Spartan Trail with Josue Stephens | KoopCast Episode 32

what's going on trail and ultra runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host Jason Koop appreciate everybody tuning in to the podcast today and hey let's face it the trail and ultra marathon race scene has changed tremendously over the course of the last several months and i am not just talking about the covid19 pandemic i'm talking about some of the larger race organizers out there that are starting to wade into the waters of trail and ultra marathon running we saw this with lifetime fitness as they acquired the leadbill trail 100 series we saw this with iron man as they start to get into trail and ultra marathoning as well and relevant to this podcast that you're about to listen to spartan obstacle course racing they have started trail and ultra marathon races that are a part of their ocr race network and in addition to that they have partnered with some of the most iconic races around the world to create the spartan trail world championships and i know a lot of the trail runners out there today are thinking what is this all about if i go to a race like trans grand canaria which is a race that they partnered with that i was at earlier this year is the race going to feel different am i going to have to pay

a different amount is there going to be a festival like atmosphere associated with the race and in addition to that if you go to a spartan trail race that's associated with their existing ocr races what is that all about do i have to pay a parking fee what's this festival atmosphere is there a band there will i be racing along all alongside all of these ocr races it is a little bit of a mystery to the average trail and ultra runner because it's not something that quite frankly we're very used to and so on the podcast today i brought i brought on jose stevens who's the director of project management i'm sorry product management at spartan and more importantly he is responsible for the trail running branch of spartan's business he is a trail and ultra runner himself and he's also a former race director he actually uh race directed the infamous copper canyon ultra marathon and i'm going to include some interesting articles about that race in the show notes you guys should go and check it out if you're not familiar with it it's kind of a crazy story crazy yeah whole chain of events that happened with that race but pertinent to this conversation jose was very open and honest and transparent about what spartan is doing in the trail and ultra marathon space and what runners should expect so i hope everybody listening comes to this podcast with an open mind as always

in an effort of full disclosure i have no financial entanglement with spartan they don't pay me a dime for anything i have never been asked by spartan to promote their products in any way shape or form they've never flown me out to a race or asked me to do anything for them i'm doing this so that the listeners understand what is going on with these partnerships that spartan is engaging in and what is going on with their foray into trail and ultra running that's it it's always for you guys it's always for the listeners so without any further ado here is my conversation with jose stevens from spartan all about their entry into trail and ultra running i was reading this morning that spartan is going to be like first back to the game in the mass participation space so are you are you okay with talking a little bit about that since it's a little topical and feel free to say no if it's if it's taboo or out of your wheelhouse or whatever i am i um i'm not as involved on the ocr side of things now now that trail has become a big thing that kind of separated it out um and this first event doesn't include a trail component um so but yeah perfectly happy to just okay well it's it's topical and i mean it literally came across my inbox

this morning and just to time stamp this a little bit since there's going to be a lag between when we record and when this gets released we're talking the morning of may 14th 2020 in the middle of the covet 19 pandemic and i feel that every time i record a podcast and i have it wait like a week in post-production some aspect of it becomes obsolete in that one week span of time i think this might be one as well but i mean needless to say that spartan is kind of like they they're they're taking the stance on the ocr side that they want to be one of the first people back into the mass participation space and you know i i find this from a business perspective it just fascinating because i understand the need to keep the public safety and the athlete's safety as the highest priority but it's not mutually exclusive with getting back to training and racing and things like that those two things can can coexist in a venn diagram that has some sort of overlap now how they can coexist i think is the kind of thing the thing that's kind of under contention so to set the stage a little bit spartan came out two days ago one day ago was this press release yesterday was this release this is like breaking news in terms of when we're recording it and i'm sure the social media is like is by the time this comes out has probably had its few rounds with it

so just yesterday came out and they said we're gonna have a sprint race sprint ocr race in florida jacksonville florida am i correct on that yeah jacksonville florida and like a lot of other organizations and industries whether you look at you know the restaurant industry or you look at retail they're kind of phasing in how they're coming back they're you know they're they're separating the participants they're having these kind of like wave starts and they're trying to ensure that they have more space and there's all these you know uh sanitation protocols that have been been put in place some of the obstacles have been uh have been removed all in an effort to blend this aspect that i was talking about earlier of getting back to the racing scene and also keeping the participation the participants safe so i mean what can you i know you don't have a huge involvement on the ocr side of things but what can you kind of like tell us about the inside and what is what what is the race essentially going to look like in the immediate future well you know joe led i don't know if you read the article or joe said it's going to be safer than an elevator or you know grocery shopping and looking at the infrastructure and everything i i can kind of agree with that i think you know when people think of mass participation events they they worry immediately they think about exposure but i you know i've been thinking about that as i go to the grocery store that it's probably one of the riskiest places to go um so i i think i i think that you know

spartan's taking the stance because you know it's sort of like uh if we are going to start when can we start when is the right time to start if not now when um internally the team really has been working on a plan on what things are going to look like when we can open up again really since this this whole thing started knowing that it was inevitable that we would start up again and we have to start up again if if um spartan wants to keep yeah stay alive it's an it's an event company after all um so i i the team has worked very very hard we we worked kind of on a general protocol of what spartan events will look like and then on the trail side of things we're working on a trail specific protocol because it's a little bit different if they're standalone events but what i can say is the team has taken a lot of precautions and everything that you see out there will be um will be implemented everything on the plan will be implemented um very very well and um spartan is spending you know also this isn't cheap to do you know post covet events are not cheap to do so spartan is actually spending a lot of extra money to to make this happen and not changing the ticket price so um you know i i wouldn't say it's for for some racers i've been reading some of the comments i i wouldn't say it's going to be the most comfortable experience you know nobody likes to run around in a mask um and gloves it's not going to be easy for for the organizers um either for the staff and the volunteers but uh i think spartan is trying to lead

the charge in saying hey we want to put on events again we want to put them on safely and um yeah and we'll see we'll see what happens we'll see how the the public reacts to well as as you guys are about to to find out since your second day into it right now and i'm sure this is these discussions have gone on behind the scenes i've been i've been a part of those operations from a camp perspective from an event management perspective for for years and and and have a good scope of you know these decisions don't just get made because a wild hair got put up somebody's butt like you have to like thoroughly you know go and think about these things what can you paint the picture at least initially in the in this in this in this very first 24 hours since this press release has kind of gone out like what has the public reaction been we had a sense of what it was going to be because a customer sentiment survey has been sent out so part of the the restart policy for every state every country where we operate is that it's this customer sentiment survey sent out to the database so we kind of had a feeling of what it was going to be like i would say it's been really very mixed almost 50 50 in a lot of ways i mean some people are saying too soon other people are saying what are you talking about i would say every other comment is almost exactly like it just keeps flipping right from so from from from one side to the other one side

