White Women and DEI in Trail Running: Looking at TrailCon, with Broken Arrow and Western States

A call for revolutionary white feminists to disrupt the white supremacy of the trail scene

Feminist Underpinnings: We’ve Been Here

In her beautifully compact 2000 primer Feminism is for Everybody, the great thinker bell hooks traces a history of modern feminism: how it morphed from a revolutionary movement to a reformist movement. hooks writes:

“Often individual Black women active in the feminist movement were revolutionary feminists (like many white lesbians). They were already at odds with reformist feminists who resolutely wanted to project a vision of the movement as being solely about women gaining equality with men in the existing system. Even before race became a talked about issue in feminist circles, it was clear to Black women (and to their revolutionary allies in struggle) that they were never going to have equality within the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

Then, hooks writes: “Most women, especially privileged white women, ceased even to consider revolutionary feminist visions, once they began to gain economic power within the existing social structure.”

It’s within this framework that I’ve been thinking about the trail events that took place in and around Palisades Tahoe in the California Sierra Nevada at the end of June: TrailCon, which is bookended by Broken Arrow and the Western States Endurance Run (WSER). These are some of the most influential trail events in the US, and they provide useful examples for how this sport is being formed.

Diving In

I’ll point out here at the top that these events present significant barriers to entry simply because of where they are: Palisades is not easy to get to, and it’s very expensive to visit. The exclusivity doesn’t end there.

TrailCon—“North America’s premier trail running festival,” says the website—made it clear this year that diversity is not a priority. Said another way, it’s supporting a sport built to primarily serve the white patriarchy. It is, going back to hooks, built within and to accommodate “the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Broken Arrow and WSER play roles here, too. This structuring is common, no doubt, across trail running.

Sometimes it is useful to look to the literal definition of a term. Here I call on the second definition in Merriam-Webster: white supremacy is “the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races.” It’s a structure—and this structure is shaping trail running.

White women play their part, often following along and gaining much of their status through their relationships to men, most often white, who are in power. As Alison Mariella Désir said in a recent episode of the Earthmovers podcast: white women’s “power is predicated on proximity to white masculinity.” Patriarchy is part of this, too.

Before I go further, here’s one important fact: the future has not yet been written.

So this is a call to white women, and white men, too, who care about creating a welcoming space for all in trail running and outdoor—especially those with a significant voice or platform: do something, say something. Take accountability for the role you play. Hold those near you accountable.

Making change requires action, not marketing gimmicks or the occasional Instagram post or saying over and over how we still have work to do or continually talking about how you wish things were different. Some day.

Sitting idly by is consent. Silence is complicit. Words not followed by meaningful, consistent, serious action are—just words. Claiming that your running is only about running is fantasy (steeped in privilege). Apolitical is not a thing.

This Isn’t New

The problematic whiteness of TrailCon is well known. Since its soft launch in 2024, TrailCon has been criticized for its lack of diversity—its whiteness.

TrailCon calls itself “a groundbreaking event that celebrates the spirit of unity, innovation, and collective progress for our beloved sport.” (That use of “our”; it happens often in the trail space.)

The organization also states on its website: “TrailCon harnesses the energy of these premier races [WSER and Broken Arrow] to create a transformative experience and a new 10-day Trail Running Capital of the World” (caps in original).

I guess we know who’s in charge.

Following his experience at the 2025 TrailCon, Matt Walsh, who is from the UK and writes about trail running media and business on his Substack TrialMix, wrote in a post titled “Talking About TrailCon”:

“It was all very ‘nice.’ There were no challenging questions or prompts, discussions were lighthearted and encouraging, and no feathers were ruffled. Maybe I’m used to industry events where criticism and debate is encouraged, but ultimately this niceness effects the depth of discussion and doesn’t move our industry any further. … I feel there needs to be a space where people can be challenging in a constructive way, but maybe as an industry we’re not there yet?”

