Ep 524 | UTMB Commentator Fired For Being Too Outspoken - Corrine Malcolm

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hello, dude badders, I've just been recording with Gurren, our next guest, and here's a bit of overview of what to expect. So we do talk about the situation with UTMB and her not being able to talk well, no longer working as a commentator for UTMB race itself. But before that, we actually go into biathlon and what it takes to be a top biathlon athlete. We then talk about how trail running has changed and the impact of her DNFs in her future races, and then we get to the meat of it, which is really it's hard. It's a great episode because it speaks to the growing pains of the sport and the not just how the professional trail runners association has been engaging with different groups within the sport, but also the conflict that anyone is working in the sport has such a passion for the individuals, the athletes and the races themselves, and so, with change is always going to be negatives and positives, and so how do we as individuals really communicate and engage with something we love without potentially being too vocal and everything collapsing in on us in some regards? So tuck in guys. Well, strap in guys. It's a really good interview. I hope you enjoy it and take it away, nick. Hey D-Batters, our next guest is someone who, as soon as the recent story erupted, who were being messaged left, right and center, say get Karin on, get Karin on. To be fair, we should have had her on for the last, every year for the last five, 10 years. You probably know her as the editor-in-chief of FreeTrail. She's involved in everything from ultra trail so from ultra sign up to being a racer herself with Adidas, terrex and obviously her amazing commentary. So welcome to the podcast, the wonderful Karin Malcolm.

Speaker 3: 2:38

Yay, I'm very excited to be here. This is a. I've got a few podcast requests in the old inbox and I was like, oh, these guys, this is who I need to talk to.

Speaker 1: 2:47

And sorry it's taken so long. We there's an element of we, because we're such an international podcast there's so many people in America who we want to interview, and so we actually end up not interviewing anywhere near as many people as we want to, because we don't want to look as if we're just talking to American people the whole time.

Speaker 3: 3:06

Yeah, you can't be too biased. You know you've got to really like spread, spread things out a little bit, that's okay. Well, how was this?

Speaker 1: 3:13

how was this last four weeks been for you? I mean, holy shit balls, what a bomb that's been hey.

Speaker 3: 3:19

Oh, my goodness, I finally, I think, found the right words to describe it recently and we're having dinner with friends. Last night and I was like you guys, I think I feel like I've gotten out of a bad relationship. Like you're, I've been dating this guy, you know, being UTMB in the sense because I'm happily married and my husband's a great dude, but with UTMB oh that we get the analogy. It's like a bad it's like a bad breakup. You know where it's like I've been in this relationship that's been like a little bit abusive and it's like I've like he promises he's going to change and like he's got all these good ideas of like how he wants to like be better, but, like you know, there's nothing's happening there and it's like I'm out and like there's a bit of liberation around it. I think people keep asking me like are you okay? And I'm like yeah, no, like I think I've come out on the good side of things and so it feels like I'm out of a bad relationship and you know conversations are going to continue with, with UTMB and the entity that they are, but it feels really good that I don't have to spend every waking minute thinking about them or trying to figure out how to navigate X, Y or Z situation. So I feel like I've gotten off kind of easy in that regard.

Speaker 1: 4:32

Now we're going to come back to this because I'd love to talk more about you, but just in terms of how you feel at the moment, is what would you say the balance between, I guess, anger, confusion, disappointment there's so many emotions you could have right now.

Speaker 3: 4:48

Yeah, I'd say I'm frustrated, and it's one of those things where it's like, you know, some things were left unclear, some things were left unsaid, and so I think it's mostly frustration, like trying not to waste too much too much anger, too much sadness on on it. But I think it's mostly just I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated with, like, what could be and like how. You know a race that I've, you know, I've, I've loved historically in the past. I've made the, the trip to Chalmonee more times than I can count, but you know it's. I've held out hope, I think, for a long time, right, like okay, they're gonna, they're gonna figure it out, they're gonna do what's best for everyone. And it just really doesn't seem to be the case right now. And so for me, I find that frustrating. And it's not frustration because I want to be on the mic and I can't be. It's frustration because I see how it could be really good and I want them to hit the mark and they're not, and so it's more like maybe it maybe it's disappointment, you know, and parents are like I'm not mad at you, I'm disappointed in you, like I think that that's kind of the the right vibe maybe for how I'm feeling about it.

Speaker 1: 5:54

Yeah, and I know what you mean about disappointing, because I think the crazy thing in, in how I see it, is that it's not as if they're gaining a huge amount by not doing the obvious things that would be good for the community, for the elite athletes, for the environmental impact. All these things are very achievable and while it might potentially slightly reduce some of their bottom line, not very much. Not very much versus the fallout of these. That's the crazy thing. It just seems such an obvious. There's just so many own goals that don't need to be done. Sorry, own touchdowns, what would it be? It's oh, no, is there? Is there an? Do you get own goals in baseball? Oh, I don't know. What would the analogy be?

Speaker 3: 6:41

I have no idea, but I personally get the own goal analogy. So the other Americans are just going to have to catch up a little bit there. But yeah, no, totally, it's like the putting their foot in their mouth, the kind of like shooting themselves in the foot. Whatever the analogy is, yeah, it's like the. They're so close to things being right but they keep choosing like the wrong course of action.

Speaker 1: 7:02

Well, let's rewind. Let's rewind to happier times, the good times when we were free, without this, this absolute monolith crushing everything. How did you, when did your love for trail Best start?

Speaker 3: 7:16

Yeah, I, I started racing on the trail back in like 2015, 2014,. But I grew up in the Midwest in the US, to kind of center the country, a little tiny town called Hayward, wisconsin, where we joke that it's like the silent sport capital of the world. So it's like cross country skiing, mountain biking, kayaking, like these kind of peaceful nature sports are like the the big sports there grew up in a really athletic family so I grew up skiing, running, playing soccer etc. Went to college to ski, actually left college to compete for the US biathlon team, so skiing in a circle with the firearm and when I was walking away from that or stepping away from that sport. I was back in Montana where I'd been going to university and I realized that trail racing was basically what we did all summer for Nordic skiing rate. It's just like go running the mountains for three, four, five, six hours and like bring snacks. And so I like had this kind of immediate, like love for, for trail running. In that sense like grew up running cross country, loving cross country. The part of soccer I was good at was like the 90 minutes are running, a lot less the like actual, actual soccer bit of it. And so for me running has always kind of been there. But it wasn't until, you know, moving back to Montana and stepping away from like this winter sport that I'd been competing in for a decade, to really appreciate kind of having a trail racing season and jumped into sky running because we have the rut in Montana as a big, big running race in the fall, which I adore and I love the mics who put it on, and so my first trail racing experience was really like jumping into races like the rut and Flagstaff sky peaks and the Crystal Mountain Sky Marathon. And then my dad was like you know, I think you'd be a lot better if you ran further, like I think you'd be like even better at this sport if you just like ran for a longer period of time and so kind of made him say that. I think I'm stubborn. I think I'm very stubborn because I'm good at soccer.

Speaker 1: 9:21

You wanted you out of the house for longer, did he?

Speaker 3: 9:23

Yeah, he's like, can you actually just be gone? You know, maybe six, 10, 12 hours. But yeah, I don't. I don't know what exactly it was, but I think it was mostly like hey, like you're really good at just kind of keeping your head down and like continuing to like motor forward, and so I, like my love of trail running, became ultra running very fast and did my first ultra in 2016,. I ran the Gorge 100K, 62 miles, for my 26th birthday, because the race lined up perfectly and it's like been kind of love ever since. You know, dabbling in all sorts of races all over the world. But yeah, I was. I was in it for the snacks is like the like, the like the. The short story was I was in it for the snacks and getting to go run in the mountains for hours on end.

Speaker 1: 10:08

Well, I'm going to remind you to buy a thumb, because we've never had a biathlete on the show before. We've had one person talk about shooting guns, but that was in Iraq, which is very different.

Speaker 3: 10:19

Very different.

Speaker 1: 10:20

I've heard about how isn't heart rate meant to be pivotal to shooting accuracy or something like that. Like there's certain strategies when you do biathlon to try and ensure that you're coming in relaxed when you try and shoot.

Speaker 3: 10:35

So we joke in the US that biathlon is popular every four years when you see it on TV during the Olympics. But yeah, so you're out skiing and you're skiing pretty darn hard Like you used to be able to be a good skier or a good shooter and you could get by Like you could out ski bad shooting, you could shoot really well and that would save you some time in comparison to other athletes, and really you have to be pretty exceptional at both at this point to excel on the World Cup or at the highest level of the sport. But yeah, there's this idea that you're going out and you're skiing for one and a half to three kilometers, pretty darn hard, and you come into the shooting range and you have to be calm very quickly, and so there aren't really necessarily tricks, but it's about just being cognizant of how you come into the range and when you're going to start your kind of shooting routine where you're switching from being a skieracer to being a marksman. And every venue is a little bit different. There are some at higher elevation where you have to start thinking about that earlier. Their prone to laying down versus standing can be a bit different for people. People can come in hotter generally to prone shooting than they can standing shooting. If you come in overworked and can't settle for standing, it's generally a disaster and you're more tired because it's normally the secondary shooting stage.

