Trail Running Is Growing at an Exponential Rate—This Is Why Women Are All In

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

Taylor Abrams spent her mid-30s grinding toward a sub-three-hour marathon, hitting it in 2024 — and then promptly burning out trying to replicate it. By 2025, the splits and pace pressure had hollowed out the thing she loved. So she took her runs off-road, into the hills of Marin County, California. Now 39 and a mother of three, she describes trail running as feeling like a kid again. She's not alone in the pivot.

Trail running has moved from niche to undeniable, according to Women's Health Magazine. The sport is growing at 8 percent annually, and the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc now draws 2.4 times more participants than it did in 2022. On Strava, female users logged twice as many trail runs in 2025 as in 2024. AllTrails saw an 11 percent uptick in trail running since August 2024. The entire market is valued at over $14 billion — and even Lululemon and Alo are dropping trail-specific footwear. This is not a fringe sport anymore.

Why Women, Specifically, Are Showing Up

The psychological draw is hard to overstate. Women are "looking for a different relationship with running," says Alysha Flynn, a Road Runners Club of America–certified coach and founder of What Runs You. Trail running structurally dismantles the metrics obsession: inconsistent terrain means inconsistent pace, which means the watch becomes irrelevant. "Notifications, music, and constant watch checking disappear," Flynn says. "It's almost like permission to let go." Noel B. Salazar, PhD, a professor of social and cultural anthropology at KU Leuven, frames it as a "mental re-pacing" — a rare, full-body experience of actually being present. For women navigating a world of financial stress and ambient dread, that's not a small thing.

Visibility is accelerating the momentum. This year, over a million people watched Rachel Entrekin become the first woman to win the Cocodona 250-mile race — a livestream that pulled 1.4 million total views, up from 841,000 in 2025. "We can't really see that in any other endurance sport," says Dr. Stefanie Flippin, DPM, a foot and ankle surgeon, run coach, and professional trail and ultrarunner for Lululemon. The representation matters. So does the science: a recent study in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports found that female runners demonstrate greater durability and physiological resilience than male runners — a direct counter to the long-held (and long-wrong) narrative that women's bodies can't handle distance.

The community factor seals it. Trail culture, coaches and runners agree, is less about proving yourself and more about sharing the experience. Yssis Davis, 30, had been running for a decade but didn't feel safe running solo in her Los Angeles neighborhood — until she found Hike Clerb, an outdoor collective for women of color, on Instagram. The crew gave her the confidence to finally go trail. That sense of welcome is by design: hiking uphills is a real strategy, not a failure, and the culture reflects it. If you're transitioning from road to trail, Flynn's advice is blunt — leave your pace expectations at home, run a local nature preserve before you run a mountain, and become a student again.

Trail running isn't a trend women are being marketed to — it's something they're actively choosing, because it hands back the parts of movement that metrics-obsessed road culture quietly took away.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.