This lack of serious critique is an ongoing issue in the trail space—especially around the lack of diversity in the sport. This is not to say that criticism isn’t out there; it is. It simply isn’t taken seriously, especially by the vast majority of empowered white men in the trail space: TrailCon, WSER, and Broken Arrow are all led, founded, or owned by white men.

DEI has been a topic of critique in trail running for years; this sport has been and remains the whitest, most male dominated sector of the running industry. It’s not only TrailCon—they’re just one of the more recent and blatant examples of how this manifests.

A few years ago, I wrote: “Back in 2019, the theme of the entire four-day U.S. Trail Running Conference [USTRC] was Diversity and Inclusion: Trail Running is for Everyone. Leading trail running journalist Brian Metzler acknowledged the glaring lack of diversity that same year when he wrote the article “Trail Running’s Urgent Need to Diversify” for Six Minute Mile.”

In 2019—an urgent need!

Leadership Intertwined

Metzler, the founding editor of Trail Runner magazine, is now the director of media for UltraSignup (USU), the longtime go-to events registration and results database for trail running, which has a media arm, TrailHead Media, and recently took over leadership of the USTRC, a conference for race directors. One of USU’s co-CEOs has been on the opening panel of TrailCon all three years TrailCon has existed (2025 featured two men from USU on the opening panel of three men—all white).

Leadership at Broken Arrow is also part of TrailCon leadership. TrailCon leadership sits on the board of WSER (a 501c3 nonprofit) and was part of, according to the WSER website, a small group of men who envisioned the live WSER broadcast—a powerful driver behind the increasing popularity and narrative of WSER. A lead broadcaster for the WSER live feed is also the founder of the popular media outlet FreeTrail, which co-branded with WSER for several interviews around the 2026 race.

The WSER live broadcast production is overseen by Mountain Outpost, which is owned by Aravaipa Running, one of (if not the) largest trail race organizations in the US, and two of the six prestigious Golden Ticket races for WSER are Aravaipa events. Aravaipa also owns UltraRunning magazine.

This is a small, powerful, intertwined crowd. The people and leadership of the businesses mentioned above are all men, most of them white. The particular details of who they are isn’t important. What is important is that the vast amount of the power, money, influence, opportunity, and accessibility to these very influential events and businesses is in the hands of men, most of them white. That is white supremacy in action. And hello, patriarchy.

Of course, it is within the realm of possibility that white men in power can do good work in diversity. Men can be integral to achieving revolutionary feminist aims. I’ve seen it—and it’s wonderful.

But what is more often the case, and what is certainly the case at TrailCon, and elsewhere to be fair, is that they aren’t doing great revolutionary feminist or DEI work. My suspicion is that they don’t really want to—or feel they don’t need to. I’d also suspect they don’t know how—not without help. Whatever the case, this is what we see.

At TrailCon, it manifests in the mostly white people—often the same people we see being uplifted or provided with opportunity and access elsewhere in the sport, over and over again—taking or being put in the most prominent positions of power and control. It manifests in honoring the community impact of a white man who’s known for unapologetically having a confederate flag at his start/finish line and running a race through the deep woods location of a decommissioned prison that held the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. (This is so deeply disturbing.) It manifests in not having a single Black woman on a panel.

It manifests in 86 percent of all the people given awards or inducted into the event’s Hall of Fame being white (this awards ceremony began in 2025). It manifests by having a panel that discusses land use and features no Native panelists (on this panel or any other)—and instead featuring a prominent white male runner who is highlighted for talking about how much he didn’t think about land use for most of his decades-long running career. It manifests in excluding para athletes from the list of panelists until being called out on social media less than a month before the event, and adding them at the last minute.

It manifests in prioritizing marketing, brand awareness, and popularity.

It manifests in the vast majority of panelists being white.

As Raziq Rauf of Running Sucks wrote in the post “C is for Community. C is for Culture.”: “An interesting observation from Vivek Gowri, the owner of SF Run Co, was that of the 70 or so people speaking on panels, 90% were white, and there wasn’t even a panel talking about diversity.”

Rauf goes on to state: “It’s abundantly clear that racial diversity is an afterthought right now.” Rauf was part of the 10 percent of panelists who weren’t white.