to the other yeah it does and on a personal level i you know i almost feel like i i don't really know know what to think about it and i think a lot of people maybe are are are like that you know it's um you have you have to restart at some point um it's now being allowed you know in certain states and if you do it properly you know why not but then you know it's easy to think about the flip side are you guys gonna do any like any like follow up with the athletes in terms of you know contact tracing or if somebody does end up coming you know down with covet like do you have like a communication plan to you know the rest of the participant participant base or anything like that yeah yeah there is a there is a post event communication plan um contact tracing as far as like using an app or anything like that i mean right now it all depends on the technology but it is it is something that's in in a working sop okay well i i know i'm kind of throwing that at you last minute but the news was just so breaking man we can't we can't not talk about it right i mean this is just the it's the storyline that's dominating the landscape today and i i would i would be remiss and i think the listeners would be remiss to not at least hear some angle of that considering you guys are certainly the biggest and one of the first mass participatory types of events to come back into the fold and that you know people just want to hear hear the take on it hear the opinion on it you know

i hear georgia was allowing um i think uh atv some sort of motor sports events um i think it was last weekend supposedly there were thousands of people there and that's more of a you know spectator sport yeah it'll be interesting to unfold certainly and i think that um in terms of the conversation that we want to get into which is trail running specifics that's the audience here um it's going to be a hard thing to blend because we can't ignore the covet 19 pandemic but this but at the same time i want to kind of ignore it because we're going to have a light at the end of this tunnel eventually and who knows when it's going to be that's just prognosticating that you and i don't really need to get into but suffice it to say spartan is kind of they're planning their flag into the trail running space to a large extent i mean you guys have your own trail running events you guys have you guys have partnered with other trail running events to have spartan world championships and to have a broader impact uh outside of the events that um uh that you operate and so uh what i'm trying to uh what i'm trying to illustrate here is is that this at times this is going to be like this awkward conversation because you had all of these events that were planned out in the trail and ultra running space and now it's kind of a man like we don't know we don't know exactly what we don't know exactly what we're going to do with it so i want to try to capture is what like what was the plan pre-pandemic

in terms of trail and ultra running what would it what would it have looked like and like what from an athletic from a from an athlete perspective when an athlete goes to one of your events whether it's an event that is in conjunction with an ocr uh race or an event that is a spartan trail race or an event that you guys are in partnership with what does that kind of like look like look and feel like so that the so that the listeners out there when they see this and it's a brand that they have some vague familiarity with what should you know kind of what what should they expect because the you guys have done a brilliant job branding over the last several years to have these races where it's all these ripped muscular dudes and gals with their shirts off like doing these gnarly things and there's mud all over them and they're jumping over these obstacles and you know blood sweat mud guts and tears and all that kind of stuff and and if that's the extent of what trail runners know ocr to be there can be a little bit of a mismatch between perception and reality so i kind of want to paint that that that whole broad that whole broad picture during the course of this conversation sound good yeah yeah yeah definitely it's uh it probably helps to start kind of in the beginning like how did spartan get into trail and uh and all of that but one of my primary jobs is to get that sort of shirtless muscled at the start line look away

from spartan trail and that's kind of why spartan trail is now a little bit of a separate entity operating within spartan so that we can do that okay so let's start with the the genesis of it so spartan trail a lot it is coming into the scene i feel like you guys are coming in and seeing it's like the worst time in the world but you but it was it's it's obviously a strategic business decision i mean you guys have a huge user base over a hundred or sorry over a million participants annually correct in this in the spartan race 1.5 and the the trail running space as a whole is about a million people depending upon what estimate that you're uh uh that you're looking at but it's very fractured meaning there's not a larger organization a la iron man a la spartan and tough mutter that dominates a big part of the landscape they're like onesie twosie races for um for almost everything so take us back to the very beginning in terms of you know what the genesis of spartan trail was so at the very very beginning if you look at joe when he first started out i don't know if you knew he comes from the adventure racing world so eco challenge he also did um i think the grand slam of ultra running back in the day um i know he did back to back 100 milers in two weekends so he's

he's he's definitely no no newbie to um trail and this is the spartan ceo joe de senna yeah yeah yeah sorry uh joe de senna is the spartan ceo so he he kind of came in things from the long extreme um ultra endurance events and um and then spartan the race format as we know and now with ocr kind of came about sort of as a short format way to get people off the couch and to reach the masses um spartan trail kind of started up about two years ago sort of as a as an idea we have you know a lot of venues most of the the venues in the u.s are um private private venues and um some of them are ski venues and a lot of them are places where um other other race organizers don't really have access to those places we come in we have the numbers we have the relationships now with a lot of these um these venues and so part of the idea was a lot of times there's there's um plenty of of space to put on another race a trail race you know at the same time as an as an obstacle course race and there had been feedback you know through customer service and um a lot of the participants that people were looking to do just a run and um you know like maybe their their husband or wife is doing the obstacle course race and at the same time they want something to do um so the idea kind of grew from that a little bit like hey let's just put trail races on um at the existing venue it's uh not a whole lot of a lift and um and it

gives these people something to do um from that seed um obviously you know we started looking at things from the business perspective looking at the sport of trail running and seeing um where it was going and obviously it's growing quite a bit and the demand for it is um is increasing a lot so we decided to do in 2018 we did two test events um one in virginia one at one of our california events near la and it worked out pretty well i mean people really enjoyed the enjoyed it it seemed to fit well within the the ocr um format because you know there's a whole lot of noise you're talking five to ten thousand people that are doing an ocr event and then you've got your tiny little trail race our test races were 300 people so it was it was tiny um considering everything else going on that weekend but the feedback was was generally pretty good so for 2019 we launched a 13 13 events um in the us and then we did three um events three test events internationally to see how well it worked internationally and um and the feedback was very positive i mean in 2019 over 50 of the people that ran a trail race um based on our surveys were brand new to trail running they hadn't done they hadn't even done a spartan event in the past maybe a family member or someone had they've done road races maybe a 10k 5k but they were brand new to trail running so to us that was really really exciting and we led with shorter distances