Speaker 1: 11:52

But you have a choice, or there's one of each, is there?

Speaker 3: 11:54

It's what? Yeah, so in the it's always, it's always 50 50. So the shortest races have two shooting stages, so one prone, one standing and the longest shot. That would be much better Like that would be crazy. But at the same time the target sizes change. So when you're shooting in prone, they're about we call them silver dollars I can't remember the centimeter is, but they're they're, they're fairly small. And then when you're shooting standing, they're more like a CD, so a little bit larger of a target. So you couldn't really do an every other shoot type of thing. But it's. It's a super cool sport because it combines like being incredibly athletic and incredibly like aerobically and anaerobically fit with being able to be very calm and very focused and very regimented. You know, half of, not half of, but a lot of biathlon training is like we call it dry firing, where you're not even shooting live rounds, you're just going through the mechanics of shooting a single shot over and over and over again, or holding in a position for a long period of time so that when you are in a race scenario you're not thinking about it anymore. It's literally like the idea is that you're hopefully so good that you don't have to think about it. You come in and it's like muscle memory. You're just like on the range, you're shooting and you know you're. You're back off that shooting mat again and generally like no more than 20 seconds.

Speaker 1: 13:11

So it's a lot to get done. Visualization. A lot of visualization.

Speaker 3: 13:15

Yeah, people definitely spend a lot of time kind of working on how they're going to ski a certain course and then how they're going to come into the range and what that's going to feel like and any adjustments they might have to make, particularly like head to head stuff. Not all the races are head to head, because some are individual start, but the head to head races that becomes a really big deal. And I actually shoot left handed, so I shoot facing. If we're standing and you're shooting right handed and I'm shooting left handed, based on what side I'm on, I'm facing you and so I'm used to facing other shooters on the range. But a lot of right handed shooters are used to like having the person's back in front of them. And when I pull up on the range next to you, I face you instead, and so I feel like I had to have I had to get really good really fast the mental aspect of it, because I saw that every single time I shot and it really throw off a lot of right handed shooters when this left handed person pulls up alongside you. So there is visualization, there is this mental component and I think it's also the like understanding that you can't control things or force things and you really just have to like fall back on skill, fall back on knowledge and be ready to roll with it, because you could come into the range and the wind could be blowing sideways and like tough shit, like that's. You can't control that. So I think there's a lot of like kind of good life lessons to take that are at least that I've taken forward from it.

Speaker 1: 14:31

And if there are any rules against wearing kind of elaborate face paint, because if someone came in and suddenly looked across and you're dressed there as the clown from it or something similar, you know that's surely going to be off putting.

Speaker 3: 14:45

You know that would be kind of crazy. We don't see a lot of that. There are a lot of people. So we you don't want to close. Generally you don't want to close one of your eyes because you're looking through an open site. It's not a scope, it's an open site and when you close an eye you generally like distort the image that you're looking at. So you'll see on a lot of rifles during biathlon that they have like an eye cover essentially. So it looks like a little eye shield and what it is. It allows you to keep your non shooting eye open, but it's just looking directly into like a black, a black surface. So it's ostensibly closed without like messing with any musculature. But a lot of people have like crazy prints or, like you'll see, like tiger eyes or lion eyes or like a hawk face or something. So there's some like people's rifles can get pretty elaborate with like different paint and that kind of stuff. But no, no one's, no one has rolled up in like a clown mask or something. But the eye mask on the biathlon rifle itself can be a little bit elaborate sometimes.

Speaker 1: 15:45

So, returning to trial, then, in terms of you've mentioned the rats already like what would you say have been your biggest results or your worst results in trial running?

Speaker 3: 15:57

Oh, there's probably been a lot of worst results. I've definitely survived a lot of races that did not go quite to plan. I just ran an ultra chill Cape Town a couple of weeks ago and had a hard day out there spent, I think it was. I thought I could run like 13 hours and I ran 15 and a half hours. So I was out there for a little longer than anticipated, but is that?

Speaker 1: 16:18

is that the heat?

Speaker 3: 16:19

Oh, I just think I flew in kind of last minute for the race. I got in Wednesday night from the US to Cape Town and raced Saturday morning and just was just off. It was definitely warm. I kind of like horrible conditions historically, like I've run Western states twice, et cetera. I think my worst performances or races where I like ultimately haven't made it to the finish line and some of that's like out of your control and some of that's making the hard choice out there In 2019 at UTMB, I had I don't know if I had food poisoning or if I there was a stomach bug going around, because Chaminie is like a cruise ship during UTMB week. It's just like viruses and bugs from all over the world descending on one little mountain town and I vomited from like 20 K in until where I ultimately dropped out at like a hundred and a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty K in or something I vomited for like almost a hundred K before.

Speaker 1: 17:10

I finally was like you know what that's? A decent amount of vomit.

Speaker 3: 17:12

I've only had Coca-Cola for like the last 17 hours. Like I'm kind of over this. So I think those races are hard because it's like you go into races where you feel like you're ready to have a great performance and something is just a little bit off your body, you're sick, etc. But some of the races I'm the most proud of are probably, you know, just showing up to challenging, challenging events. I've been top 10 twice at Western States, finishing in kind of the back part of the women's top 10 two times in a row and it felt good to kind of be in a race where I don't think of myself as a super fast runner but I think of myself as, like a super smart and super stubborn runner and a person who can like deal with the elements really well. So I felt I felt really good being able to like kind of like hang on in a very good field, to like finish, finish in the top 10 there in a race that I don't necessarily think suits my strengths. But yeah, it's, trail running is crazy. Like you can have, you can finish really far back and like consider it one of your best races ever and you can win a race and be like I messed up a lot out there, or I had a little bit of luck on my side today, and it's just like you don't know what's going to happen. And I think that's the beauty of ultra running too, is that you go in and you kind of roll the dice every single time.

Speaker 1: 18:33

And those races where you have pulled out. There are some people that subscribe to finish no matter what, and every day at DNF almost weakens you because it gives you more permission to quit the next time. Do you think that's true in your case, or do you think that that is actually true? Or do you think actually making the right decisions is more empowering and actually allows you to fight another day, and distinguishes between when you're feeling tired and when you're feeling injured, or you shouldn't be there.

Speaker 3: 19:05

Yeah, I'm not a death before DNF kind of person. I just think that, like there are times where it's okay to pull the plug, like only drinking Coca Cola. For a hundred miles I could have UTMB. That was disappointing because I could have walked it in and I could have finished well under the cutoffs and I just would have been a hard day. But I wasn't. I didn't go into that race mentally thinking I'm going to finish this. Unless I've hurt myself, unless I have physically caused damage, I'm going to finish this at all cost because it gives me X, y or Z thing. I have done races like that. Cape Town felt like that in a big way recently, where I was like you know what, I'm not having a good day, but there's no reason for me to stop. I'm not hurting myself, I'm you know, I want to finish the loop, I'm not losing anything by finishing it, et cetera. I think it's worth kind of toughing that out, but I've definitely had. I dropped out of TDS last year and I dropped out of Madeira this year due to I broke my pelvis in 2021, just like several stress fractures, essentially.

Speaker 1: 20:08

And.

Speaker 3: 20:09

I it's called not having great mobility and picking up running as a young adult and never fixing any of those issues and just praying that it's going to be okay and ignoring it. And so I I don't. I mean, I ran the Tahoe Rim Trail FKT in 2020, which is 171 miles, and then it was probably three or four months later that I had these stress fractures, and so it's like was it that that did it? We don't really know, but essentially it was like a lot of biomechanical load on some like kind of weak points and ended up with three stress fractures in my pelvis and so I dropped out. I've dropped out of a couple of races since then, but it's generally been to like protect my health, to say, you know what, like something's off, I you know, by stopping. Now I'm going to be out for a couple of weeks, versus being out for months or a year. This spring at Madeira, I rolled my foot really badly, and Madeira, the goal was to like get a big Verdi race in, but my big A goal was a hundred mile race actually not that far from where I'm sitting here in Washington state in July and I was like you know what? I'm not hurt yet, but if I run 20 more miles downhill on this bad foot, I'm like worried that I'll miss the race that I really want to get on the start line for this year. And so I think that there are races that I could have finished with the right mental goals in place and there are races that I'm happy I dropped out of because it was the right decision, either because it wasn't the A race or I was being protective of injury, et cetera. So it's like there's no, there's not a right or wrong answer. I think generally people know like I think you know like I regretted dropping out of UTMB in 2019. I have zero regret about dropping out of Madeira this April. So I think it's like you know, you know within the day or within a couple of days if you made the right call or not. And I think that's like generally pretty hyper individual. But I'm yeah, I'm not a not not a death before DNF person and I don't think it's made it easier or harder to drop out of races Like Cape Town was hard and I was like, nope, I'm good as long as I'm not hurt, like we're just going to keep working the problems even though I don't feel awesome.

Speaker 1: 22:21

They're actually ugly. Arguably, the regret of dropping out of UTMB might mean that you're more likely to push through the next one Totally If you've done it. Yeah, interesting. So when did you start moving more towards the media side of trial then?