It manifests in just about zero white people saying anything about any of this being problematic. It manifests in many prominent white women in trail running celebrating mostly white women’s ascendance and accomplishments in this sport as a win for women.

It is not.

Panels and luncheons and Tshirts and movies celebrating mostly white women at events that celebrate mostly white people is not a win for women: it’s a win for white women. Wins for women and wins for white women are not the same.

We Know Trail Running Lacks Diversity

In fairness, some white people at TrailCon reflected on how white the sport is. Stephen Holmberg, a consumer researcher and strategist in the outdoor industry who was featured in the opening panel of TrailCon in 2025 and again in 2026, noted the lack of diversity—with an opportunist slant.

In a LinkIn post highlighting six takeaways from his 2026 TrailCon experience, Holmberg wrote: “DIVERSITY REMAINS ONE OF THE SPORTS BIGGEST OPPORTUNITIES: The industry is making progress, but brands, race directors, athletes, and community organizations all have an important role to play to make this a sport for everyone” (all caps in original).

Looking past the capitalist, extractive overtones of Holmberg’s view of diversity being an “opportunity,” this would have been a terrific opportunity for him to note how astonishingly not diverse this very event was, and how it is contributing to the problem. He’s an industry strategist after all. But he didn’t.

It was all very nice.

Holmberg also didn’t critique the whiteness of TrailCon in a post-event conversation with two other white men for an episode of the Second Nature podcast (a podcast that shares leadership with FreeTrail and TrailCon). But there was conversation about the sport’s lack of diversity.

“The hard part about our culture is it very much lacks diversity,” said Holmberg (again with that “our”). “This is one of the key topics that we were talking about while at TrailCon—is it definitely has that opportunity to grow and be more inclusive and have a more diverse set of people that are participating, which I think everybody supports. We need to just figure out how to make that happen, so it’s not quite as homogeneous as it is now.”

Holmberg later added: “It’s all of our responsibilities to help make that happen.”

I’ve written this next thought many times because I’m finding it hard to keep from being snarky. But I want to pause here because this isn’t just about these three white men on a podcast founded by two white men—all of whom have influence, opportunity, access, and power in trail running. It’s about the fact that this is an example of something we see over and over again.

In this case, it’s a trio of white men who don’t seem to recognize that them joining together on this podcast to champion this event, which they all contributed to and benefit from, without calling out the problematic white maleness of it all—the white supremacy of it all—is exactly the type of issue they claim they want to address.

If only we could just figure out how to diversify the sport, so it’s not quite as homogeneous as it is now.

Off to the Races

At either end of TrailCon, there are the races: Broken Arrow over the first weekend, which comprises multiple events and this year offered the “biggest U.S. prize purse in the sport,” wrote Brian Meltzer on TrailHead Media; and WSER on the following weekend, arguably the most popular race in North America, with significant international reach.

Broken Arrow has become known for making inroads with diversity. That is largely due to volunteer efforts, through the Broken Arrow Skyrace Advisory Council, formed in 2024. This is an all volunteer group that, according to the Broken Arrow website, “exists to bring new voices and perspectives into the room. To challenge us. To sharpen us. To help us see what we might otherwise miss. To ensure that Broken Arrow continues to grow in ways that serve all runners.”

With the work of the Advisory Council at Broken Arrow, there has been increased diversification at Broken Arrow’s races. This is great. It’s what we should be seeing throughout the sport. It’s concerning, however, that this DEI work largely falls to volunteers.

This is a common approach for organizations that lack the ability and experience to do the DEI work on their own: they call on those who are skilled leaders in equity and DEI work to volunteer their time, experience, and expertise. Verna NezBegay Volker talked about this recently on Earthmovers (both on the podcast and Substack). She also talked about how she no longer gives her work away for free—because it has value.

Holmberg knows this value—he said so when he wrote that he recognizes diversity as one of the sport’s biggest opportunities.

