Trailheads

Trail running has grown from a niche pursuit into an increasingly important piece of the broader running and outdoor landscape. But building a category that lasts beyond its trendiness takes more than growth alone. It takes athletes who stay invested in the sport, retailers who create meaningful connections within their communities, and brands willing to support the ecosystem for the long term.

To explore what that longevity really looks like—and what it will take to keep trail running thriving—we chatted with George Plomarity, Director of Business Development at KEEN Running and moderator of The Running Event (TRE) session “Built to Last: How Brands, Athletes, and Retailers Create Longevity in Trail Running,” to talk about the people, partnerships, and ideas shaping the future of trail running.

Trailheads: I know this is the meat of what you’ll be discussing at TRE, but I’d love an insider glimpse at you how you think our industry keeps trail running on a sustainable growth trajectory. 

Plomarity: This is something that I personally find very fascinating and think about a lot having come from skateboarding in my youth, which is the ultimate example of booming and absolutely busting, and booming again and busting again. If you look at the history of running, we tend to have these big booms but then plateaus. It doesn’t actually crater. Always, the trajectory tends to be up and to the right on the x-y axis. I think that there’s two pieces to it: There’s the trend of it and speaking to people that are coming in from a trend perspective. But then there’s also the core driving force. Where they intersect is how we convert people from trend chasers to core users and community members. I think that takes a slightly different shape whether you’re a retailer, a race director, or a community organizer.

Trailheads: How do you answer that from a brand perspective? 

Plomarity: When I put on my brand hat, I think that it’s about being true to your values and being who you are. At the end of the day, what resonates in a long sustainable way is being honest and authentic always. You must be who you are and show that to the world in an honest, open, vulnerable way. 

Trailheads: Skip Brand from Healdsburg Running Company will join you on the panel. What do you hope to hear from him, and what do you think retailers want to hear from him?

Plomarity: How do you as a retailer conceive of piercing through who’s here for the trend, who’s here to stay, and how do you move them from bucket A to bucket B? I don’t think people are having too much trouble bringing customers into the store today. I think the question is how you hold onto them when, say, outrigger canoeing becomes the next cool thing the fashion kids are doing, or whatever the thing is. It’s how do you move them from trend to core. That’s going to be sort of the circle the TRE audience would be super excited to hear about. Skip is so well positioned as somebody who has consistently ridden several of these spikes and kept his business growing, not just month over month but significantly year over year through it all. 

Trailheads: KEEN has been part of the outdoor industry for decades, but only recently made its debut into trail running with the launch of its first trail shoe in 2025. What was the genesis of officially getting into the category?

Plomarity: KEEN, of course, we all know for water sandals, hiking boots, and just really high-quality footwear in the outdoors. One of the things that most people don’t know about KEEN is that on the inside of KEEN, it’s full of a bunch of ultrarunning nerds all the way to the founder’s son who’s the head of our innovation team. He ran the Hurt 100 when he was 21. There’s such a core group of longtime trail runners inside of this org that eventually the question became: Why aren’t we making product for the thing we actually do together every single day? That’s sort of the genesis. It grew very organically almost as a passion project, and it turned out we’re making really good shoes. So then it became an obvious next step of the evolution of the brand. Rather than cannibalizing any other piece of the brand or who we are, it’s another natural addition to what we’re already putting into the world.

Trailheads: When KEEN decided to enter the trail-running space, why was it important to bring on brand ambassadors like Jeff Browning and Krissy Moehl?

Plomarity: One of the things that strikes me as very profound about running right now is those stats about how, like, half the people running today started running during Covid. Thinking about that, 50 percent of them had no connection to trail running before six years ago. The history of the sport is so rich, so full, and goes so far back that KEEN feels like it’s very uniquely positioned to bring forth the best parts of the sport to water the new leaves that are growing on the tree of trail running. We thought it was very important when making that first choice of athlete that we really bring forth the heritage and where we come from as we set up the future for where we’re going, too.

If you were to wind the clock back 15 years in trail running, it was very common in races that you were not allowed to run a race a third time until you volunteered for a year. This concept of service was built into the community. Almost every race had mandatory trail work requirements in order to sign up. Some of those really awesome aspects have kind of fallen by the wayside as its expanded and grown, and I think KEEN being a service-oriented organization, it’s really important to us that we’re helping to extract and bring forward some of those best pieces into the practice. By supporting someone like Krissy Moehl, who’s intimately tied to The Conservation Alliance, or Jeff Browning, who has been an absolute stalwart of the sport from the early days and is still a pinnacle today – we feel like makes a really proud statement about who we are and why we want to be in this space.

Trailheads: You’ve talked about honoring the roots and history of trail running while also welcoming a whole new generation into the sport. What do you think is drawing so many newcomers to trail running right now?

Plomarity: When I go to a run club like the one KEEN hosts, what I see is a bunch of people new to the sport because they’re hungry for something more, something that’s deep, something that’s meaningful, something that’s not a flash in the pan. It’s not marketing-speak. There’s no retail component to it, per se. They’re looking for genuine connections to authentic expressions of what it means to be a human in the world today. That is what the best of trail running has to offer, and the more we as a brand or as an industry at large lean into that part, then we get past the trend and set ourselves up for sustainable long-term growth year over year.

Trailheads: How can the industry preserve the authentic, meaningful aspects of the sport as it continues to grow?

Plomarity: When I think of trail running and the early days, one of the things that turned me onto it when I ran my first ultra in 2005 was that the culture was defined by the people who were there. There was this very open and fluid nature to what that culture was. It kind of reorganized itself and redefined itself over the course of time as you went from event to event. I think that malleability is a crucial aspect of how you navigate this space now. If you think of the other sports that have not done it well, it’s because they hung onto this crusty, locals-only, “back in the day it was better” attitude. It’s more about the open tent, the welcomeness, bringing forward the best aspects of how we show up in service and in letting go of our egos. But we are incredibly open to everybody being a piece of defining it at the moment right now. If we can hold onto that, the sky is the limit. 

Don’t miss this conversation and register for The Running Event. Check out more education sessions here and see all the brands that are exhibiting at the event.