The Trail Makes You Pay Attention

Trail running, nature, and the appeal of being present

In Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, the Friends of Attention argue that our capacity to attend to the world is being captured, measured, and sold by powerful commercial systems. Attention, in their account, is fundamental to how we experience life and relate to other people. They call for collective practices and places where that capacity can be reclaimed. Their argument reaches beyond individual discipline to the conditions in which we live: what surrounds us, what repeatedly interrupts us, and what opportunities we have to give something our sustained attention. [1] Reading this book gave me another way to think about trail running. A trail makes you pay attention, and then gives you reasons to want to keep paying it.

Foot placement matters. A root crosses the path. Loose rocks move underfoot. A descent changes how you balance and control your speed. At an intersection, you look for a marker and establish where the route continues. Your attention has immediate consequences.

Then there are the fall colors, changing light through the trees, water moving beside the path, and wildlife that appears briefly before disappearing again. You notice these things because you are there, moving through the same surroundings in which they are happening. Attention begins with the practical demands of running and expands into curiosity and pleasure.

I think that combination helps explain trail running’s growing appeal. In a world that makes it easy to be mentally elsewhere, the trail offers a compelling reason to be where you are.

Getting through the gate

In my earlier essay on local trail running and the changing shape of recreational endurance, I explored how small races create an entrance into the sport. Nearby venues, manageable travel, informal gatherings, and welcoming communities can make trying a trail race a fairly straightforward decision. A person can show up, run what she can, walk the climbs, and discover whether she likes the experience.

The growth described in that essay provides important context. RunRepeat’s 2022 report, developed with World Athletics, analyzed 15.6 million recreational trail-race finishes across 116,947 races in 127 countries and reported 231 percent growth over the preceding decade. These are recorded finishes rather than unique people, and the figure is historical rather than a current annual growth rate. Nevertheless, it establishes that the expansion was already underway several years ago. [2]

More recent evidence points toward substantial new participation within the populations measured. In September 2025, UTMB World Series and Strava reported that the number of athletes uploading trail runs in the first half of 2025 was twice the comparable 2022 count. Their release also reported that 42 percent of runners in the first-half UTMB Index race data were participating in their first trail event. The count of Gen Z women uploading trail runs had increased 6.5 times over the same three-year comparison. [3]

These datasets capture particular race networks and platform users. They establish growth within those settings; they do not tell us why every participant arrived.

My earlier essay concentrated on the invitation. This essay considers what people may find once they accept it. Someone can discover trail running through a friend or a local race, then keep returning because of the quality of the experience.

What “more” means

Scott Jurek captures something of ultrarunning’s inward dimension when he writes, “The longer and farther I ran, the more I realized that what I was often chasing was a state of mind.” In Eat & Run, Jurek describes distance as a way of stripping away ordinary worries until the present moment comes into sharper focus. I read that not as mysticism, but as an invitation to consider what extended time on your feet can reveal.

I have run plenty of marathons, and they can change your life. Preparing for one requires dedication. Training becomes part of the week, recovery matters, and ordinary decisions about time and lifestyle begin to revolve around a goal. Fitness takes on a different meaning when you are preparing to cover 26.2 miles.

Race day can be an extraordinary celebration of that work. Cheering crowds, encouragement from strangers, a party at the finish, and a medal you are pleased to bring home all contribute to the experience. You prove something to yourself and discover people who understand why it matters. A marathon can introduce you to a new tribe.

That remains a powerful attraction. RunRepeat’s 2025 US marathon report recorded 432,562 finishes in 2024, approximately 5 percent above its pre-pandemic level. [7] Road marathons continue to draw people into experiences they find worthwhile, even as trail participation expands.

The road-marathon and trail figures describe different populations and time periods. They cannot be compared as competing growth rates or used to demonstrate that runners are migrating from one to the other. What they do suggest is room for several kinds of meaningful running experience.

When I think about the appeal of trails, the word that keeps returning is “more.” More time to contemplate. More connection with nature and the elements. More opportunity to discover what an experience means to you while you are still living through it.

Some of the ultras I have run offered long stretches almost entirely alone. There were no cheering crowds along those sections, and no outside encouragement carrying me from one mile to the next. At an aid station, someone genuinely encouraged me in a conversation. At the finish, there might be only a handful of people. The medal might have been made by the race director or the director’s friends.

