Hey, fam. Welcome to the free trail podcast. Of course, I'm your host, Dylan Bowman.

Back with a little bonus

episode here in order to make an important announcement. That is that today, Free Trail is proud

to announce the launch of Trail Runner of the Year, a new annual award recognizing the top 10

best trail athletes globally for the 2022 competitive trail racing season.

Who will be the trail MVP?

Here to help me make the announcement is free trail team member and the inventor of the

fantasy trail running platform, the software engineering wizard, Mr. Travis Longcar. Travis is also responsible

for building our new Trail Runner of the Year platform, the topic of our conversation today.

So it only felt right that he helped me make this fun announcement. I'll keep the intro short

because the info that you will need is contained in our discussion,

but I'll just drop a few bullet points here at the beginning.

First, Trail Runner of the Year voting is open now.

There is a link in the show notes, or you can visit fantasy.com and navigate to the voting page.

Voting will be open for two weeks, closing at 12 p.m. Pacific

time on Tuesday, December 20th. Second, the vote is open to everyone. That's right. Full democratization

means that we want your participation and your voice to be heard in this voting process. Go vote 10 deep

for who you think were the best performers in the world for 2022. Third thing, this vote is

distance agnostic, so short course specialists should be considered against their long course

counterparts. We want to recognize

all the different specializations of trail runners and felt this was the best way to do so. And finally,

this award is for trail running only. While we have deep respect for those who race on the roads

...