i think we had that year we had a 10k and then what we call the 21k and now we've converted to a half marathon format um but that was exciting because we thought hey we're bringing in brand new people and maybe they're coming to do a spartan trail event um as their first trail race because maybe they're comfortable with the brand or they already have a family member that's coming in to do an ocr event they're intimidated by ocr but they but they're comfortable with the brand um so then we you know at the same time on in 2019 we were simultaneously i was working on the sport side of things and what trail running looks like at the upper end of the spectrum you know obviously my background i do a lot of um ultra distance races and um so that's that's sort of my passion is a longer format and then we do have an endurance um world within the spartan ocr world you've seen some of the ultra distance ocr events um so we were kind of working on that side of things and that's how these relationships with these longer races um kind of came about as part of our effort to really do with the short distance events kind of a bottom-up strategy and then a top-down with the longer more established events events um that joe likes to call halo events so existing events that have been around for a while like trans gran canaria and lavarado UTMB obviously um those are all those are all halo events so our strategy was to um partner with those events and create a world series that would attract um pro pro

racers you know elite racers and and to elevate trail running so i love the way that you painted that so with your initial like pilot data essentially you're taking your existing venues and for the most part your existing audience maybe not the participants because you'd mentioned some a lot of people coming in the trail race uh into the trail race specifically are new to trail running it might be new to a spartan race they're a family member or something like that but in large in large part you're leveraging your venue which already exists and creating another event for people to do within that venue and you're kind of leveraging your existence your existing audience to try to create some sort of template essentially and spartan trail has as you mentioned has these i don't know exactly how to describe it other than i i other than like two flavors or different flavors they're the events that spartan kind of owns and operates for lack of a better word and you can correct me on the ownership piece of it but they're kind of contained spartan events it's you guys running the show either whether it's in your ocr events or a specific trail event and then there are other events that you have partnered with to some extent to create a spartan world championship or a spartan race is that a correct interpretation of the business situation behind it yeah yeah exactly we've got

right now i'd say what we have is a sandwich we've got the piece of bread on the bottom and the piece of red on the top and there's still some filling to be figured out ultra runners love food analogy so that's gonna go over really well as you know right you know maybe we could make it like a burrito or something like that but sandwich will work with sandwiches common aid station food and ultra okay so let let's take let's take both slices of bread and and i want you to describe them because a lot of a lot of ultra runners are going to be familiar with the second slice of bread the existing races but not what you are bringing to the table with those events fewer runners are going to be familiar with the first slice of bread the events that you guys own and operate or are already part of some sort of ocr event so let's kind of like start there with the least known commodity in the whole equation the events that you guys kind of own and operate what what is an athlete going to experience when they go to a spartan trail race uh some are all all right um i was going to say some some might be turned off by it at first because they're not used to the loud and the music and this and that if you're if you're expecting to come in and see a little 10 by 10 with a table and grab your bib number five minutes before the event and take off running and there's a little inflatable larch that's that's not going to be the experience

because these are paired up with ocr events which are already pretty large you know they're generally in that five to ten thousand person range um it's you know it's going to be a little bit louder and you might be the the little trail runner that's next to all the muscled up guys in line you know to get to pick up your packet and it might feel a little bit intimidating um you know loud music playing or or you might say hey i dig this is a little bit of a different but there's a lot going on it's a festival atmosphere there's a lot there's a lot going on runners that have been to the north face endurance 50 championship which is now defunct or they might try to revive it who knows what's going to happen at the end of this but they're kind of they're kind of used to that festival atmosphere particularly at the finish line for that event where it's not just a finishing arch they've got a band you know playing in the background a bunch of food vendors people can kind of people can come hang out there's usually a cornhole tournament going on a bunch of vendors that are uh that are trying to you know sell and demo their wares and things like that spartan race is is not dissimilar to that where there's just a lot of things going on and also there there are several different events going on at the same time as well correct yeah we have quite a few distances i'm going back real quick to the to the um festival atmosphere and all of that and i think that's something that experience is probably within trail race is probably a little stranger in the u.s or a little more uncommon than it

is you know in europe or even you know in asia there are some very large events and trail events in asia as well where there is that you know anytime you have you know thousands and thousands of people the atmosphere is going to be a little bit louder the music is going to be louder there's going to be a lot more going on um so i think i i guess this will be a little more of a strange concept to maybe the u.s trail runner that hasn't gone to any other large events i mean even UTMB that's a big that's a big that's the example i was going to bring up whenever i have athletes that have no international experience and they go over to UTMB i spend the last couple months of coaching them like kind of preparing them for the atmosphere of the actual race and the city and our town and how busy it is and all the other things going on and hey watch all the videos just to make sure you that the that the hoopla around it isn't such a culture shock when you get over there so that's a good analogy i mean it's more akin to UTMB as as opposed to you know some of these low-key hunter modelers like the bear or wasatch or something like that yeah and our our trail culture in the u.s has evolved a little differently i think not been as commercialized um but yeah the experience is you know for some people it's great you come in there's a festival area and you know we call it the the festival area because it is a contained area and people do pay like a fee to enter even if they're not participating in the

event and we can we can get into that um a little more and uh you know there's a kids race available they're you know changing tents there are showers there's a bag check there's food and music um you know there are workouts and you know warm-ups and all sorts of different things in there uh you know most of it is geared toward the ocr because you're looking at you know that's 95 of the population that's that's there at the event um but as trail continues to grow you know we're starting to do more trail specific things last year we had a trail tent where we had um you know well-known trail runners would come in you know dean carnazes scott jurek was a um one of our events earlier in the year last year where people can come and meet you know meet them we had trail runner as a partner last year and they had magazines um there for people and uh yeah just just more you know also trail specific companies um tailwind um and all of that so so the infrastructure will continue to grow and be a little more trail centric in certain parts of the festival but i would say the experience will be pretty ocr within the festival once you go once you start the race and you do the start line we work pretty hard to make sure that the trail course is separate from the ocr and you're not mixing in with it you're not running alongside people they're also running you know doing obstacles um and depending on the venue you know you're in some beautiful single track and some really nice um