Those encounters stayed with me because they were personal. The hours between them mattered, too. Without a continuous audience, I had time to encounter my own thoughts, manage my effort, and notice the landscape through which I was moving. Continuing became something I had to decide for myself.

That is the “more” I mean: an experience that turns you inward while keeping you involved with what is outside you. You attend to your breathing and fatigue, and also to the weather, ground, trees, and distance ahead. The internal conversation unfolds within a physical world that continues to make demands and offer discoveries.

An ultra can give that experience considerable time to develop. But neither distance nor solitude guarantees contemplation, and you can find absorption and meaning during a short trail run. Trail running includes far more than ultras: the UTMB–Strava release reported that roughly two-thirds of participation in UTMB Index races was at marathon distance or shorter. [3] The opportunity begins wherever someone starts engaging with the trail.

My suggestion is that this kind of experience answers a need some people increasingly feel. Their ordinary lives contain obligations, interruptions, and demands on their attention. Time outside offers a chance to direct that attention themselves and to give it to something personally important.

The growth data cannot prove that this is what newcomers are seeking. It is a hypothesis grounded in my experience and consistent with the research on nature, meaning, and wellbeing. It helps explain why the attraction may extend beyond fitness or the finish-line achievement.

Trail running gives me time and attention back in a particular sense. I still spend hours and energy doing it. But those hours feel like my own, and my attention is involved in the life happening around me.

Attention you have to give

Trail running involves an ongoing relationship between movement and ground. You watch what is coming, feel what is underfoot, and adjust your effort as conditions change. On a technical section, that relationship becomes especially apparent. A rocky descent may require concentration even when gravity is doing much of the work. A climb can reduce your pace to a walk while keeping you fully engaged.

Experience makes many adjustments more familiar, but the trail continues to change. Yesterday’s firm ground may be slippery after rain. Leaves may conceal roots. A familiar turn may look different in low light.

This is one reason I find the word “meditative” useful, provided it describes the experience rather than promising equivalence with formal meditation. The mind has a concrete activity to attend to. Footing, breathing, direction, and effort belong to the same immediate situation.

A person can arrive carrying a conversation from work, tomorrow’s obligations, and a collection of unresolved concerns. A demanding section of trail can bring attention back to what is happening now. The concerns may return, but for a time they cease to occupy the entire foreground.

That is an interpretation of the experience, rather than a conclusion established by participation statistics. It is also a recognizable part of why some runners value their time outside.

Attention you want to give

Necessary attention is only the beginning. If the appeal were entirely about avoiding falls and staying on course, we would have an incomplete account of why people love trails.

There is something worth attending to.

Autumn changes a familiar route overhead and underfoot where light reaches the forest floor differently as leaves fall. During or right after a rainstorm, a creek becomes louder and you can see deer appearing at the edge of the trees. You can hear a bird call from somewhere you cannot quite locate. It makes you want to slow down or stop because you want to see what is there and be more deeply in the experience.

Some stretches demand close attention to footing. Others give you room to look around. The experience moves between concentration, observation, reflection, and conversation. A runner need not notice every leaf to develop a meaningful relationship with the landscape.

In my earlier essay, I wrote that runners begin accumulating places as much as results.

Attention is part of how that happens. A trail becomes familiar through repeated encounters: the steep bend, the exposed roots, the crossing, the shaded section that stays damp. Your body almost starts memorizing the features on the trail. Returning allows you to recognize both the place and its changes. The route can remain the same while the experience keeps developing.

Why effort can feel calming

Physical exertion and psychological calm can coexist. You can be breathing hard on a climb while feeling absorbed in a task you understand. The effort has a purpose, and the ground supplies immediate feedback.

That does not mean every run is peaceful. Heat, fatigue, difficult footing, and uncertainty about the route can make running uncomfortable or stressful. Racing can add pressure. What interests me is that calm does not always require physical stillness. Sometimes it accompanies movement that gathers attention around a coherent activity.

Research on nature experience offers a useful connection. In a small randomized study, Bratman and colleagues assigned 38 healthy urban residents to a 90-minute nature or urban walk. The nature-walk group showed a reduction in self-reported rumination—repetitive negative thinking about oneself—that was not observed in the urban-walk group.