Speaker 3: 22:38

Yeah, I think I got invited in to do some live commentary at UTMB in 2018 after I finished on. I finished fourth at TDS that year and one of the commentators from Washington State he saw that I was from Bellingham, washington, and he was like we should bring her in. And that was probably. I joked that that was like their worst idea ever, because they brought me in and I just like didn't leave and so I helped out in 2019 with OCC again and then pandemic happened in heading into 2021. I was invited to be part of the first ever commentary team for Western States and being and I think that was just because I had done a little bit of commentary at UTMB by accident and then that became like a full fledged commentary career, so to speak. I'm not making big money on it by any means, but I think it was one of those like proof of concept situations where they wanted a male and a female commentator. Like my name came up really quickly and it's been kind of like history ever since. It helped in 2021 that I wasn't running. I was dealing with the stress fracture that took me out for the entire season, so I had some extra time on my hands as well, and then the long running joke in our household is that my husband was tired of hearing me talk about running and wanted me to find some other people to talk to about running, and so podcasting has come out of that and working live race commentary has come out of that, and I think my brain, just like naturally, is really good at remembering kind of asinine details about strangers. Instead of like the periodic table or like practical information, like tax information or anything that I like probably should remember, I can tell you you know who ran what last year at Western States type of thing, which is, I don't know, probably a bad secret talent.

Speaker 1: 24:33

Well, the first one you did, going into it. How did you approach it? Because now, as you say, it has changed a lot. There are far more races who are doing live commentary, but also not just live commentary. There is more opportunity to actually look at stats to see who's doing what in races, to actually see people running in their styles. But going in, even even three years ago, the amount of information available was dramatically different. But how did? How did you prep for your first commentary?

Speaker 3: 25:07

Yeah, I mean, the stuff I did in 2018 and 2019 were zero prep. Those were like accidental commentary for 2021. I think I was honestly way more nervous to do a bunch of pre-race interviews that week because I wasn't really podcasting a whole lot yet. And we those one on one, or Dylan and I sitting down with someone and doing a 20 minute interview, like just asking like the one question and wanting the one question to land well, that created way more stress for me than being like okay, you're going to talk on air for 20 hours. Like that seemed like an okay, an okay challenge. But I'm a I would say I'm a high consumer of ultra running media in general, like I. I mean, they're my peers too, which is probably helpful, like I'm 33. Most of the people I'm talking about are my friends, my teammates, people I've been watching come up in the sport, people I've admired in the sport for years. I feel like I know them personally, which means I feel like the background research I have to do is doesn't feel like research. It's just like, oh, I'm checking in on my friend who I want to like, oh, had that race go for them, etc. So there is like a little bit of cursory research, particularly for athletes I'm less familiar with, like athletes coming in internationally to Western States, for example. I want to make sure that I sort of know how to say their name and I'm more familiar with results they've done. Or I reach out to someone that knows them just to see, like, how training has gone, etc. But for the most part I feel like once again it's like I'm a high consumer of running media and, for whatever reason, my brain holds on to every single piece of it. Like you won't see me with like a bunch of notes doing live commentary historically. Like I'm not sitting there with Google Docs open or or anything like that. Like I've got split docs because I want to know if we're on on or off course record paces. But other outside of that, it's like, for whatever reason, my brain just holds on to everything it's ever heard about anyone running and I can generally recall it pretty quickly, which is again a bad secret talent I do.

Speaker 1: 27:17

Well, I mean it's, I think it's been ready to apply yourself. I'm sure if you were interested with those, those tax documents, you might, might learn those just as well. And so, in terms of your relationship then with UTMB is an organization. Well, there's, there's two things really. There's there's one, the observing things that you wish were different, and but that's very different to actually feeling comfortable talking about it and comfortable talking about it on on air. But when, when did when did that evolve?

Speaker 3: 27:57

Yeah, I mean I think I intersect the organization at a lot of different levels. To like, I'm a member of the Pro Trail Running Association Board as well. So I'm in a lot of like background conversations with big entities, big race series outside of UTMB, to Golden Trail World Series, skyrunning World Series, the World Trail majors, now with Western States etc. Kind of working for the athletes and working for the community. The stuff that we've done on air is, you know, I think, pretty authentic and genuine to who we are as people. We're talking about what we're seeing in front of us. At the same time, like you know, we're balancing this line of generally speaking, when we're on contract to do live commentary for a race weekend. We're not really unbiased journalists. We're working for the organization, so we try to, we try to reflect that in our commentary. Right, you're not going to hear us say disparaging things on air If something bad has happened. On course, you know we're getting kind of the background information and saying, hey, we want you guys to, you guys need to address this, you guys cannot address this, etc. Because they want. You know anyone wants to control the flow of media coming in and out of races as they're, as they're happening, which I think is fair to the organization. If they are, they want us to speak accurately about a situation that might be unfolding, for like for someone's safety, for example, or if there's been a medical emergency. On course they. The expectation is that we're not going to speculate about it, that we're going to provide facts when we have them, because I think speculation is where things kind of get, can get off the rails a little bit. But when it comes to like being, you know, being able to talk about certain things on air, like equity, for example, and making sure we're covering both fields equally, I think a lot of that actually comes from the fact that we're not we're not broadcasting on TV, right? It's not like there's this disconnect between me and the audience. You're not watching, you're not tuning into ESPN or or Euro Sport to watch a by UTMB race or Western States, for example. You're watching it on YouTube, which means there's like this direct interaction with the audience. Ie, they're in the chat, right, and that chat is live and it is sometimes great and it is sometimes awful. And you know the names often you know their names, you know who they are. They're cheering for their friends, they're cheering for their family members, they're cheering for significant others or teammates, etc. Or you know, you've seen them in the live chat over and over again. So you, you know, you interacted with them in a race a couple of weeks ago and you're going to interact with them again in a couple of weeks. So it's this very interesting community viewing opportunity that a lot of major sports don't experience, at least not on the primary streaming source right. Other big events. They might be this this might be happening in discord channels or on other other watching platforms, but the main platform doesn't have that feature and I think because of that, when we're in the booth, we are also accountable to what's happening in the chat, and some of it's ignoring it, some of it's flooding it. If there's, if there's trolls in the chat, you'll definitely be here. You will definitely hear me say on air hey, let us know where you're watching from, let us know who you're cheering on, because that will pump 300 comments into the live chat that completely like floods out the trolls, because all of a sudden we'll have 300 comments saying I'm watching from Thailand, I'm cheering for number 432, or I'm watching from you know, hello from Denmark. All that kind of stuff Like that is. That's really cool that we have that, that control. But that also means that they're like hey, like what's happening in the women's race? Or hey, what's happening X, y or Z, like we see that and we're beholden to that in a way. The customer is not only always right, but they're always present in the situation, and so I think it becomes our job in studio to say hey, like we are, we are camera. You know, our camera is waiting at this aid station and as soon as, you know, engvild Casperson gets there, we're gonna like, we're gonna show it live. Like right now, our camera is ahead with such and such person, but they are waiting to intercept the women at this at this point in time, et cetera, and some of that's like we know what the filming schedule is, and that has definitely evolved too to us. Sometimes We've done live commentary gigs where we can actually see all of the camera angles from the studio, in which we don't just see the live feed. We see, you know the three drones and the eight camera runners, et cetera, and we'll be like you know, dylan and I have been on air being like show us camera 42, or show you know, show us camera seven or drone one, et cetera. You'll hear that at Broken Arrow, for example, we've oftentimes been able to see all the cameras from our end and if we don't have a back end communication to the production team, you'll hear us just call out camera numbers, like on air, because we're like oh, that's actually, we're looking for Mika and Mika is there right now, type of thing. When it comes to bigger productions like UTMB or Western States, the production team is generally just outside the doors of where we're sitting. So that might mean that myself or Martin or Keith are muting ourselves and running into the other room to get the answer from the production team to say and you'll hear us on air be like, hey, okay, so we are waiting for our women at this location or waiting for our men at this location. Let me go get you an ETA when we're going to pick them up next. And one of us is literally running out of the booth into the production room to ask that question because we want that answer right now, type of thing. So it's, it becomes us kind of calling it out on air because we're signaling to the production team like, hey, this is a question that's coming up. Or it's us being, like, quelling the needs of our audience via the live chat and it's way easier just to say it on air, to say, hey, we're going to get you such and such, you know shot as soon as it happens, type of thing. Or you know, we're going to go replay this thing that we missed because we had to go to commercial, because this is otherwise a free viewing experience, etc. So it's, it's I think it's protective of the production a little bit, but hopefully also quells the quells, the fears, or quells the angst in the chat, as opposed to, like I'm not trying to like light them up, I'm not trying to, like you know, create a riot in the chat. It's more like a we're on the same team and as soon as this happens, you know we're going to bring it to you, type of thing. So it's more of a hopefully like a comfort than a let's, you know, rah, rah, rah, get stuff super fired up.