fairly gnarly terrain depending on we had a montana race unfortunately got canceled and i was excited about that trail race because it's a beautiful course and um we can do more with the trails in a trail race because we don't have to worry about where we're going to put obstacles so we can put people up and over a mountain where we wouldn't be able to consider that in an ocr because we can't put a wall up there we can't get a truck up there to get an obstacle so that's kind of cool i think um the team that organizes uh the courses puts the courses together has a lot of fun with that um but uh you know and then you get to the finish line it is kind of a loud uh experience with a loud announcer and you're getting your shirt and you do have a mixed finish line so you have people finishing the ocr event and you're finishing your trail race at the same time they're giving out the different medals um so that's that's what we call our quote-unquote regular season events and um that's the product that we that we started with when we started with what are the distances so we have um 10k uh half marathon and then 50k was added this year to those regular and you're doing all of i'm only in certain venues all potentially all of those in the same venue so can you can you since since you're trail runner ultra runner that's your background try to paint some of the differences between just the trail aesthetics of doing one of your

and we'll just take 50k because a lot of this audience is going to be ultra specific versus trail specific but just some of the trail some of the trail differences that there may or may not be between a 50k that you guys designed in this contained environment of the spartan venue versus a 50k like the rut or some other you know some other 50k that doesn't that doesn't have those those those boundaries associated with where they can and can't go yeah i would say hmm well the ruts kind of unfair because that's i know well sorry pick another one then that's like taking the pinnacle of like a cool race i love those guys over there so i would say we don't have anything like the rut but we do have some cool cool venues like you know tahoe for example squaw valley is um where spartans had their the world championships for a few years and we had a trail race there last year and you know you're running on a lot of the same trails you know we use the western states trail for for the trail um distance there so in terms of the experience a lot of it is venue dependent but um you know you're running on you're running on single track once you leave the festival and before you arrive in the festival you're out running the the race i would think you would feel like you're pretty much any other any other trail race um you know we we put together pretty pretty good courses um it's really the a couple of the nuances you know the

headband thing that came from from ocr potentially that's something that will change but everybody has a headband that has their race number on it um and that's kind of funny because when people come into registration and they get the headband i'm like what the heck is this for where's my number so those are a few things that kind of came from the ocr side and we're evaluating whether that flavor is something that's necessary with trail and um i think the headband really isn't so that'll probably be phasing out um the headband came into play with ocr because bib numbers would just tear off after people would go through obstacles so after a few years of bib numbers picking up thousands of bib numbers out on the course and no one having a number we just went to headbands um so people trail runners ask what's up with the silly headbands so suffice it to say the picture that you're that i'm trying to paint here is it's not too indifferent from a normal 50k like you guys aren't trying to like over contrive the course to have a bunch of loops or stay around the venue like you're trying to have like a natural course that fits the contours of the terrain just like any other trail race exactly and one of the things that we did when we started the trail um races we have a lot of great race directors with ocr and they're used to you know producing really high quality events with a lot of people so i would say on a level of expertise these ocr race directors are very very good but when it came to designing courses we said um we're not going to let them design the courses we're going to bring in

race directors from trail that already know what a trail course needs to look like to do it because there are there are differences in there so we brought in louis escobar the first year and he designed a lot of the courses and actually worked with the race directors to design them another guy chris brown we've had a lot of like trail runners and trail race directors that have come in um to design the courses so yeah at up to now all of the courses are designed by experienced trail race directors so that helps with more of that natural feel um they are limited sometimes like if you talk to lewis or somebody like that they'll tell you it's a pain in the butt sometimes you have to work with these venues because it is a little more restrictive i mean some are great like montana then other ones like our venue in in seattle is a little tougher you know you're running through cow fields some of the time and you're like how do i make this interesting oh trust me every race director out there wants some part of their course to be different because it there it improves the aesthetics or it improves some feature of the course but they're restricted by some permitting agency or not being able to fit as many people on that like a little one section of trail or whatever so those compromises that lewis is going through every race director feels those same pains it's never perfect you always have to you always have to make the best course possible given the constraints that you have from the forest service and the number of people that you want to fit on the course and safety and all of those things it's there's always a compromise yeah yeah 100 yeah so i would say experience wise when you're out on the

course you're having a trail experience i would say the the start and the finish line the festival atmosphere those are the things that might be the shock factor for some trail runners that are expecting just some low-key you know sitting on lawn chairs at the finish line drinking a beer type of experience which is fine i mean as long as they know what they're getting into um okay let's let's kind of let's let's try to forecast a little bit out to a theoretical perfect 2021 if that is going to actually happen can you get can you give the listeners some of like the scope and breadth of where these trail races the the first flavor of trail races that we've been talking about where they're going to exist how many and how many of them are there we don't have to go through the whole calendar but just just just generalize how many of them are going to be out there so the interesting thing about spartan is that you know we're a global company we we own and manage all of the u.s events all of the canada events now this is the first year um in canada that we we own and manage all of those events and then the rest of the world um we operate with um licensees essentially franchisees that buy the license to to own and operate spartan so when we started spartan trail we tested you know in the u.s we proved the concept in the u.s and then we also tested in a couple of other countries with our licensees um this year we gave the option to licensees to add trail to venues

that had enough space for it using the same format we had and we're up to close to 50 events or we let's let's talk pre-covid right um we were up to close to 50 events i'd have to take account now after the the cancellations to see where we are next year um with the licensee network we were going to have about 100 to 120 of these regular season trail events with distances from 10k up to 50k venue dependent so that's the thing like we had the opportunity to scale very very quickly with trail because of the licensee network yeah that and that's an incredible network right there and once again to my earlier point like you're leveraging the things that already exist now let's get kind of nitty-gritty and maybe some of the things that have been more contentious or more more discussed in the trail running space and let me first start out by by with a couple of caveats or just with a couple of my like personal thought thoughts first off there's there's always consternation around whenever a larger organization comes into a like a smaller entity that always happens there's always a little bit of friction we can go back to the leadville lifetime example which is a which is a great one that's uh endemic to the trail and ultra running space but if you broaden it out to any other participatory sport or even other business opportunities whenever a big company kind of

starts to play in the smaller companies waters or the smaller waters there's always friction and consternation that's and and and that's just that's just gonna happen the second thing that i'll say is that nobody owns trail running you know trail running belongs to the people not to one organization or another organization or another organization if whatever spartan iron man somebody else kind of comes in and wants to own and operate trail races my personal opinion is that they as long as they're adhering to like the culture and the ethos that has been established throughout decades before they came in great they should be able to to kind of play ball so with that being said we know that there's always going to be some friction and certainly there's been that i mean i think right out of the gate you know without no anybody knowing anything without you having run one single non-test event people are already throwing their hands up in the air and crying foul about this that and the other but we're going to start we're going to wade in those waters in kind of a little bit of a respectful way because i want the listeners to understand that it's not so i just want i just want to the listeners to understand the entire picture which we could start to paint so first off right off the bat somebody comes in and does a spartan trail race what's going to be the hit to their pocketbook in terms of the cost of the ticket um 10k i think 79 it varies depending on on location but i'll just

