🗞 The Scoop: Wrapping Up a Challenging 2025 and Looking Forward to 2026 by EmKay Sullivan

If you’ve been following along with the Sub Hub podcast this year, it will be no surprise to you that the last 16 months has been a bit challenging for both Dani and myself. I mostly speak for myself, but I’m sure Dani would agree that the podcast has brought a mix of joy and sadness to our lives as I loved to be able to be involved in trail running somehow but sometimes found it very hard to engage with a sport that I couldn’t participate in. 2026 is looking up with the birth of my child, a “new” Achilles tendon and Dani finishing up her pinky toe recovery! I know I can’t wait to get back out on the trails to race hard and celebrate this wonderful sport. Here are some of the things that I’m looking forward to in 2026:

Healthy Healthy Bodies!

Although it’s still a work in progress I am incredibly excited at the idea of lining up for a trail season healthy. I’ve been dealing with nagging Achilles issues for a couple of years now and I finally was able to address it with a surgery to remove a Haglund’s deformity from under the tendon. During pregnancy we also found a tear in the insertion point of my Achilles tendon that has likely been there since December of last year. As weird as this may sound, I think surgery may be a blessing in disguise for this obsessive runner! 3 weeks post pregnancy I was already champing at the bit to run, but my torn tendon and my very smart and patient coach made sure that I didn’t rush back into it after delivery. I feel confident that when I come out of this phase of life my pelvic floor, my bones and my tendons will be recovered from birth and ready to rip! My big hope for Dani is that she also stays healthy and neither of us requires any more surgeries or boots!!

Trail Runners Qualifying for the Olympic Trials

The Olympic Trials Marathon qualifying window officially opened on September 1 of this year and will remain open for the next 2 years plus a little. As trail running in the U.S. attracts faster and faster athletes every year, I hope we see a major uptick in trail athletes qualifying for the 2028 trials. Y’all all know that Dani and I are huge fans of a road block to prepare you for a long trail season, and I think plenty of our top athletes in the sport are fully capable of qualifying if they decide to run a marathon sometime in their winter off season. It will be fun to see how many people are actually interested in going after this standard and showing some roadies that our little trail legs have some pop to them!

The Rise of World Trail Majors 50K Category

The World Trail Majors debuted in 2024 as what felt like a reaction to all of the UTMB controversy at the time. The 2024 season only included races that were 100K and above, so for the Sub Hub it didn’t feel like that relevant of a series to cover. In 2025, WTM added a 50K category, but it still didn’t feel like it got enough hype as the season went on. It feels like a much more low stakes commitment than a series like Golden Trail as you only have to run 2 races to be included in the final ranking. The races are similarly all over the globe, but at least one of them is likely “close by”. The winner of the
short series makes $9000 at the end of the season, which feels like a substantial amount of money for anyone who wouldn’t be as competitive at a UTMB Finals or Majors races. Or even as a bonus for someone who would be! I’m hoping that year two of the short series gets a little bit more hype and we see WTM take off as an alternative or additional series in people’s schedules.

More U.S. Sub-Ultra Athletes Rocking Sponsors

And finally, I want to continue to see sub-ultra athletes in the U.S. being supported. We have an exciting podcast coming up with a team manager that we think has been tyring to make this happen and I would argue has been quite successful. Whether you see it as a jumping off point for ultra or as a life long event to be pursued - short trail is a great way to develop athletes in this sport in a healthy way. These athletes are also able to race more frequently than a long trail, which has to be a bonus for any brand. Selfishly I also just think that short trail races are way more exciting for me when we are sending great U.S. athletes to actually compete with the European and African athletes. I don’t want to spoil the upcoming episode, but you’ll know when it hits. SPONSOR MORE SHORT TRAIL ATHLETES!

What are you looking forward to in 2026? Shoot us a DM on Instagram and let us know!!

Trail Throwback

Now our new feature section, Trail Throwback, for all the stat junkies (like ourselves 🙃), history buffs, and trail nerds who love connecting dots between past and present. A quick look back at the performances and people who built the sport we love.

Since the Skyrunner® World Series wrapped this month, we’re taking it back to the origins of one of the most influential mountain-running movements ever.

Fun Fact: Skyrunning didn’t start as a sport — it started as mountaineers racing each other.

According to the International Skyrunning Federation (ISF) and historical accounts:

• Skyrunning was born in 1992, when Italian mountaineer Marino Giacometti and fellow climbers began holding high-altitude races across the Himalayas, the Rockies, Mount Kenya, and the Mexican Volcanoes.
  Their training idea? Run to altitude as fast as possible — then run back down even faster.

• By 1995, Giacometti founded the Federation for Sport at Altitude (FSA) to formalize the sport.

• In 2004, the Skyrunner® World Series officially launched, bringing together the most iconic, technical, high-altitude races in the world and giving skyrunning a unified competitive circuit.

• The FSA later evolved into the International Skyrunning Federation in 2008, which still governs the sport today and now oversees more than 200 races worldwide with athletes from 65+ countries.

Essentially: Skyrunning didn’t follow the rules — it created its own.

What Makes Skyrunning… Skyrunning?

The ISF defines skyrunning as mountain running above 2,000 meters, on courses with steep inclines (often over 30%) and technical difficulty no harder than a low-grade climb.
Translation:
🏔️ big vert
🏔️ big exposure
🏔️ big consequences
🏔️ and terrain that humbles even the greats

The sport eventually broke into seven disciplines:
Sky, Ultra, Vertical, SkySpeed, Vertical Running (skyscraper racing), SkyBike, and SkyRaid.

Trail Training Tip: Vitamin D☀️

As winter officially settles in across the Northern Hemisphere, don’t forget to keep an eye on your Vitamin D levels.

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Cleveland Clinic, Vitamin D deficiency can feel like:

• Heavy legs + early fatigue (similar to low iron)

• Muscle weakness or slower recovery

• Low energy or sluggishness throughout the day

• Mood dips, especially in winter

• Increased soreness or achiness

• More frequent colds / lowered immunity

Basically… all the things that make winter training feel twice as hard.

So this is your gentle nudge to get your levels checked, lean into sunlight when possible, and consider supplementing if your doctor recommends it.

Winter mileage feels very different when your body actually has what it needs to thrive.

And that’s a wrap on 2025.

A year of wild swings, world titles, breakout stars, and more storylines than we can count.

Rest up. Celebrate well.
And we’ll see you all back in January with our Short Trail Picks for top athletes of the 2025.