Speaker 1: 34:19

Because I think one of the challenges is especially that when what I've found, when things go wrong, it tends to be filming the women. I don't know what. I know what. I do know why. It's because the first cameras are going through with more space, they have the first test of the connections. It's when you're then trying to ensure that camera runners are in different positions, that they're not crowded out by people, and so, even if, even if all the right intent in the world, you don't end up with an equal offering.

Speaker 3: 34:54

Yeah, or you miss the woman because you know they're wearing a baseball cap and you didn't see their ponytail. Or, like you, it's a different woman than you expected to be in the lead and they're not wearing X, y or Z traditional uniform.

Speaker 1: 35:05

It's raining, they've taken their jacket off, or yeah, totally Like it's.

Speaker 3: 35:10

It's kind of a cluster and it's. I know that. You know one thing that Golden Trail I think is done really right in some of that case is is completely separate the two races out so that you have a dedicated day, therefore a dedicating viewing experience to the women and a dedicated day and dedicated viewing experience to the men. Cross-country mountain biking does the same thing, et cetera, kind of in their Olympic format. And I think that that is that is complicated in trail and ultra running, particularly as you get into the longer races, and sometimes we allocate enough resources to both races and sometimes we don't. Sometimes the answer of why we didn't see X, y or Z runner at this location was because our camera runners are tired, and I get it. They're putting in mega weekends to bring everything for us. But then my, my ask is like, well, why didn't we hire one more person? Or why didn't we hire two more people? Like, why, like, really making sure that we're allocating resources the best we can? We've done that with live commentators that are kind of more on course correspondence in the U? S at a couple of races where the first time we did it, we realized that you know if you were going to have Leah Yingling, for example, at this aid station, if you were having her bumped to another aid station and she's the only one out there you're going to miss something because she's got to get to the next aid station in time for the next man to come through there or to make sure she doesn't miss the men coming through their type of thing. And so Aeroviper, which I think has done a really good job in pioneering a bunch of this in the ultra endurance but lower budget at times, more like passion projects, making you know we're going to buy four star links of our own to make this happen, type of thing. What they pull off is amazing. But one of the things they've added is a secondary on course correspondence. So then they're not having one person needing to bump ahead so they don't miss someone. It's like Leah's following the women and Zach is following the men and we're going to have a dedicated course correspondent. Or they are leapfrogging each other to aid stations so they're going to, you know, one will start covering as soon as they get there and when the next correspondent comes there they get to bump ahead and we've got someone on the ground to not miss anything in races. Those races are generally like we don't have the cell service to offer continuous runner coverage, ie we're not using e-bikes or, potentially, runners with go pros etc. Or even drones in some of these areas due to permitting, due to cell connectivity etc. So you're more reliant on static cameras in some of these races and therefore we're using core correspondence to bump the aid stations, which is a big deal. In races like the UTMB races, where you are reliant on a better data network and you can have like e-bikes or runners, like camera runners with the runners, I think you need to allocate two complete teams and like very clearly allocate two complete teams. So it's not like oh well, they've got to go back up the hill to pick up the woman and it's like okay, why don't we just have a secondary team that's picking up the women there? Why is it this one guy's job to get back up there to cover the women and we're going to miss maybe two kilometers of them running down this road because our camera bikers didn't get up there in time, type of thing Like in my mind those are easy fixes that shouldn't be problems to begin with.

Speaker 1: 38:18

Although actually with good coordination they don't have to go back. They just wait and carry on and someone else films. They just film different sections.

Speaker 3: 38:27

Totally. Yeah, you can leave.

Speaker 1: 38:30

Prague for sure, Because with Golden Trial the visual output is the product in many ways, Whereas UTMB obviously it's all about it's far more about ticket sales, because it's a mass participation spot. So how do you think they see the visual output? Because why do you think the men, the men's and the women's has been substantially different.

Speaker 3: 38:59

Yeah, and it's interesting. So I'm actually working with a professor in the UK and I would say I'm working with them in the sense that I'm a connection point. They've done 99% of the work, but we've run an audit on this past year's OCCCCC and UTMB, kind of by the minute. And then we're also looking at some quality control stuff, like if you're just looking at M1 through M3 and F1 through F3, or if you're just looking at, or if you're including the top 10, or if you're including key sections where people were missed, ie Grancle Ferre or in the Chormyre aid station, etc. So we've run an audit on it and it's almost done and we'll be publishing those findings as we get it. Who's the heeding?

Speaker 1: 39:38

that with Hadabin just.

Speaker 3: 39:39

Oh, I'll have to pull up their name, carl. But it's really cool Like they watch everything on two times speed to make it happen and, you know, like God bless them because it's like not probably not the most exciting thing to do to watch, I don't know, 30 hours at two times speed but some interesting like stuff coming up there where it's like some things got better, some things got worse. If you include certain sections versus other sections it gets really bad type of thing. I don't know, there's no necessarily like in a participant mass participation sport. I don't know if the juice is always worth the squeeze to put out a live broadcast sometimes. And it's so novel still that, like any broadcast, is a good broadcast type of sensation. Right, because it's not. It's still so novel. It's like if we have a stream, it's amazing type of thing. But I think that's slowly changing. I think a lot of it is still a group of concept like IE. If we can pull this off, do we have a marketable product? Is this another revenue stream for us? Can we? Are we selling ads for it? Is the ads covering the cost of the broadcast or is it covering more than the cost of the broadcast? Is this something that we can sell to a larger distributor for more dollars to come in, etc. I think it's probably what's your instinct? telling you on that.

Speaker 1: 41:07

Of like if it's profitable or what the goal is just if it's profitable now, but because, say, with GoldenTrial, I know the intent is to keep on growing it and at some point to have lots of channels around the world, paying a lot of money to be part of it. To stream it yeah, yeah, and you can see that, you can visualize that happening. It's a two-hour product and it is something that's it's commercial friendly.

Speaker 3: 41:37

It's TV friendly. I think the marathon du Mont Blanc is probably one of the few that doesn't quite fit, or maybe series and all even gets a little bit long, but for the most part, if you're in that, 90-minute to two-hour block, all of a sudden you can make a really good product. Or if you're working with an hour block, can you or a 90-minute block, can you do 30 minutes of really good kind of quick post-production recap to get people up to speed really quickly so you're not missing those early attacks. But this is akin to the iron manization of the sport. It's the Olympicization of the sport. The TV readiness of a sport also indicates could it be an Olympic sport in a lot of ways and can we make it in a format that is palatable, that is televisable etc. Which I think has a lot of pros but potentially could have cons? I know Cross-City Mountain Biking had a lot of growing pains in becoming an Olympic formatted sport. They do a looped course. It's very televisable, it's 90 minutes from start to finish. Basically that is very viewer-friendly but is a slow movement away from one big looped courses that we used to see in Cross-City Mountain Biking. The shorter distance trail racing probably has more of that, not going to lose its culture, not going to lose its flavor by making it televisable. But I do think longer ultras have a bigger hurdle there. As far as the, it's a niche sport, it's a participation, sport and you're asking people to watch a live broadcast for 20 hours. I think that narrows the functionality of it in a big way. Is it still awesome? Yes, do I still spend a lot of hours on it? Yes, are there a lot of people who will keep it on from start to finish at a race like Western States or UTMB Sure, like they do, which is bonkers? They put it on their phones. They can go for their run around the block and continue to listen to it. They're not even watching it, they're just listening to it. Sometimes even but I don't know that that is without really good recap. Higher-paced, quicker, more interesting short-form media. I don't think that. It's like. I can't imagine a mass audience sitting down for 20 hours of UTMB coverage.

Speaker 1: 44:21

Yeah, true, but if you think back to, one of the issues partly at the moment, is that Courtney's so good and she's won everything. She's won it easily, whereas, say you look at the men's race at UTMB last year and the year before, there were lots of different attacks, there were overtakes, there were quite a lot of points, which doesn't always happen. Actually, if you're telling the story of that race is interesting and understanding the different backgrounds of the people and even their approaches coming into it and seeing some people like Zach Miller suddenly doing well and Tom Evans going out hard and Kylian coming back, all these narratives were there and the last two years have been.

Speaker 3: 45:13

I'd argue. Sport always gets a little boring when there's a guaranteed winner. That was the Nino years of professional men's cross-country mountain biking. I was like oh, nino's gonna win again, great. Or oh, julian Epsilon's gonna win again so exciting. Remy almost has that a little bit where you're like oh cool, remy's gonna win again. You want the battle and I think that. That's why doing commentary for Broken Arrow is so much fun, because it is this short, fast attacks. Or constant OCC during UTMB man, that race is really exciting because it's never really a blowout. People are like there's crazy attacks being thrown late in the race. All of a sudden there's someone different in the lead at Le Fleger or whatever it is. I think that that can be possible in the long races. We've seen it at Western States, We've seen it at UTMB. But it also means that the spread becomes more and more and more. If all of a sudden someone is out front by two hours, you're going back to figure out what's going on behind it. From a live broadcast standpoint you can totally cover it. It can be very interesting. You've got a couple of good, engaging commentators on your table and all of a sudden, yeah, you can keep people engaged for a very long time. But I do think that the longer the race, the harder it is to be. The production is less about the performances and more about how you're talking about the characters and you kind of go into podcast mode a little bit.