throw that out there yeah you're spending around you know that hundred dollar range depending on the distance a little more a little less between 80 to 100 and um and then you do have a parking fee in some places now spartan's starting to include it in most states where parking is now included in the registration fee and that can be anywhere from five to ten dollars and then there is the um if you have family or friends or anybody that's coming there's what used to be called the spectator fee which was 20 per person it's now called the festival festival pass um just because it talks a little more about what it is um 20 it doesn't get charged to you as as the runner it would be if you you bring anybody now with with the trail event we added uh one free pass per trail entry so if i'm running and i want to bring my my friend or my wife or one person then i get one free festival pass and then i have to pay the 20 for anybody else um that's participating so that's that's it um now quick caveat to that is that um that's all country dependent as well and region region dependent so in canada for example there were some parts of canada that didn't charge that festival fee a lot of it is also venue dependent if the venue has more of an open format like in squaw valley we never had a festival um pass because it's it's in the village the whole thing is integrated in the village

and no one's going to pay to get in there we keep it open um so a lot of it is dependent on that and in other countries most of them don't charge a festival and does the base price scale up based on the distance so they go up to the 50k it's more expensive it does so why don't you run through that a little bit like what does it scale up to in in in a lot of the venues um so yeah so just ballparking here and um i don't have uh any of the races open in front of me on the computer to to look at the exact pricing grid but we have kind of a pricing grid um it goes essentially from like 79 up to i believe 140 ish for the 50k so that's kind of the sliding scale and then it has instead of um doing date-based pricing where the price changes depending on dates like a lot of races do we do inventory based so the first 100 slots are x amount and then it goes up and so on and so forth and that's kind of standard across the board well let's get into the most controversial part now oh i appreciate you wanting to talk about this because it's it's it's made people's hair turn gray for whatever reason when when they when they look at this proposition and this is the formerly known as spectator fee which now is the festival fee festival fee is that what you're calling it now okay good rebrand by the way kudos to your marketing team i mean because you're you're charging for what the experience is like the previous connotation of the spectator fee it's like you're charging me for spectators no we're going to charge you for this like experience that you're having i think that's a better branding of that

that particular way to of that of that particular revenue line item but this is one of those areas that trail runners are just not used to and yeah going back to how i set this how i set this piece of the conversation up whenever trail runners are that or any group is just not used to something they're going to throw their hands up in the air and go oh well you know why do i now have to why do i now have to pay for that and i know that you've gotten feedback within the own ocr the endemic ocr community on this for years and now that you're coming into the trail running uh space i think suffice it to say for my observation from the outside looking in that that feedback is a little bit more ferocious against some sort of festival or spectator fee is that a fair assessment i believe so yeah i think that's one of the things that came out right when spartan launched his trail events at the end of 2018 there were some that hammered a little bit harder than others against us i i think so the big difference is that technically you know tough mudder and spartan are ocr right they essentially created obstacle course racing and were the leaders and so they charged they both charged for parking they both charged access fees for the festivals and that's just kind of how it goes and people complain about it but they kind of got used to it um it's part of that sport when we brought those practices into trail then that's when we got criticized because we're not used to that but if you look at at our side of it if you look at spartan

side of it it's like you can't create a trail race within the spartan infrastructure and then all of a sudden say trail racers don't have to pay this festival access fee but everybody else still does because then imagine we've got 10 000 people at that event yelling at us not the 300 truck truck no i so you got to look right no but that's a great way to paint it i mean this is a this is an event within a within a spartan event the trail component is an event within a spartan event and the rules kind of apply to the rules apply to everybody so my question for my question as a consumer and i want to go to these events i want to experience a spartan trail race and a spartan ocr race i've been to them but i haven't actually participated in one but what i want to know is is is it worth the price of admission since you're calling it a festival fee i'm going to use that vocabulary right you're you're this the spectators are paying a fee to go into to a festival now obviously you think that that the the cost of that is worth the price of admission but what is the feedback been from the people that are coming in as family members as spectators that then have to pay for this festival fee what do they get out of the experience so that's something that i think this whole trail thing um kicked it into motion last year where the production team said you know it's a fair question what is this fee for are people paying just

to come in and spectate and we're just you know capitalizing off of it and so they started a whole kind of a festival campaign internally to really turn the festival into something more exciting and create a better value proposition for for the for people paying you know coming in so i they've started adding things looking at adding you know djs and live music and um more more things for the kids to get engaged in so there are some things that we've been um testing in within spartan to make it more interesting i would say for the trail runner it's still difficult to come into an ocr festival and um you know to pay that festival fee and feel that you got your money's worth and i'm just just being up front it's probably not the best marketing for it but just because it is still ocr centric and some people are happy as a lark to pay um 20 bucks to stand um at the obstacles because we put all the key obstacles all the really interesting obstacles um and the way the course is designed it comes in and out of the festival and sometimes even above it with a bridge or underneath it um so if you're there watching your athlete or even if it's someone's first time spartan race and you're a parent you don't give a crap that you paid 20 bucks because you're excited you can see your your your runner out there doing these obstacles now as a trail racer if you're there um for your trail racer you see them leave you see them come back they might dip in and out of the festival at a distance but there's really nothing there so i would say the biggest attraction is the obstacles um we're looking to

add more things like i mentioned the dj and all of that but but currently no i mean you have food trucks and music there's merchandise and things like that i mean there's definitely that atmosphere but um that's yeah that's it um i do have to say we brought some trail runners and i won't name them them because i would let them speak for themselves but some pretty well-known um trail runners um to a spartan race that i've never been to one before and you know obviously they were very aware of this whole festival access fee or this spectator fee but when they saw it they're like okay now i get why why you guys charge for this it's there's a spectacle it's it's an event may not be as interesting to a trail runner um but there is something that's being charged for it's not like you're just charging people to show up at a 10 by 10 tent a little finish line um to to watch their friend finish a race is the course open for spectators to view outside of this this festival well first off what what is the festival area like kind of if you can visually describe like the boundaries of it because i want to start to paint the picture of a trail runner comes into a spartan trail race with their family and their family wants to watch watch them race they want to watch them race at a certain part of the course and they want to watch them finish so what is the festival like what is this like enclosed festival area encompass exactly from in terms of where is it on the race course so it's it's right at the the entrance you know it's a it's a closed festival area so it's just like

