It’s summer festival season, but not all of them are about music or yoga or pop-up cities in the Black Rock Desert. There newest addition is called TrailCon, and it celebrates all things running outside on unpaved roads.
“We did an afternoon session last year that we called ‘A Taste of TrailCon’ to see if the concept had legs,” said Brendan Madigan, co-founder of TrailCon and owner of the outdoor-focused Alpenglow Sports in Tahoe City. “We found out very quickly that the interest was massive.”
The trial run’s success led to a full two-day event in 2025 taking place June 24 and 25 at Palisades Tahoe. The festival aims to fill a void in the trail-running world by providing a time-and-place focal point for the entire community of stakeholders, athletes, devotees, and fans; complete with interactive panels, brand activations, movement sessions, networking events, and, yes, trail runs. It will showcase the latest and greatest in gear and garb as well as leading voices and visionaries to spur industry-wide excitement, insight, and innovation.
The festival’s timing is strategic — bookended at Palisades Tahoe by the Broken Arrow Skyrace (June 19 to 22) and the Western States Endurance Run (June 28 and 29), two of the most iconic sub- and-ultra-marathon trail runs in the world — to maximize visibility and participation. “There is a 10-day window every June where Olympic Valley becomes the center of the trail running universe,” Madigan said.
The region may be witnessing an origin story in the making of North America’s premier trail-running festival, as TrailCon hopes to provide to the trail-running world what the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey has done for the cycling world — an open-to-the-public, one-stop industry mecca for the sport. Sea Otter has grown year over year into a four-day festival that draws over 1,000 brands and up to 74,000 athletes and attendees annually. With time, Madigan believes TrailCon can follow suit for foot strikers.
“There was no real gathering place for trail running,” Madigan said. “We think people want it and the industry needs it. There are bridges to be built from human-to-human collaboration.”
Trail running is a tangibly growing sector of the outdoor sports world, with races and run-clubs gaining in popularity and economic power. According to a May 2025 businessresearchinsights.com article, the market for trail-running shoes alone was approximately $4.11 billion in 2024 and projects to reach roughly $8.14 billion by 2033.
Madigan, a lifelong runner whose résumé also includes founding the Broken Arrow Skyrace, along with TrailCon co-founders Dylan Bowman, CEO of Freetrail, and Douglas Emslie, 30-plus-year trail running icon, have created a gravity that’s attracted the sport’s top athletes, minds, and brands; including all three with On, the festival’s primary sponsor.
Started on a shoestring by Olivier Bernhard in the Swiss Alps in 2010 — his first prototype for a new trail running shoe was created in part by gluing together cut-up pieces of garden hose — On is a gear-and-clothing brand that has grown to be worn by over 7 million athletes in 50 countries. The company’s mission is to ignite the human spirit through movement. At TrailCon, it will globally debut its new carbon-plated Cloud Ultra Pro, a unique trail running shoe that has been in development for over 5 years.
“It’s a real validation to have On as a partner for our first real year of the event,” Madigan said, noting that the official name of the festival is TrailCon Presented by On. “You can come and demo the shoe with On athletes, including some of the Kenyans racing at Broken Arrow.”
TrailCon’s vendor village will feature more than 60 brands with product demos and immersive activations (experiences), and a TrailCon Hall of Fame will be established to honor legends of the sport. Trail runs will be held each morning on ‘the escarpment’ (Mainline Pocket on the skier’s trail map), an area made famous in the running world by Western States. Athletes and fans may hike or run up for free, or opt for a tram ride to High Camp for a birds-eye view, where there will be a beat-dropping DJ and fresh-brewed coffee.
The festival will showcase over 20 interactive panels, with titles spanning from The Rise of Athlete Representation, to The Intersection of Trail Running & the Creator Economy, to The Future of Trail Races. On Wednesday, Catalonian-born Killian Jornet, widely recognized as the greatest trail runner in the world, will record a live podcast on the Western State’s stage at 2 p.m. As with all events at TrailCon, the recording is open to the public. Happy hours will also be held.
“There is something for everybody at the festival,” Madigan said, “even for non-runners. Tahoe is full of athletes, and at the end of the day all our sports have a common thread — the mountains, protecting sacred places, challenging ourselves physically. Really, there is something to be learned for everybody who wants to attend, from nutrition tips to public land issues.”
The festival is free to attend, be it one panel or the entire two-day’s worth of events. The only requisite is to pre-register at trailconference.com.
In some ways, trail running in the Western World began with Pheidippides in 490 B.C., who, according to lore, ran the roughly 26.2 miles home from the battle of Marathon to inform Athens of its underdog victory against the invading Persian army. Though Pheidippides reportedly died from exhaustion directly after giving the news, trail running has lived on — and the center of its universe may be even further cemented in Olympic Valley with the rise of TrailCon.