But again, diversity work often gets positioned as something we all ought to do together, for the good of the sport—for free. It’s treated as a nice to have, not a need to have. And important questions get buried, like, Who’s ultimately benefitting? Who ultimately maintains the power? Because while diversity is no doubt good for the sport, it’s also good for business.

And, a primary hangup remains: real DEI work requires real change—structural change and power shifts. There are people who are very good at this work; it’s their profession.

Then There’s WSER

It’s been well established that WSER is an exclusive race that mostly features white people, the majority of whom are men (for 2026, women made up 22% of the total field, down from last year’s ten-year high of 27%: this shouldn’t even rate for reformist feminists).

For nonelite runners, the most common path to entry is the lottery, and on average it’ll take a runner roughly 7 years to get in via the lottery system. It’s reasonable to assume that this will only get worse over time because of the ever growing popularity of the race.

That means it is most probable that this race will always be years behind demographic shifts in its lottery entries: someone entering today won’t, on average, be seen at the start line for many years to come.

One way diversity is being introduced into WSER is through sponsors purposefully giving their entries to people from underrepresented communities (a limited number of race entries are set aside for sponsors each year as part of their sponsorship deals; sponsors can use them as they like).

GU Energy Labs is well known for its initiatives in this regard. But as one person I spoke to noted, GU and other sponsors who use their entries to help diversify the race won’t be sponsors forever. Then what? WSER itself doesn’t have any such a mechanism in place; it relies on others to do this work.

So here we have an event that is wildly popular, with the majority of its entrants being white men—and signs point to it continuing to be that way, in large part due to a lottery that will lag behind for years. (For more about women and the WSER lottery, see here.)

Adding to the massive barrier to entry locked in place by the lottery system, the aforementioned expense and remoteness of the location only add to its accessibility issues.

I recently wrote, “The mainstream trail world appears very happy to continue down the path of becoming an increasingly more exclusive and expensive aspirational pursuit.” This is the sort of thing I was talking about.

White Women in this Space

In the opening panel for TrailCon 2025, UltraSignup’s co-CEO David Callahan stated that “while we don’t have information about race or nationality, we do have some really exciting stuff about what’s happening in the women’s space.” He goes on to talk about the growth of women participating in trail running and how women are “performing at a higher level than they’ve ever performed before.”

It’s great that women are racing well. I am not surprised. As athletes, women’s capabilities are only beginning to be realized. But that’s an essay for another time (it is in the works). But that’s not my primary interest here.

Setting aside how problematic it is that there’s no widespread data that allows the trail world to track diversity metrics like race or nationality (or that the person saying this oversees a company that could actually do this), I’ll point out the problematic nature of lumping all women together. It allows conversations about growth while avoiding the details of who exactly is benefitting from that growth.

The reality is that what Callahan is actually talking about is that there’s exciting stuff happening mostly for white women—especially when talking about race performance. This is something that would be made plain if we did have more demographic data. We don’t, but we do have eyes, and we see it—over and over.

Returning to Rauf of Running Sucks and his post about TrailCon 2026, he mentioned: “50% of the TrailCon panelists were women. Pressure to get to this point has certainly come from HERE FOR THE WOMEN’S RACE over the last couple of years. That’s fantastic, but it’s important to reiterate that 90% are white” (bold and caps in original).

Whatever the reason for 50 percent of the panelists being women, the fact about whiteness does still remain—and women were complicit in this. This is white feminism in action: a different flavor of serving to uphold white dominance, under the guise of “diversity.” In other words, white women serving as a proxy for diversity, while reinforcing the power of the white patriarchy.

Let’s also be clear here: not all women support all women. Who you support and stand next to matters.

No one is forced to be on a panel of all white people or part of an event that is created by and serves to uphold the power of white people. That’s a choice. You can say no, or ask for change.

It’s a choice in the same way that it was the choice of the organizers of TrailCon to organize panels that are almost all white.

That wasn’t a coincidence. That wasn’t because there aren’t any people of color who are experts and leaders in this space. These were decisions.