coming to a county fair or something like that it's fully you know gated around um and most of the course and everything is sort of beyond you if you come from parking you won't see it i mean it depends on it's also venue dependent but um you know it's an enclosed area there's a registration sort of check-in area they come through with you know there's security and everything and once you get through and you get inside you'll usually go through like a merchandise area as you're entering and exiting the festival and um once you get inside you're in in the festival area you see all of the obstacles you'll see the main stage the dj and um and then the start line and the finish line they're separate start and finish lines and they're usually kind of on opposite ends of the festival and you'll see those those as well now whether or not um we usually have spectator routes like for the ocr we'll we will even put on the map you know you can go to these obstacles family and friends can go to these obstacles even if it's a couple of miles out that's all really venue dependent it depends you know if these are private properties and the owners have said you know absolutely no one except for a participant out on the course then there's there's only so much we can do with the trail race um we did a an event in los olivos last year we called the us trail championship we had a pretty big prize first fifty thousand dollars we had quite a few good trail racers come and that was a fully open course it was a ranch um people could go pretty much anywhere they wanted on the trail race to come and watch their their friends um run but uh but yeah like i mentioned it's all super venue specific

so here's where the friction is going to be right which i'm sure you're already aware of of this of this kind of conflict so i i've had athletes that have done also our ocr races and i've gone to those and had no problem paying the spectator the event fee what was at the time called the spectator fee now it's called the festival fee no no problem doing it i think it's an entertaining product if i didn't have an athlete in the race and i just wanted to go and watch a bunch of ocr race i'd go and do it absolutely i think that's an entertaining product but at the same time you're going to have trail runners who are not used to it that come to it with their families and the only thing their family wants to see is the runner finish and it's gated off and that that piece that piece of it from a trail running perspective from trail running communities perspective is it's it's too much in conflict i'm trying to come up with the words for it but i and i really and i really can't because it's such as as you very well or aware of it's such a strong part of why friends and family members come out to races is specifically to see their loved one cross the finish line give them a big old sweaty hug or whatever social distance equivalent is going to exist in 20 in 2021 that's just a big part of it that's just like a big part of the community and by create like literally creating a fence around it and charging to get inside of that fence irrespective of all the other cool stuff that's going on i'm sure that's rubbing people the wrong way

yeah yeah and like i mentioned you know we within the trail side of things my job and anybody else that works on the trail side of things is to find out what works within trail and what doesn't and we have you know like the first thing that i did was um push to change it to a festival pass so people understood what that was and that some of that drive came from me um toward the marketing team and then the other one was to add the free um free entry with with one one registration so those are the little tweaks we can do but um from from our side you know when you're trying to change things just for trail you're talking about those 500 to a thousand people um compared with the other 10 000 and so we have to balance those and i come up against the business team and i'm like you know more festival passes and they're like looking at the numbers like uh it comes out of that saying right you can please all the people some of the time some people all the time but not all the people all the time so i don't envy your position certainly and i i i think whenever i look at an organization that responds to the feedback of their consumers and listens to people that have more experience with them in the space my take on it is you'll eventually figure it out and that's why i look that's why i look at this thing i say okay they're gonna eventually fit they're gonna eventually figure it out it's not gonna be all sunshine and rainbows and gummy bears right from the get-go and they're

gonna be some people that are still pissed off no matter what the solution is five or ten years from now but on the course of the whole like i don't know i mean i i look at the way that you're approaching it and my my professional opinion on it is is you'll you'll eventually figure it out it's gonna change from this year and it's gonna change a lot from this year next year it'll change from 2021 to 2022 to 2023 there's always going to be those like little ebbs and flows but the important thing is is like you're listening you're listening you're listening to the you're listening to the consumers from a covid friendly side of things you can say that our festival access fee is going to limit the amount of people coming in right it controls it a little bit more so let's find that silver line you're not gonna take care of it for that though that's circumstantial so um but one thing i can say is so out of you know like i mentioned it's it's really us only um and then it's about two-thirds of the events i would say that are the integrated events with ocr that are charging that fee um some of them because of the venue already don't charge like i mentioned tahoe and a couple of the other ski venues and um and then any event that we put on that's going to be standalone trail so obviously all the world championship events all of that we're not adding that fee that's not a fee that we want to add it's only really where ocr is happening where it's already integrated into um into the product so we you know if we do put on if we create a standalone

spartan trail somewhere that's only trail you can expect there will not be a festival okay that's that's actually good that's really good to know and actually gives us a good transition point from the trail events that are within the ocr venues or the existing ocr venues to the trail championships events which i'm going to describe as partnerships and you're more than welcome to elaborate what types of partnerships those are if you want to and i know a lot of those business deals are under ndas and things like that but suffice to say i mean it is a different deal because you guys are partnering up with existing and in a lot of cases well i'll say all cases very beloved events like like la veredo and trans grand canaria which i was at uh earlier this year and uh kodiak big bear and things like that and you're kind of putting your stamp on the trail and ultra running space through these iconic well-established beloved types of events so why don't you take a take a minute just to describe what this world championship kind of scene looks like from the spartan perspective and hopefully we can lead we can use that conversation to lead to what's going to be in the middle of the sandwich eventually hopefully we can figure that out okay i'll charge you a consultant see then um so so first of all joe like joe joe coined the term and maybe it's existed in other places halo

halo events with these these races and like i was mentioning you know UTMB tour de jance uh um a lot of races you know leadville they're they're halo events because they've elevated themselves through a lot of them really for through their legacy of just being there for a long long time and putting on really great races and building up a reputation so one of the first um conversations that i had with him when we started this um this whole project was if it ain't broke don't fix it you know we're going to go for events we're going to partner with events that are there in that halo status and we're not going to go in there and try to change the events we're not going to change the names um we're not going to change the way that they do business we're just going to come in and try to to add add to them add value and and help them um continue to grow the sport so kind of leading with that that's been the approach with with these events and um saying hey why is lavarado such an appealing event because you know it's it's done a lot of work to to build to build um to get to where it is but you know talking to them like what do you guys need what what is it that we can do to help you um become a better race a bigger race and bigger isn't always better so that's not always the approach that we're that we're taking on some of these events um but uh but yeah so that that's the approach and so what we did is we um and i'll probably go as far as just saying yeah partnered i mean in a different way probably for for each event the deal is a little bit different um we did purchase