Speaker 1: 46:52

You're like oh, let's talk about nutrition.

Speaker 3: 46:55

Let's talk about using polls or not using polls. Let's talk about what's in their pack. Let's talk about what happens in X, y or Z, weather conditions, etc. It becomes less about the blow-by-blow of people making moves and more about the complete holistic, ultra-running experience, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's just very different than being a play-by-play for 90 minutes.

Speaker 1: 47:19

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the challenge is if it becomes a regular, even talking on Goldchall for two hours, there's only so many times you want to talk about nutrition when that's what you're having to rely on as the entertainment, because, sure, it's fine for the first two times you do it, but someone tuning for the fourth episode doesn't want to be hearing about nutrition again and like, oh, I don't care how many carbs that you eat an hour yeah.

Speaker 3: 47:47

Yeah, and at the same time, it's like if you have novel audience coming in every time, there are some like introductory concepts or topics that you want to cover because you want to explain the format of the race or the format of the series, or the X, y or Z person needs this many points and this is why they need this many points. Like there are going to be those things that come up over and over again just because you can't, while most of your audience isn't going to be new, there will always be new people tuning in and you don't want them to be lost either. And so that's kind of like the balancing act you have of like keeping people who are very knowledgeable engaged while also keeping people who are brand new to the sport or brand new to the I don't know how they found you on YouTube type of thing. You want them to also be like oh okay, I can kind of figure out what's going on here and I'm not lost by any means.

Speaker 1: 48:35

With the professional showrunners association. How? Because when that first came out I saw who was involved in first. I was like, oh wow, this is a big deal and but there was an element of there's. There's an element of it being almost sad that it has to exist is great that it does, but also and inevitability about the fact there's three, four, five different organizations who are, you know, fighting for dominance, who really want athletes to be dedicated to their series, which is causing these conflicts, which all the all the will in the world is very hard to get organizations to actually change, to adapt, to allow for other organizations to also have space as such. But how have you found the? What do you think the impact it's had with the association and what kind of conversations and has there been feedback like it has it been has given you faith in how the sport will develop and the organizations will interplay with each other, or do you think it's it's going down a path that it's going to be difficult until there are fewer big players?

Speaker 3: 50:06

Yeah, there's definitely this like power dynamic in play right now. I do think that, broadly speaking, it's been really good because it's given the athletes kind of a unified voice to have conversations with these entities. You know, before it'd be like, you know, just one off athletes trying to maybe talk to someone, or a sponsor talking to someone. Like now it's like we're hosting a meeting with every single race entity, right, and it's like we're talking about, you know, their equity, their plans for equity, their plans for environmental causes, their plans for you know what kind of assistance they're giving to the athletes. Like, what is the value they're bringing to the athletes? What are the expectations of the athletes who are taking part in a series? It kind of gives the athletes more. It gives the athletes a seat at the table that they've never had before, right. Like maybe it's like the race structure just happens to like an athlete and we'll listen to them, type of thing. But this gives, when it becomes the default, to be like, oh, we need to talk to the PTA about the 2024 race calendar that gives the athletes a seat at the table. And sometimes it's just like being like yep, like we're happy with where things are going, like we will pass on this information to our athletes, etc. And sometimes it's like oh, like, actually, have you considered doing it this way? Or have you considered adding this resource? Or have you considered, you know, like, actually, when you have this ask, this is what it means for the athletes, type of thing. And it's been, I think, largely very positive.

Speaker 1: 51:35

At least from the athlete side. What would you say the main things you're having to feed back, or are the more common requests of changes?

Speaker 3: 51:44

Yeah, I think the big thing is like us trying to talk to them about scheduling in general just to be like, hey, like this is where conflict, this is where we're feeling conflict, this is where we're feeling there's room for athletes to take part in more than one series. This is where we want to see you grow and allow us to grow as well. A lot of our talks have been about anti doping In the sport. We've moved away, thankfully, from like the quartz system to more mainstream anti doping, both from like the ITA, which is International Testing Agency in Switzerland, to now we've got countries that are actually bringing athletes into the Adams program. Both Spain and France have kind of adopted, have decided that trail runners are legit enough athletes to be part of the Adams program, so they're bringing on athletes for out of competition testing in those countries. But we're seeing that within race organizations as well, of trying to find common ground within an organization so that one off race directors aren't completely footing the bill for something where they might be paying for anti doping to take place in competition at their event but then at the finals there's no anti doping, for example. Like just trying to try to make things equitable for the races that are part of these series if the races aren't all owned by the same entity has been a big one. A lot of it's been about support of the athletes as far as like is there a certain amount of commitment from the athletes and if they commit x, y or z, you know they're going to do three races in your series and it's going to be. You know this, this and this, like what does that mean for for bibs, for accommodations, for helping the sponsored athletes, for the not sponsored athletes has been a big thing too. Like, many of us have great support from our sponsors for travel, for race entries, etc. But there are a lot of athletes that don't have very good support where they're paying out of their pockets, they're taking on credit card debt. They particularly athletes from, not from Western Europe or from the US, you know, south American athletes, african athletes, asian athletes are generally aren't on some of the more traditional contracts that we're seeing out of Western Europe and out of the US, and so be just making race directors aware or race series aware that actually, like some of these athletes, if you gave them the opportunity to opt out of this support, they're spot you know if they say, hey, if your sponsor can take on x, y or z thing, we can actually allocate this money to an upcoming athlete who doesn't have that support, or an athlete coming out of South America who doesn't have a sponsorship or has a sponsorship but doesn't have. You know it's, they're getting gear, they're not getting travel assistance, etc. It's been, I think, some of that stuff which all kind of falls under the like DI equity paradigm a little bit. And then it's been about surveying athletes, kind of after a season two, to be like Well, what are the athletes actually care about? And then we've been able to kind of turn around and provide that information to race organizations like the Skyrunning World Series and the Golden Trail World Series, as far as, like, we asked the athletes and you know 200 of them responded and this is the things that they cared about and these are the things that they didn't care about. To be like where, where are our time and money and energy? Being like where those resources actually going to? I think has been really paramount. We've also just been on a lot of like inside conversations with race entities about pregnancy deferrals and environmental initiatives and you know kind of more of the DI inclusivity stuff. It's been. I feel like a lot of stuff is like closed doors, critical conversations, and they should really be more public, but those have largely been kind of the pillars that we're working with race organizations on, and then internally we're doing things like helping athletes with contracts and contract literacy, kind of understanding how and when to approach brands. It's kind of like a lot of educational stuff for the athletes as far as like how can we support them in their careers and give them the resources where they might not have it Because, you know, maybe they don't have a manager Most of us don't have a manager type of thing. How can we provide them with resources to make the best decisions for them and for their careers? Both brand new athletes to the sport and athletes that have been in the sport for a decade Turns out all actually need very similar resources.

Speaker 1: 55:55

I mean, I think the biggest thing they need is understanding their value, because it's one thing to understand a contract and to negotiate or to be able to ask for certain things, but if you're asking for £100 and your real value is £5,000, that's the biggest problem and that's the issue of people coming in don't know that.

Speaker 3: 56:17

Yeah, and with NDAs, right, there's a limited ability to communicate about some of this stuff and so actually having kind of like a centralized group of lawyers who can both like see through the legal jargon but also can say, you know, like we know, what your results are. We've seen other contracts. I can't tell you what those other contracts are valued at, but I can tell you that this is a bad deal or this is actually very like on par for what the market is offering right now, like just having someone else see the number and be like I'd ask for this or can you see if they? Maybe they won't budge on this number, but maybe they'll budge on this other number. Maybe they'll give you more money for healthcare, you know, for massage, physio, strength, etc. Or maybe they'll give you a bigger travel budget, right, versus your retainer, versus your bonus structure. There's lots of different pots that money is allocated into, some very sure and some very kind of up in the air. But having someone to talk, to talk to about that who has seen, you know, most of the other current contracts in the industry helps both new athletes and old athletes understand, like if they're getting a fair shake or if, like they, they need to ask for a little bit more than what they're currently being offered.

Speaker 1: 57:26

And would you say there are some brands that are squeezing the juice a lot more than others, and some that are just giving away the pie.

Speaker 3: 57:33

I think, from what I've from the conversations I've had with athletes this year, I think that generally speaking, there's a good upward trend as far as like what people who are on contracts are getting paid. I think the industry has had an ambassador problem for a long time where we call people professionals but they're really, they're really a brand ambassador, and so that's allowed people to work for free for a very long time. So that is slowly changing. And then I think the other part too is just understanding what your expectations are for a brand. Ie. There are some brands that might not be like fun to work with. Maybe they pay really well, and that's that's a choice you have to make. Like, are you okay? Like being kind of solo and getting paid well and maybe not having your needs met in other ways? Is that worth more than a company who's, you know, got a bunch of financial assets that aside to cover X, y and Z thing, and they, you know, sometimes the offers are not completely financial, sometimes their support in other ways, be it social media, be it brand building, be it community support, etc. I think athletes kind of need to know what they, what they want from their contract, from that brand relationship, because I'll hear complaints from athletes about X, y or Z brand and I'm like you should have known that going in like they, this X, y or Z brand is not known for caring about X, y or Z thing. Like you, like anyone could have told you that, like your expectations were not aligned when you came into that project, when you came into that partnership, and that's just like every. It's like people have different personalities, brands of different personalities to, and I think that instead of gatekeeping that information, the PTA allows us to kind of share that information amongst our members and or up and coming members. People might, who might not be on contracts yet. Like it allows for information sharing and gatekeeping of that information.