The researchers also reported changes in activity in a brain region associated with rumination. The study offers suggestive evidence for a pathway through which nature experience may support wellbeing, although it examined walking and cannot establish what trail running does for every runner. [4]

Trail-specific qualitative research adds the participants’ perspective. Chambers and Poidomani interviewed six people after their first participation in a particular trail-running event. Their accounts connected the experience with health, engagement with nature, and the social atmosphere of the event. The small study gives depth to individual experiences rather than a representative measure of the sport. [5]

Together, these sources support taking the psychological experience seriously. My argument goes a step further as an interpretation: trail running brings physical engagement and an interesting natural setting together in a form that some people find particularly absorbing and restorative.

Being there

A screen can show a forest. An app can help you find a route, arrange a run, or record what you did. Those functions can be useful. They cannot substitute for moving through the place itself.

On the trail, the surface answers your foot with resistance or movement. Air temperature affects your effort. You hear the creek before seeing it. The distance ahead must be covered by your own body. What happens depends partly on the landscape and partly on how you respond.

That participation matters. You are involved in the scene you are noticing.

There is a revealing tension in using Strava data to describe an activity whose appeal may include time away from screens. Technology can help people find their way onto trails and document the experience afterward. The run itself still takes place in the world. The useful question is whether the tool helps you participate in that experience or repeatedly draws your attention away from it.

For me, the appeal lies in the time spent there: choosing the next step, noticing what surrounds it, and allowing the landscape to hold my interest.

Solitude, company, and a place to return

The earlier growth essay emphasized community, and that remains part of this argument. Trail running can accommodate someone who prefers to run alone and someone who values a regular group. A runner can spend most of a race in quiet concentration and still appreciate the people at an aid station or finish line.

The 2025 UTMB–Strava release reported a nearly 20 percent increase over three years in the share of trail runs grouped with other participants. That is a platform measure rather than proof of the quality of those relationships, but it shows shared running becoming more prominent in the recorded activity. [3]

The social experience can also involve attention: listening to another runner, noticing when someone needs help, or remembering a volunteer from an earlier event. A small local race can create opportunities for those encounters, while an ordinary solo run provides another kind of space.

Both can become practices people want to keep. A familiar route and a recurring gathering give running a place in life that extends beyond preparing for the next finish line.

Trail running’s growth has many possible explanations. Fitness, competition, adventure, achievement, friendship, and the availability of events all matter. Attention belongs among them as a plausible part of the appeal.

The trail asks you to notice where you put your feet. It also offers a landscape worth noticing once you look up. In a demanding, constantly connected world, the opportunity to give sustained attention to something immediate and worthwhile can become a powerful reason to return.

About the Author

The author has been running since 1978, with remarkably little improvement. At ShankGym.com, he writes race reviews and shares a few hopefully useful things he’s picked up while traveling around the country to run. He has nothing to sell, but apparently plenty to say. If you see him on the trail, say hello. He’ll appreciate the excuse to catch his breath.

References

1. The Friends of Attention. (2026). Attensity! A manifesto of the attention liberation movement. Crown. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/782387/attensity-by-the-friends-of-attention/

   
   

2. Andersen, J. J. (2022, December 10). The state of trail running 2022. RunRepeat. https://runrepeat.com/the-state-of-trail-running-2022

   
   

3. UTMB World Series, & Strava. (2025, September 10). UTMB World Series announces strategic collaboration with Strava, and releases joint data story on the evolution of trail running [Press release]. https://res.cloudinary.com/utmb-world/image/upload/v1758546499/worldseries/press/Press%20releases/EN/ws-2025-09-10-en_fwvcoq.pdf

   
   

4. Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112

   
   

5. Chambers, T. P., & Poidomani, J. (2022). “Like nothing I’ve seen before”: A qualitative inquiry into the lived experience of competing in a trail running event. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 817685. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.817685

   
   

6. Jurek, S., & Friedman, S. (2012). Eat & run: My unlikely journey to ultramarathon greatness. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

   
   

7. Andersen, J. J. (2025, August 28). The state of US marathons 2025. RunRepeat. https://runrepeat.com/uk/the-state-of-us-marathons-2025