an event called um la ruta the conquistadores in costa rica that you know it's it's a mountain bike event and then we've added a trail um option to that event kind of a similar to leadville there's a the mountain bike is going to be one weekend and then the following weekend is is the trail race um so that's that's an event that was a quote-unquote halo event with mountain bike that we've added a trail race to but all of the other races that we've partnered with are existing trail races around the world um we wanted to pick for our first world championship um series uh seven to eight races around the world that were you know one to two months apart put big big prize money on them create a point system um to encourage people to go to many you know to to more events and then have a a final a world championship final where all those points are added up and there's a large prize purse for the event and then there's a final prize purse as well um added to it and this year uh slash next year because it doesn't necessarily go within a calendar year our um our seven events um we're going to end with trans grand canaria in 2021 and it was going to start with patagonia run in um april that's going to happen next um i appreciate the fact that one of the events that you uh have initially explored is this la ruta event um you probably are not aware of this but i've got a long-standing kind of personal and professional history with that race we we've been taking groups

of athletes out to their mountain bike race um for for for years and uh know the uh know the race director there quite well it is a beautiful area i don't know if you've had the opportunity to get out on those trails but it is absolutely stunning down there in costa rica i have it's it's incredible right everybody remembers the mud yeah lots of mud okay yeah so what runners are going to be curious about is what what do these races that they've either seen on the web or they've experienced how are they going to be different now that spartan is involved is this just a branding thing and you know that happens in trail running one year hoka is the sponsor and the next year ultra is the sponsor and the next year some other you know shoe companies the sponsor and they swap out the banners at the end and the branding on all the athlete guides changes and things like that is is that what athletes should expect that this is kind of like a branding change or are you getting involved in the races to a deeper extent to improve the experience of the athlete um so i guess a little bit of both in terms of the of the experience we would only get involved where um we can improve the experience just with our you know logistical and operational experience which that we have so if we can bring something to the table there or improve on it um we will you were trans grand canaria this year i was i was there i think i might um i

just missed you but um you know in terms of the look and feel and all of that that you saw at trans grand canaria nothing's going to change other than some branding i mean there will be you know spartan trail world championship branding there it's not going to take over all of a sudden the event's not going to be called spartan trail world championship slash trans grand canaria it's still the trans grand canaria but it will be a spartan trail world championship event um i would i would make it i would say it's probably more similar to like ultra trail world tour in some ways like the event doesn't change just because it's part of ultra trail world tour it continues to be the same event um it's just part of it and it gives some athletes kind of a path to follow um it has points it has prize money i think we're going sort of a little above and beyond um ultra trail world tour by you know putting in a very significant prize person i think hopefully offering that carrot to um athletes to motivate them to um to to participate in the full series not just go to trans grand canaria but to participate in you know as many of the series events as they can before trans grand canaria and another thing that we're doing um is we're opening up these events to the spartan world you know when we announced the spartan trail world championship there are people with an ocr like i mentioned we have ultra endurance um distance events um with an obstacle course racing and those people are interested they're like oh trans grand canaria i've never heard of that before i've done ultra marathons a lot of ocr racers do ultra marathons on

their on their off season um and uh and they're interested in coming so i think we can bring we'll bring a lot of new people so you might see new faces and some people that are you know new to the sport there but as far as the look and feel and all of that you're not really going to see a whole lot of uh a lot of things different different other than branding so as it exists currently with the exception of laruta which you you know you came out and said that you bought it you spartan owns it a lot of this is co-marketing and co-branding meaning spartan comes in they infuse you know some sponsorship they infuse some money into the prize structure which elevates the prestige of the of the races that you got that you are all in involved in and it brings awareness of the spartan brand to that group of athletes that are participating in the uh and the bigger group that is following the race and things like that and then also from the race director's perspective they get branding into a new audience as well this trail running audience as you mentioned that does trail running in their off season or ultra running in their off season and and they might not and i agree with you they might not have heard of the trans grand canaria or kodiak big bear or some of these other ultra races and it's and and so those what i'm trying the picture that i'm trying to paint is is that marketing relationship although it could be viewed as you know the big bad spartan like coming in and you know basically putting their stamp on all these races it's mutually beneficial both ways like it's beneficial to the athletes it's beneficial to the the race directors in terms of expanding their audience

um and it's obviously beneficial to spartan or they're not otherwise you you know y'all wouldn't be doing it i think the fear from and and this is this might be unnecessarily placed from a lot of trail and ultra runners is the what's going to come next is spartan going to start owning all of these races and then implementing the ocr piece into trans grand canaria kodiak laruta and things like that so that all these races have the same kind of flavor of your existing ocr races that have the trail running piece kind of bolted into that and that might be too much prognostication for this particular podcast but if you want to like address any of that like forecasting concern that a lot of the community has right now like please like go ahead and do so yeah so the quick answer to that is is no um you know starting with joe's first instruction on this project if it ain't broke don't fix it um that's you know we're looking to get into trail not to bring ocr to trail oc i mean the the goal is to diversify i mean hence laruta which is a mountain bike event to diversify and to create um a larger brand based around sport and lifestyle not just ocr and so right now we're working on weaning spartan from that ocr image you know on the marketing side of things which is a very very difficult

because it's good well that's why it's difficult because you guys have done it so well because we've done it really well so it's like how do you take that bare-chested guy at the finish line you know ready to start the or at the start line um that image out of people's head and how do you make them think about when they think about spartan trail they think about somebody running through you know in in on the trans gran canaria course you know that's when they think about spartan they just think about fitness and lifestyle and health and all of that but that's that's where we're going just as a company um and so yeah the the short answer to to that is are we going to change these trail events and put in the spartan flavor no you know will will there be larger merchandise areas will there be more merchandise offerings um at trans gran canaria you know nicer higher quality um products those types of things because spartan does kind of specialize in in that as well in in their events will there be a little bit more of a of a festival here uh cohesive festival feel um at some of these events yeah probably yes those types of things will um will change but i really think for the better you know will we address any operational gaps in in some of these events or help some of these smaller race directors um to put on you know better events yeah we will um but as far as like you know ocr ising or spartanizing the events i don't um we're definitely not headed down that path but it's reasonable to say if this is a new business unit for you that you're trying to expand trail running

