend to be remote and isolated, with difficult access, poor living conditions, and high training costs. Terrain adaptation is important for an athlete's performance, but it's not insurmountable.

I believe similar training environments can be found domestically, but the question is whether people are willing to go. Blaming differences on "European mountains being different" is dangerous — a temporary setback is not the problem; the real danger is a collective cognitive bias: is "adaptation" really the biggest issue?

I don't mean to disparage anyone's effort; every drop of sweat is real and respectable. But the cruelty of elite sport is that effort doesn't always pay off. You can only work backwards from results: what did I do right, what did I do wrong?

OCC and CCC champion Toni McCann is based in Annecy, but she is South African. The unstoppable American Jim Walmsley moved to a small Alpine village and lived there for a long time because he really wanted the UTMB title. Last year's runner-up and new champion Ben Dhiman is also American; he lives and trains in the Pyrenees at the other end of France.

They share one thing: they changed their geography of life to create training conditions for their target races.

If UTMB is an athlete's most important race of the year, then in theory training should be designed around it. You can seek long climbs, add downhill-specific sessions, even simulate with steep-tilt treadmills. If triathlon hobbyists at home are willing to crank up the heat and wear extra layers for heat acclimation, professional athletes should be even more willing.

These are not impossible problems to solve; the real question becomes: how much are you willing to pay for this race?

This is not fundamentally a question of whether there are mountains, but of the level of professionalism. Tom Evans trained in the UK and still won the UTMB title.

It needs to be emphasized repeatedly: don't settle accounts over a temporary loss; instead, sound the alarm for long-term problems.

Trail running is becoming more professionalized and increasingly exposes problems — in our country this even shows certain common patterns:Insufficient support systems, inertia in talent pathways, and chasing short-term gains.

First, about supporting resources. In the past trail running was a relatively rough-and-ready sport: if you had talent, could endure hardship, ran lots of mountain miles and raced frequently, you could quickly make a name for yourself.

But as trail running professionalized, training, nutrition, strength, rehab, sports-injury management, data analysis, psychology, equipment, recovery and other professional resources all started to come in. So the unit of competition shifted from the athletevs to the system behind the athlete vs the system behind the athlete.

This happens to be a relatively weak area for Chinese trail running right now. It's not that China completely lacks these people, but it hasn't yet formed a mature, stable, and athlete-friendly professional sports service ecosystem.

Next, talent pathways.Abroad, athletes enter trail running with far less path dependence. Marathoners can switch, track athletes can try it, other endurance athletes who find they can make a living from trail running can turn it into a career — you even see many part-time trail runners who are top-level.

In China many outstanding athletes come from systems with strong path inertia. That system has of course produced many excellent athletes, but its training goals and career pathways don't fully align with a highly individualized, market-driven discipline like trail running.

The more an environment allows athletes to rechoose events and career paths, the easier it is to attract new talent.And truly outstanding athletes often need to make their own choices at the right time.This is precisely Li Na's significance: she didn't simply change a coach, she began to treat her professional career as her own affair.

Chasing short-term gains — this is something I think is especially worth discussing this year. China's trail-running market has already formed a large race ecosystem: many events, many brands, substantial prize money, lots of commercial activity, so it's very common for athletes to race frequently year-round.

There are practical reasons for this: sponsors need exposure, races need top athletes, athletes need income, and some events themselves offer prize money. But professional athletes must actively calculate opportunity cost, clearly rank race priorities, and manage their training cycles around key events.

LikeBen Dhiman top athletes of this caliber limit the number of races they do each year. If you race nonstop all year, chronic fatigue prevents full training cycles and performance at important races becomes a gamble. This is a typical conflict: short-term commercial gain versus long-term competitive return. And what exactly does "using races as training" mean? Do people really understand its significance?

Athletes of course need to earn money, but if they want to reach the top tier they must calculate whether the extra tens of thousands of yuan earned this year are really worth sacrificing aUTMB training cycle?

At least for elite athletes who already have significant commercial value, the question is often no longer simply "is there money," but whether that money is being converted back into competitive ability.

Li Na is a good example. She chose to break out of her original system and actively seek the team that suited her best, rather than simply staying in a familiar environment — even at great cost.

This choice is crucial, because what a professional athlete really needs is not just "someone to train me," but whether there is a system that truly fits me.

A mature athlete should constantly ask:Does my coach understand me well enough? Is the training method the best fit for me? Is my recovery sufficient? Is my race schedule reasonable? Can the team identify my problems? Can they help me stay calm at critical moments? Is my contract fair? Do commercial activities affect my training?

These questions essentially fall under the management of a professional athlete.

Sometimes we say "国际妙", "国际申" — not only because 姚妙 and 申加升 have achieved excellent international results, nor merely because they often have the opportunity to compete internationally. They and their teams know where the gaps are between them and the world's best, know what resources to seek, understand their weaknesses, know what is worth spending money on, and are willing to proactively engage with the international environment.

In other words: they didn't first reach an international level and then gain an international perspective; rather, they began to approach international standards in their thinking first, and then used that international perspective to shore up their competitive ability. This is a very important distinction.

A professional athlete is, in essence, a "company." If you have sufficiently strong judgment, you can of course manage yourself; but if you don't, the most rational choice is not "I'll do it myself."On the contrary, paying someone truly capable to think for you is a very important professional investment.

That person can be a coach, an agent, or a team that truly understands competitive sport. They don't just help you arrange races, negotiate contracts, or find sponsors — they help you make long-term decisions: training cycles, race density, event-specific adaptation, commercial activities, contract structure, and even life arrangements.

Professionalization is not about handing yourself over to othersall in to others, but about knowing what you lack and being willing to purchase professional expertise for it.

If one insists on summing up this year UTMB To summarize, I don't think it's a disaster at all — more like a wake-up call.It reminds us that the advantages Chinese trail running accumulated over the past decade-plus are no longer sufficient to automatically maintain world competitiveness.

We once built our advantage in this discipline when it was still on the margins of world athletics and immature, relying on outstanding athletes' talent, toughness, training volume, and race experience.

But now others have noticed and begun to acquire these same qualities — and have brought with them far more complete professional sports systems.

So future competition will certainly be about who can more quickly transform themselves into a modern professional trail runner.This includes training cycles, race selection, terrain adaptation, nutrition, recovery, strength training, data analysis — and also agents, contracts, commercial activities, and personal career planning.

What is truly worth worrying about is not this yearTOP10 Not that it's too little, but that five years from now we'll still be talking about "European mountains are different from China's," still talking about "what placings our athletes used to get," still having athletes race a large number of events each year, still relying on athletes to train blindly on their own, still treating large portions of income as consumption rather than investment, and still managing careers in traditional ways.

World trail running won't wait for us.It will continue to draw talent from marathon, athletics, triathlon and other endurance sports, and continue to raise its level of professionalism. If an athlete stops progressing, they're not standing still—others are moving forward.

The greatest danger for Chinese trail running isn't a shortage of world-class athletes, but that we still use the old methods to develop them and stubbornly stick to the same old path.

That's also why I'm not particularly disappointed by this year's results; I'm more worried about whether we realize:World trail running has already taken a different route up the mountain.