Speaker 1: 59:31

Any, any brands you'd like to to paint at all the row under the any personalities or just personalities or.

Speaker 3: 59:39

Oh yeah, just broadly right, there's going to be brands that are more kind of team oriented and that, like you either want that or you don't want that, and you might think you want it, and then you get into it and you're like, oh, this is actually like a bigger ask than I thought, or whatever, or which I don't think is a bad thing. So brands that you know might say, say one thing and do something completely different, or yeah, I don't know, there's their brand, bad brands out there at the moment. you say their brands where you have to be in the good boys club for sure. It's like maybe they're, probably they've got a bunch of athletes on contract but if you're not in the good boys club, you, like you may or may not exist, type of thing. And I've definitely heard from athletes who who had a great performance and suddenly realized that they were now in the good boys club and it was very different than their experience. You know, 72 hours before that type of thing. So I think it's like, yeah there's, you got to know what you're getting into and that changes with brand, that changes with changes with, like, marketing directors. Even you know you get someone else that comes in and takes over as global marketing director or your team marketing manager. That has a lot of sway, right. Like I joked, for a long time I was on like a very my very first contract ever was with Solomon, but it was with the North American Solomon contract, which was like a I got a little bit of money but it's basically ambassador. And there are a bunch of us that joked that Solomon didn't sponsor us. Mike Ambrose sponsored us and Mike Ambrose for those who who know Mike, he's been in the industry for a long time worked for Solomon both in the US and in Europe, now works for normal. He sent me one of his own headlamps for TDS in 2018 because I like was like, oh my god, I need a second headlamp. I didn't know that, like he mailed me the traveling rain pants, like Courtney DeWalter, to use for something, and then I was going to use them for TDS and I was going to send someone else and then he literally also like Mailed me one of his personal headlamps because I needed a second one. So there are people like that in the sport to or like maybe your contract isn't great, maybe you're, you know, like you're undervalued or I don't know. You're just like you're brand new to the sport and your contract is very small. But the person that's responsible for your contract Even if they wanted to pay you more and they can't type of thing like the way they take care of you also can go a long way for an athlete and so it was saying we're saying Mike sucked up so much of the budget that he felt guilty enough.

Speaker 1: 1:01:58

They had to just show.

Speaker 3: 1:02:00

I think he had no control over that he was nice enough that he wrote in a box of cookies to my contract to I adore Mike Ambrose but yeah, no, like he, he like financially couldn't do a lot for us. Like his budget was like super shoestring but Like you get on the phone with him and he'd be like okay, like how can I help? Like how can I help make this thing work? Or like how can I like help, like what can I send you to like make this easier type of thing. So it was like the brand might have shoestring him but like he went above and beyond for the athletes he was responsible for, which is you know, like I think Courtney had been signed maybe the year before that as like a brand new kind of like kind of just come out of the scene at a bracey, had been signed. I think when I was signed, like we were like this like little rag tag group in North American trail runners and Mike, yeah, on a shoestring budget, made us all feel very like cared for and that that's like that value is not. You're not going to get that value from other brands potentially. I'm happy that I'm on a better contract, just like in general at this point, but like I also have a great manager, like our marketing manager with the D. This is amazing and Rob takes. Rob is family and that will be different. If I, if I left and went somewhere else like I'd be trading that For something else and you said there really be credit you'd really think critically about what you actually want out of those contracts as pros, because sometimes you're roped in for not very much and it can be. I don't know. People are like you're a professional athlete, that must be so fun and some days it's really fun and some days it's not not that fun.

Speaker 1: 1:03:38

Yeah, and you know we, we've been saying to athletes quite a few times in the past if, if you've been sponsored or ambassadors, and the actual added stress of having to deliver extras sometimes isn't worth the payoffs of having a little bit of extra kit. And so then, in terms of and in terms of your kind of relationship with, with commentary, with UTMB, then where do you what, where do you see the fallouts happening? What, what, what do you think led to this composition? Is it your work with the professional Chairman of the Association? Has it been a few comments on air? Has it been? What do you put it down to?

Speaker 3: 1:04:18

I think it's probably very multi factorial. I think that and you know I've I'm waiting to have another conversation with them. They asked talk to me a week ago and I responded right away saying yes, and then it's been crickets ever since. So who knows what's going on over at UTMB HQ. But it was I don't think it was a comment on air. I don't think one comments on air. I don't think it was one comment not on air type of thing. It was Kind of a misalignment of what their expectations were for me and what my expectations were for my job In a recent conversation. It was you know well, you're a spokesperson for UTMB and and therefore we don't want you to be critical of the organization I was like well, hold on, like I am not a spokesperson for UTMB, I am, I'm a paid commentator and I am on a you know, basically a handshake contract that says I will work. You know these five events this year and these are the dates for them. This is the agreed upon like daily rate for those events Done type of thing. And I think that I've been very diplomatic in how I've largely been critical of them, both on air and off air, in so much as to say is like when I'm on air with them it's like, yeah, I'm, I'm working for the event, I am working for Trans Volcania or Val d'Oran or whatever it is and my job is to Do justice to that event and to the competitors were watching on the screen and to make sure that they all feel. You know, I joke that I do it for the moms. I get text messages from many mothers of runners who are racing, you know, thanking, thanking us to be like. You know it's really great to see you know so and so finish. But when I'm not, when I'm not being paid for that work, my allegiances to the community and my allegiances to the professional trail runners and my allegiances to the athletes that I coach, my allegiance isn't to the entity. I'm not a spokesperson. I'm not a paid spokesperson. If they want to pay me to be a spokesperson, that is another, another story. But it's not what I'm paid for. I'm paid to do live commentary for X number of events on X number of days and I personally think that me being critical of them, both privately in these ptr a meetings with them, and publicly at times saying like hey, like you need to reevaluate your relationship or how you're doing business here, there, etc. I think has largely been very diplomatic. I don't think I've gone around hashtagging anything fbtnb at this point, but I do think that that was where the issue was for them was that I was publicly critical of the organization and that didn't align with how they thought I should be speaking about them. I will say that in my mind me agreeing to work with them while being critical of them, for a lot of people brought credibility to UTMB because it was like well, maybe, like, maybe there's hope here, like current is still working for them, maybe there's hope here, maybe she knows something we don't know, maybe there is good still in this. In this event and I don't think they saw it that way I don't think they were happy with the audit that we're running on the live broadcast. I don't think that surely I mean which benefits them, benefits the race, benefits.

Speaker 1: 1:07:40

I was instantly thinking that'd be great to do, about going to, like Greg would love to have, that he'd love to know the area. Are we doing a?

Speaker 3: 1:07:48

good job, right like yeah, no, and it's good for me to like, as a commentator, I want to make sure that we're doing a good job, and so I think that it's kind of I think it's short-sighted is my impression of it that it's short-sighted, that it?

Speaker 1: 1:08:00

was defensive, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 1:08:02

Yes, and it's like you know. I think other people have been very critical of them, but they could kind of brush them off as fringe, like the green trail runners, for example. I think that they could say they're kind of a fringe group, we're just going to ignore them and they'll go away. I think me being a public figure and being someone affiliated with them and any into any degree was something that they couldn't just like brush aside to a certain degree and decided that, like me, just not working for them was going to be the best way forward. I think it had the opposite response to what we thought was going to happen. I also don't think that they thought I was going to tell anyone, and I don't know why they would think that if they're telling me that I'm not allowed to, they're unhappy that I am publicly criticizing them and that I am speaking out about decisions they're making. I can't believe that they didn't think I was going to say anything and so now they're upset that I said anything and it's just like I I'm not on contract for that. I'm not. I don't have an NDA with you. I don't have any sort of a confidentially clause with you. I literally have like an email with a greed number of events with an agreed daily pay rate. Like I'm not, I'm not in anyone's pocket. Like I'm the voice for my community and the voice for our sport and I am like that is who I am beholden to, that that's who I owe stuff to. I don't owe UTMB anything in that regard. So I think it was very rash and has backfired and I would not want to be the UTMB PR person because their job just cannot be fun right now.

Speaker 1: 1:09:37

Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker 3: 1:09:38

Like I'm still being tagged on things on Instagram. Like their job cannot be fun right now.

Speaker 1: 1:09:43

And this was especially the timing of it with Gary Robbins as well. It seemed to be in a one. One error is almost not forgivable, but at least you can. You can say that hopefully they'll learn from this. It's maybe not indicative of the organization. To back to back you're like, oh boy, wow.

