When Taylor Abrams hit her mid-30s, she started getting serious about road running. She worked diligently to run a sub-three-hour marathon in 2024 but had a hard time repeating the magic in 2025. Stressing about her paces and splits, she started feeling burnt out and unmotivated. On a mission to make running fun again, Abrams took to the trails in Marin County, California, where she’d been living for two years.
Today, at 39, the mom of three leans on the sport to explore, be adventurous, and feel like a kid again as she zooms down the hills. She’s rejuvenated her relationship with running—and many others are doing the same, for similar reasons.
Running in general has boomed over the past three to five years, and trail running is no longer hiding in the shadows of glamorous road races—it has fully entered the mainstream. The sport is growing annually by 8 percent, with more people entering races like the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, which has 2.4 times more participants now than it did in 2022. The fan base is growing as well: The 2026 Cocodona 250-mile race amassed over 1.4 million total views on its livestream, compared with 841,000 in 2025. Those are extreme ultra-based examples, yes, but there’s also this: The number of athletes who uploaded trail runs on Strava increased when comparing the first half of 2025 with the first half of 2022, with female users logging twice as many trail runs in 2025 as in 2024. Over on the AllTrails app, trail running has gone up by 11 percent since August 2024. And the entire trail running market is worth over $14 billion—even everyday fitness brands like Lululemon and Alo are now dropping trail-specific shoes.
Women like Abrams are gravitating to the sport because we’re “looking for a different relationship with running,” says Alysha Flynn, a Road Runners Club of America–certified running coach specializing in performance, sustainable training, and the realities of women’s lives, and the founder of What Runs You. By nature, trail running requires you to let go of pacing and PR pressure (and comparing yourself to others) and instead just enjoy the challenge. Here’s what else is behind the boom.
Staying Present
Being in nature does wonders for your mental health, research shows, and those benefits increase tenfold with trail running. It requires you to drop your speed, concentrate on the terrain, and stay present, which can feel almost meditative. “The focus is really on the now,” says Noel B. Salazar, PhD, a professor of social and cultural anthropology and the founder of the Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) cluster at KU Leuven in Belgium. “It triggers a kind of mental re-pacing.”
This process can help take your mind off life pressures. (Finances! Scary headlines! Uncertainty about the future!) “Trail running is seen as a meaningful activity in a world where people feel increasingly overwhelmed,” Salazar adds. “People seem to be craving activities where they are in direct contact with their bodies in the environment.”
This feeling is something Megan Gorsky, 24, experienced on her first trail run in college. Subconsciously focusing on the nature and environment around her, she was shocked at how the time passed. “You’ll hit five miles before you thought you were at three—it goes by so much quicker,” she says.
On the trails, women are able to reframe running. Relationships become “built around effort, exploration, and adventure, rather than constantly chasing pace or comparing themselves,” says Flynn. We get the chance to ask ourselves questions like “How do I feel today?” “Can I stay calm as the terrain is changing?” “Can I adapt?”
The Art of Disconnection
These days, it’s almost unheard of to run without a wearable or not upload a run to Strava. “We’re getting burnt out by chasing metrics,” says Flynn. However, trail running is naturally less of a data-driven sport. Because you run at an inconsistent pace, many runners leave wearables (and music or podcasts) at home, Salazar adds.
Instead, you’re dialed in to your next step. “Notifications, music, and constant watch checking disappear,” Flynn says. “It’s almost like permission to let go and allow the terrain to dictate your effort.” As such, the stakes are lower and you don’t have to worry about shaving a minute from your mile time. You can just listen to your body, adds Stefanie Flippin, DPM, a run coach with over 15 years of coaching experience, a foot and ankle surgeon, and a professional trail and ultrarunner for Lululemon based in Pine, Colorado.
Abrams notices she’s less stressed on the trails because she’s just trying to have fun. “I put a lot of pressure on myself about running for a hobby,” she says. “It takes the pressure off, to not feel like you have to be hitting certain paces when you’re bouncing around in the woods.”
All Eyes—and Hearts—on Trails
When Dr. Flippin started trail running 15 years ago, there weren’t many opportunities to livestream races. “Now you can follow races in real time,” she says. That’s changed the game for trail running’s exposure. This year, over a million people watched Rachel Entrekin become the first woman to win the Cocodona 250-mile race. “That’s a really inspiring aspect for women, too, just to see that, ‘Oh, you know what? She’s doing this. She’s at the front of the pack here,’ ” she adds. “We can’t really see that in any other sport that’s endurance-based.”
With more exposure comes more money from major brands, especially following the 2021 decision to permit collegiate athlete name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. So, in addition to pros, college athletes are being offered contracts for cross-country, steeplechase, mountain running, and track and field. “We’re definitely going to be seeing more and more of that with trail brands stepping in,” says Dr. Flippin. (Particularly for athletes whose main goal is to go from the NCAA into professional trail running.)