I return to bell hooks, and how privileged white women often stop considering revolutionary feminist visions once they began to gain economic power within the existing social structure. So much of what happens over this ten-day period around Palisades Tahoe provides examples of this.

One more insidious piece to all this: white women, these white women, know they can do better. Meghan Hicks, the editor-in-chief of the online trail publication IRunFar told us so years ago.

In March 2024, IRunFar published an article titled “Women in Trail Running and Ultrarunning: Perspectives on the Challenges and Progression Toward Equity.” It was applauded by many, including the Professional Trail Runners Association (PRTA), the founding umbrella organization for the Here for the Women’s Race T-shirt campaign, which launched a few months later at TrailCon.

This article was also widely criticized for focusing almost exclusively on white women—and only a narrow slice of that narrow slice of women, on top of it.

In the comments section, Hicks noted that earlier iterations of the article “did begin to explore the perspectives of women of color, LGBTQ+ women, women of diverse age ranges especially grandmasters and older ages, and women who experience socioeconomic inequality. We found that, as we continued to work on this, it became too long for one article.” In other words, the default priority is financially privileged young, straight, cis white women.

Hicks added, “I am hopeful that this article can be a starting point for a follow-up series that can each focus more deeply on specific issues related to women’s running that this article didn’t reach.” We’re still waiting.

Meanwhile, within the article itself, Hicks had this to say about covering (mostly white) women in the publication:

“Over a decade ago, we made an organizational policy that we’d endeavor to cover women and men equally in all of our work. … To be candid, the traffic for our women’s-specific work was a fraction of that for men. Covering women equally was the correct thing to do, but gains in viewership and interest in that work took time.

Fast forward to the present, and we have a robust women’s community on iRunFar that is larger than basically any other non-women’s specific outdoor media entity out there. Often our coverage of women gathers more readership than that of men, which is about the coolest thing ever.

I hear media entities and race organizations say they don’t cover women as much as men because their women’s coverage doesn’t have the same following. …

If we do the work of telling stories about women, then we will build a community of people interested in those stories.”

Hicks, and others to be sure, understand that change takes effort. That building community and audiences take conscientious, dedicated, consistent, committed work.

With work, it can be done. This is a choice. It is the choice.

What’s Possible

Returning to what I said at the beginning, the future isn’t yet written. We can build a trail running scene that is inclusive and welcoming to all. A sport that is scaffolded by a different structure, by new visions. A revolutionary feminist structure—which to be clear cares about people across the gender spectrum: men, too.

Race director and co-owner of Rainshadow Running Katy Farrell recently told me about an approach to culture and community that provides a helpful jumping off point.

She was excited about it. She got me excited about it. Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Banu Subramaniam was also excited about it and wrote about it in a book review for the Catalyst Journal.

The idea comes from Moya Bailey, a Black American feminist, scholar, and activist known for coining the term “misogynoir.”

Subramaniam wrote a review of Bailey’s 2021 book Misogynoir Transformed Black Women’s Digital Resistance:

“Bailey also establishes early on that when she talks about Black women, she means to privilege queer and trans Black women as well Black nonbinary, agender, gender-variant folks’ work and voices.

“In a wonderful moment in the book, and one that should be a mantra for all of us, she begins with a powerful challenge: ‘I challenge you, dear reader, as you read this text, to think of ‘Black women’ first when you see the word ‘woman,’ to think of queer and trans women first when you read the term ‘Black women.’

“Indeed, as she convinces us all throughout the book, the world would be a better place if we all did that.”

In other words, take care of the most marginalized, vulnerable people first. In that way, we make sure we’re taking care of everyone.

White women have a powerful say in how the future of this sport gets shaped. Who you support, how you support them, where you show up, and where you use your voice—it all has an impact.

So again, this is a call to us white women who want more equity, diversity, and inclusion—and especially those in the positions of power and influence—to participate in restructuring this sport with new vision. Hold yourself and other white women accountable.

You want a more just, fair, inclusive, equitable, diverse sport? You want a sport that’s welcoming to all? Well then, do something about it.