Speaker 3: 1:10:05

Yeah, you could be like this isn't malicious, this is just like you know them not reading the room or being tone deaf, etc. I think when it's like this continual thing that becomes an issue. I think the stuff with Gary probably is largely more in relationship to, like Iron Man's involvement in the North American by UTMB series and like a disconnect between them and the trail running community and a disconnect between Iron man North America and the European, like European UTMB, like I think there's some disconnects there that need to be recognized, and so I think the way that I think about the brand is that they're very consiled and that's probably where a lot of that issue came from. Versus me being let go by. Utmb is directly related to a few individuals in the French office and so it's like a bad double whammy from two very different sides of the brand and I just it's yeah, I again would not want to be their PR person.

Speaker 1: 1:10:56

So these conversations that they've said they want to have, if they turn around and said, look, we've had a think, do you want to come back?

Speaker 3: 1:11:06

What would I do?

Speaker 1: 1:11:07

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:11:09

Yeah, oh, like we're so sorry, like my bad, like he wasn't. He actually didn't have the power to do that to you type of thing. They could do that.

Speaker 1: 1:11:16

That was a draft email sent by accident.

Speaker 3: 1:11:19

We didn't mean to trick you into having a conversation that you thought was going to be about Doyantinon, and it was not about Doyantinon. No, I, what I've I've had some conversations with people, both like on and off the record about this, and I, you know, they asked, you know, was this is this definite, is this indefinite? Like, is the door closed forever? Like what did they say, type of thing, and I was like, you know, they said the door is closed for now, but I don't know what that means, because I'm not going to change, like I have nothing to apologize for, I have nothing I haven't, I have said nothing that I want to retract, so to speak. And I feel like, in my mind, it's it's them who has to change. It's their, their policies that have to change. It's the way they handle business that has to change, it's the way they interact with the community that has to change. It's it's all those things. And so it's like, yeah, we can move forward, but it's not me who actually has to do the moving forward, it's it's them. And so in my mind it feels pretty definite, because I don't see them making those changes. So I don't think they're going to come back and be like, oh, oopsies, we gave him, we gave him permission to have that meeting with you and that wasn't a good idea. I don't think that that's going to happen, but I think there will be more private conversations with them at some point in time, assuming they respond to my email and I just, yeah, I can't. I can't see them just saying like, oh, we're sorry, like that was, that was a mistake on our end. I don't think that that's genuine, nor do I think that actually fixes the problem here. The problem that I was feeling because I the stress that I have had has been, was all pre this meeting with them. Like I've been feeling the stress for a long time of being a professional athlete, being a coach, being the editor-in-chief at free trail, being on the board of the PTA, trying to be diplomatic in these podcast interviews and these conversations I'm having with race directors in the sport, my relationships with private race directors in the sport. You know, like Gary is one of my role models, like I've known Gary since I started trail running. Jim Beal Curry is one of my role models, like he is hugely influential in my life and it's like I felt this dissonance and this, this tug of like feeling like I was trying to be on all sides at the same time and I don't think it needs to be this big us versus them, you're either against us or you're with us Like I think that is nonsense and that was part of the conversation with them too. Is that I'm against them and I was like well, I'm not against you, I just have some opinions about how you should be behaving, and I think that I think that that is part of the issue, and so all my stress pre that meeting with them was really about just like feeling like I couldn't do right for the people that I'm really supposed to be supporting and protecting and so, in a way, you can be my life a lot easier because now I can just support the people who I think are for our community and working to make the sport as good as possible.

Speaker 1: 1:14:37

And if you have like a magic wand, like what would be the changes if you say, if they said look, we've realized you're, all of your views are valid. What changes do you want us to make? What would the big ones be?

Speaker 3: 1:14:52

Oh man, it's a business talk, right? It's like in my mind. I think what they've probably been most upset about is that I've said that they're like, that they're monopolizing the sport, and that I've called it the iron manization of the sport, because we've seen iron man do this historically right. Like, oh, we want to do, we want to buy challenge penticton. Well, challenge penticton doesn't want to sell to us, so we're going to create, we're going to create Iron man Whistler, which happens to compete directly with it, etc.

Speaker 1: 1:15:18

Like they've, iron man has a history of kind of eating its young, so to speak of like, of cannibalizing a sport to like have full control over it, which in some ways is probably not as bad in Iron man, because they did create, you know. Iron man and they, you know it was it was their concept and where's UTMB is an upstart really compared to a?

Speaker 3: 1:15:45

lot of races. You can't cannibalize trail running. That's not. I mean we. It's not. That's the antithesis of trail running, right? Trail running is a bunch of people who are non conformists who want to go run around in the woods with snacks and their friends and try to do really hard things. Like that's very non conformist. And then you have this, the Iron Manization effect of the sport via UTMB, the UTMB World Series, where you form sole control over the entity. And you're right, there are other races that are going on. Why can't you go and do X, y or Z local race instead? Or as well, as has been their argument? You can do both is their argument. But I think if you want everyone in the sport to want to apply to the UTMB lottery, to get into the lottery right now, you need about 11 stones. To try to get an actual spot in one of the UTMB races you need 11 stones. Races are worth one to three stones and stones are good for two years. So you need to be doing two to three by UTMB races a year to have a shot in the lottery. Like the pros have it pretty easy. We have to go to a race with the qualify we're in. We're not doing two to three by UTMB races a year just to have a chance in the lottery, and in my mind that creates a system of haves and have nots. That creates a financial barrier, because if that's what you're doing, you don't have the PTO like the paytime off, you don't have the the budget or the physical bandwidth to also do the cool local race down the street from you or the cool race a couple hours away from you that you know a local, a quote unquote local race director puts on. And so in my mind, that's probably why UTMB is really upset with me is that I have I have said that I have made that my position stance of saying that, like I think it was a mistake to create a self-encompassing world series in which to go to the finals you have to do not just one by UTMB race, but you really have to do many a year, that that feels like you will automatically create a financial barrier and or geographic barrier, which will become financial as well, and which people really can't do. That part of the sport and you're gonna like people are they're gonna be completely in the sport or in the in the UTMB version of the sport, or they're gonna be on the other side of that, and I think that that was a mistake on their end. I think the old system where you could collect points from doing local races and you needed x wires, the amount of points to UTMB versus CCC, etc was a better system was a more was not a perfect system, but was a more equitable system for the lottery, and I don't know that they will ever be able to go back to that, and I think that that will eventually create two different trail running ecosystems one in which you are within the UTMB system largely, or one where you do other races, and I don't know what that will mean for the elites, I don't know. I don't know what that will mean for the general participation of folks in the sport, but I do think that that's what will happen and I don't think that UTMB can fix that without completely going back on what they've created over the past two years of having a. I think it's 41 races now. But yeah, it's just. I think that's a big issue, that's probably my biggest issue and I don't think it can be fixed, unfortunately, which just makes me not want to give them my money and makes me want to support, wants me, makes me want to run Squamish 50 and run rabbit run 100 and Translaconia, and you know the slate, the slate ultra that Mike Jones is going to put on like it, makes me want to support those folks. Go to have Alina, that kind of stuff versus you know, go do a race created solely to be part of the UTMB World Series.

Speaker 1: 1:19:39

And do you think, because when I look down your post, Instagram naturally flags to the viewer the names that it knows are commented who are going to have the biggest impact on the viewer either people they know, or followers, or, and it was very, very notable, just the level of people who were supporting you on the post. But do you think the wider community, these 3000 people signing up to a random UTMB race in a place I never heard of do you think they're feeling this lack of connection with the, the elites and with the old heart of trail running?

Speaker 3: 1:20:19

I think people who are newer to the sport won't know or won't like, really won't really feel that. I think people who have been around the sport for a while have seen and felt that change at these bigger races. I think particularly the North American audience and the European audience is a little bit different because you're used to bigger production races where there's several thousand runners in the race in a trail race we just don't have that in the US because of permitting issues. So most of our races at the big end are probably 1000 runners type of thing. But you know, western States is 369 runners High Lonesome I think is slowly moving up to about 250 runners. I just interviewed a race director earlier today where, like their big race, they have a limit of 475 runners for 50K. It's like we don't. Our races are just a lot smaller due to that, and so you can feel the difference, if you're like, if you go over to European race in general, and then you can feel a difference in, like, the more recent additions of those races as well, as it's been kind of this like amplified growth, so I think that it's going to be. There are people, though, who have reached out to me or my husband or friends of mine who maybe they were going to do CCC this year, or maybe they were going to put in for the lottery, and they're just, they're not going to anymore, and people who are going to you know, they've already signed up and put the money down on canyons and they're going to run canyons but they really they're not going to go sign up for something else later in the year, type of thing. So I think that it's a. I think UTMB is at a crossroads and at a tipping point and and at a tipping point and hopefully they can make some better moves. But I think if they continue to make moves that they have in the last couple of weeks and couple of months, that is going to be harder and harder and they're going to alienate certain communities.

Speaker 1: 1:22:02

But I'm just curious to see what that looks like. Do you think western states can be decoupled?