is a new business unit for you for you to try to expand that a method of expansion as we've already talked about is using your own endemic group using the ocr group putting trail race in there and and expanding that way but another piece of expansion as you've already demonstrated with laruta is scooping up existing races and that those are races that then spartan that spartan owns and they could there could be others whether or not you're currently sponsoring them or not they're all there so i mentioned from the onset of the podcast there's a lot of trail trail races out there or starting your own like those are the three avenues of expansion into a new marketplace you either take over what's existing you either start with your existing user base and you expand within that user group grow from the core so to speak you go out and you scoop up businesses that are currently in existence and have some sort of customer base and operations and you know just take them over and and their business becomes your business or you just start your own so within the latter two what in or do you know what to expect from spartan for the future if it's an if it's an avenue of business that you're trying to grow are you going to grow your own events your own trail running events and are you going to take over more events that are uh that are currently out there so the third piece to the puzzle i guess you could say the meat in the sandwich or the um the plant-based meat in the sandwich um is uh so the first one is the integrated events as we talked

about what i call regular season you know integrated with ocr um then the you know the top is you know trans gran canaria lavarado type of events that we're gonna that we'll be working with and then the the third piece is we are working with local race directors specifically in the us right now a couple of projects in asia to create new events but we're working with um reputable trail race directors in their regions um to partner on new events and so that's that's kind of the approach that we've chosen rather than coming in planting a flag and saying get out of the way little race directors um we're integrating them into the project kind of like what we've done with lewis was saying hey come and direct these races come and design these courses and lewis can tell you um and i won't you know i won't speak for him too much but he he can tell you that he has gotten more people to his races that recognized him from a spartan event and signed up for his races so finding that mutual uh mutually beneficial way to um to uh integrate the local race directors is is what we're doing that's that's the third part of the project i i appreciate that approach as a consumer because i mean as all of us all of us both of us here on this podcast and everybody listening is going to be aware there is although nobody owns trail running there is an established culture and you know you can't i'm going to use an analogy that bob crowley used who's the president of itra if you want to join a church the first thing you do is you sit in the back of the church and you sing the hymns and you shake all

of the other churchgoers hands you don't go in through the front of the church trying to preach to the choir and by working with like the local race directors and the established members of of of the trail running church the trail running community who are the local race directors that's the way to like understand the culture getting the good graces of people making sure and making sure that you're building a product and a service that is going to be cohesive with the the the values and uh the thoughts of the members of the community that are already there yeah yeah it's in that church analogy is interesting i was talking to bob a couple of weeks ago too and um he used the church analogy and i was like you know it's interesting uh my parents have come from a religious background because of my parents long story they were missionaries but so i'm i'm aware of how those things work and trail running in the u.s if it is like a church it's like one's pentecostal the other one's methodist the next one's catholic like your experience will just be all over the place depending on what race you go to um so that's what's interesting whereas i feel like the the quote-unquote church is more in europe is a little more cohesive they're more of the same denomination and in asia it's growing more off of that european influence yeah um same as south america yeah and that's why that's it's been interesting to see the reaction from the trail running community because you can kind of divide it up into the trail runners that have that international experience that have either lived abroad or done a

lot of trail trail races internationally and the ones that have not because the trail runners that have done the races internationally they understand that there are different denominations of the church the ones that have only done races within the us are only used to the us's denomination and i just think that i just think that some perspective kind of gets kind of gets lost whenever whenever change whenever change happens if you don't have those different types of experiences yeah yeah and in the end um change is inevitable i mean um you know the sport the sport is growing whether we like it or not you know from that um you know taking myself away from spartan right now and just saying hey what is my what was my first trail experience um actually was arkansas traveler 100 miler in 2007 um so that's you know that was my first trail experience and that was a quote unquote maybe big ish trail race back then um and then bandera 100k i did it that that january 2008 and those you know those are really cool experiences and all of that but it trail running isn't what it was back then it is changing whether spartan jumps in it um or not um there are companies that started off small that are now getting bigger um as a result of this growth and then there are other companies jumping in that are already already big well i i appreciate you coming on the podcast today i appreciate the candor and the transparency that you offered and even some things that you know might

knock you down and you're in your marketing job over there at spartan um but but i think like trail runners as you are aware of we're all really authentic people and authenticity goes a long way in this community if you operate your business in an authentic manner and you're transparent and open and honest about it people are very accepting of it and i i it would be very easy for for an organization to come into trail running and plant their flag and put their stamp on everything and just kind of sweep up the entire community because the numbers are not that big it wouldn't really take that much capital to go in and do it now it probably wouldn't be a very lasting change because the community would eventually reject all of that but in terms of how feasible it would be from an economic perspective you look at it and it's really reasonable for a number of you know companies to to kind of do could to kind of go and do that so i appreciate you know all the thought that you uh that you just put into this dialogue and i really do that um i really do hope that trail and ultra runners have an open mind when they see these new things because different isn't always bad different can be good as well mm-hmm and and i guess my last words on on this would be uh you know there are real people and real trail runners working on this project and um we are working as hard as we can like i said to integrate

local trail runners local trail race directors and to get um you know and to and to take that feed back and not grow irresponsibly big companies struggle to grow responsibly just because they're big lumbering beasts but we're doing what we can 100 100 agree with it all right we're gonna let you go appreciate it thanks for all your time eventually we'll see thanks a lot eventually we'll see you back out on the trails and i hope to experience one of your events once i can get out there and if the races start yeah you're always welcome well go to jacksonville sounds good i can't even make it out of colorado what are you kidding me and there you have it folks hope everybody listened to this podcast with an open mind and open ears really appreciate josue coming on the podcast today um in an effort of full disclosure i have nothing for or against spartan coming into the space i just want to see a healthy trail and ultra running they don't sponsor me they don't pay me to do anything they don't give me any race entry fees they don't pay to fly me out to any of their races or anything like that i have zero conflicts of interest with spartan my interest in this is just simply to bring the dialogue out into the public in an honest and authentic fashion and let the trail runners let the market decide on things hope everybody enjoyed it if you have not had the chance go on over to itunes and give this podcast a like or a review that helps

the podcast out a lot appreciate the heck out of everybody listening today and as always eventually at some point we will see everybody on the trails