Welcome back or welcome to the Single Track podcast. I'm your host, Finn Melanson, and in this episode, I am joined by Brian Metzler, an award-winning sports journalist, writer, and photographer from Boulder, who has produced storytelling content for publications like Outside, Trail Runner, Runner's World competitor, and Sports Illustrated, as well as several books,

including Kixology and Trail Running Illustrated. We talked through a lot of interesting topics

in this conversation, including the value of trail running journalism, how sports marketing

is changing, pro athlete welfare, and the evolution of UTMB. Before we get started, this episode is brought to you by Rabbit.

Rabbit makes the absolute best trail running apparel in the game.

So if you're in the market for new kit and you want to support this show in the process,

use code single track 20 at checkout on their website for 20% off your next order.

With that, let's get started. Brian Metzler, it's a pleasure to have you on the single track podcast.

Yeah, stoked to be here. Thanks for, thanks for inviting me.

There are four categories that I want to hang around in this conversation.

The first one is, I'll call it

the content preferences of trail running fans. And as I was preparing for this conversation,

I was just thinking about other sports. And I know for the record, trail running is a totally

unique entity with its own historical forces. But most other sports have media outlets that are totally dedicated

to the professional part of the sport.

And one of the things that's unique about our sport is almost every single media outlet,

with few exceptions, is mixing in training content, gear reviews, other human interest storylines alongside pro race coverage.

And I have a bunch of questions off this, but the first one is, do you think that there is

enough fandom in our sport for there to be a self-sustaining pro-trawerning media outlet right now?

That's a really good question.

I think that you certainly hit the nail on the head. I mean, with fandom, I think that if you look at other sports, basketball, football, baseball, all those, soccer, I think that, you know, largely

the audience is spectators, right? Certainly people play those sports on their own or did play those sports.

...