Speaker 3: 1:22:08

I don't think it's going to decouple anytime soon. I'm sure their contract goes through at least this year, if not another year, because that's one that's a title sponsor contract with Hoka, for example, and then it's also a partnership with the UTMB World Series, which is probably at least a three year relationship. They're not a buy UTMB race like many other races or like other other races in the series. That is a buy UTMB race. They are technically independent. Hence the reason I'll be doing commentary for western states. We run that commentary team and live broadcast production in-house, completely with Billy Yang being the person in charge of it. But, that being said, I think that they have historically viewed that relationship as positive and I think that that has felt very strained as of late. And a lot of that relationship goes back to the Pilates, and Katrina and Michelle have a really strong relationship with the Western States board, and I have nothing against the Pilates. I think that the Pilates are really interesting individuals. I think that the business end of the sport feels very different and disconnected from that, and so I think that they're trying to figure out how to throw the needle between their personal relationship with people like the Pilates and the race and the community and I think western states has largely felt like they can be positively influential on UTMB as kind of this sister organization, the sister race, and I'm curious to see how that changes and shifts over the course of the coming months and a year and what that might look like heading into 2025. But there will be no immediate change for 2024. And that's how business works. It's really hard to decouple contracts, particularly when contracts have monetary value and you're a non-profit and it's like you have margins and very thin margins to make things work.

Speaker 1: 1:24:07

Yeah, interesting. Well, we've. I'm conscious of time because we do have some. I knew it was going to go longer than the usual hour, but I'll just quickly look at it. Do you have any time for questions at all?

Speaker 3: 1:24:21

Yeah, we can do some rapidifier stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:24:25

So let's have a look. We've had one from UltraSophie. Oh, I know UltraSophie. Yeah, she's. Thanked you for your coverage of UTMB last year. You're commitment to 50-50. What do you think needs to change in order for the for them to actually deliver 50-50 next year?

Speaker 3: 1:24:45

Well, I think they need to accept our audit when we give it to them and I think they need to allocate appropriate resources and I think that needs to be both in the people on the ground, ie the cameras allocated. But then I think they really that needs to be reflected in how we consciously discuss the plan going into the race with the commentary teams, because there were some really big but easy misses last year, like overnight in Cormier could have been phenomenal and they, accidentally, they didn't have really they didn't have a plan for it essentially in my in my eyes, because some of this is definitely unplanned, where they interviewed the crew for the top three men and then didn't talk to any of the women's crew. They they largely didn't like we didn't actually get to see the women come through there. So there's some really big misses that were very obvious and I think they need maybe even a dedicated, like truly dedicated production person just to the women's race who can be the person pinging the commentary teams, pinging the on the ground teams, etc. Just to almost be like constant reminders of like hey, like this thing's really important, you need to make sure that we're coming back around to it. But like, again, keith Byrne and I were the only commentator commentary team that stayed on through the top 10 women in UTMB. Our entire production team left, it was just Keith and I and luckily nothing crashed while we were on air. But all other commentary teams left after the top five women and Keith and I stayed because we had covered the top 10 men and we weren't going to not cover the top 10 women, and so Keith and I popped champagne in the studio by ourselves and stayed on, stayed on air until we got them all home. And it was Lucy. Bartholomew was in 10th. It was great, like it was really, really cool. What legends you know so it's like, and that wasn't us going above and beyond, that was us doing like the bare minimum for the women and I think that that that needs to change, like the minimum expectations need to be elevated.

Speaker 1: 1:26:39

And does it feel like they are?

Speaker 3: 1:26:42

I feel like, like people getting hearing the message. I don't know and I'm a little bit scared that I was the squeaky wheel and I'm a little bit worried, if I'm not there to be the constant squeaky wheel, that that there could be some issues there. But at least with the other PTA I can still be very squeaky and so I'm hopeful that we can have some accountability there.

Speaker 1: 1:27:03

And the hope is as well. You know the way GoldenTrader doing things so dramatically different that actually it raises the standard for everyone. So I've got a quick question Last one from Ellen. Wow, ellen's trying to quickly read her message, yeah Well, her question was just about how do you take, what do you make of the Darcy UTMB sponsorship?

Speaker 3: 1:27:34

Well, there are some really great minutes from a behind the scenes conversation between the environmental working group of the PTA and UTMB and the green runners and I think that some of it was heard and some of it wasn't heard. I think that we're going to see more sponsorship from quote unquote non endemic sponsors, ie people who are outside of the traditional trail and ultra running community. We've asked both UTMB and Dotsa to be more thoughtful with what exactly like the ad material is, what exactly that partnership looks like, etc. To be on track with specific environmental initiatives that UTMB is supposed to be holding holding true to. I think that that was a very interesting move, but I have to imagine it was a financially advantageous move and that is something that people have to always weigh, and they've been quoted as saying, well, they're also making these affordable EVs etc. But that wasn't the initial ad. Marketing material wasn't about electric vehicles, it was about adventure vehicles. But I think that there's also this idea that we have to be perfect advocates in the environmental space and the in the quality space, etc. I've talked to a lot of environmental advocacy folks about this, where sometimes you don't want to say anything or look at any of these relationships because you can be critical of it. But do you drive a gas car? I guess it's kind of like the thing there. It's like you can be critical of it, but what are you doing in your personal life? We're also driving gas vehicles and not always bringing our real vehicles and not always bringing our recyclable cups, and probably living inefficient homes that don't have solar or whatever, etc. I wouldn't have been the move that I made for UTMB, but I think that there's this notion that it's also the race organization that is asking athletes to fly all over the world, and many of us are flying all over the world to do this sport and I think that a lot of us, both from the big it's a very wandering answer. I think that for both the big organizations like UTMB and the individual runners, both professionally and community-based, need to just evaluate what they think their responsibility is to the planet and all of us try to act better and act accordingly and then also call your people in local and regional and statewide and countrywide government to put stricter penalties on big oil and big gas, and that's a big deal I think people forget to do that kind of stuff of. We blame a lot of the biggest polluters in the world and a lot of the biggest carbon producers in the world have convinced us that it's all our fault and that we are the biggest problem, and really it's these big entities and big companies that are most the problem. And again, this is like the craziest, most wandering answer to this, but I think what I'm trying to say is that it's not simple. Was it a good move? Probably not. Is it a simple answer? Definitely not, and I think, both as individuals and entities, we have to be more thoughtful of how we're interacting with carbon and the world more broadly.

Speaker 1: 1:30:58

Yeah, absolutely Well, if people want to. There's so many ways in which people can follow you. But what are the big things you're pushing right now, or what are the best ways people can continue hearing your views?

Speaker 3: 1:31:10

Totally. You can hear me rant very regularly and hopefully as coherently as I did here over on the Trail Society podcast that I host with Keely Heninger and Hilary Allen. We put that out every other week. We're affiliated with FreeTrail so you can find us via the FreeTrail website. And then I'm on social media I think on everything at just at my name at Corinne Malcolm, where you can find mostly photos of my dog but also hot takes on the Trail and Ultra community etc. And then I think those are the big ones. Yeah, social media at Corinne Malcolm and then the Trail Society podcast is generally where I do most of my ranting, so I encourage people to go give that a listen as well.

Speaker 1: 1:31:55

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Good luck with your email responses over the next few weeks and I can't wait for Western States next year, but hopefully there'll be plenty more commentating opportunities before then.

Speaker 3: 1:32:09

Yeah, hopefully I'll see you at some short trail race this year too.

Speaker 1: 1:32:13

Do it. That's so much for fun. They're great and they're more equitable. Cheers, corinne. Thanks, so much, cheers, thank you so there you go, do badders. That is the well. Really interesting to get her view on what happened with her relationship with UTMB and also how UTMB has changed over these years. And inevitably, with any organization becoming so big and suck up so many people into trail running, it's going to make mistakes and there will be issues. And I mean it's been incredible to see just how many people do have been running trail races, ultra trail, these last two years, primarily down to UTMB. But question mark is it now too big, too all-encompassing, and will it be responsible with the power it now has? But if you've liked this episode, other episodes that would be good to listen to that are along similar themes. We spoke to her by Brian Metzler, the founder of trail running, a few weeks ago where we talked a little bit about growing pains within the sport. If you wanted to just listen to episodes about UTMB itself, we interviewed Pap Kapé, winner of UTMB, probably about two years ago really good episode where he was talking about phoning up people during the race to give a motivation Western States. We've talked about a few times with Jim Wormsley an amazing interview actually, where he talks about how he got into trail running and actually it was through quite a dark place which we went into and how trail running really gave him the light of a point in his life where he's working on a nuclear base and was kind of being singled out by the person in charge and just going through a torrid time Another great episode to listen to. And we also spoke to Damian Hall about when he came forth at UTMB and how he managed to do that. Perfecting really what he saw is probably the best result he'd be able to get at a race like that. I can't remember which episode that is, because we've spoken to Damo maybe three times down because he's such a great person to have on the podcast. But if you've got any suggestions for future guests, then do message me at David at badboyruncom or directly on the Instagram, and if you can review us on Spotify or wherever you're listening to this, it really helps with our credibility and get good guests in the future. So back to you next time. Bye.