When Taylor Abrams hit her mid-30s, she started getting serious about road running. She worked diligently to run a sub-three-hour marathon in 2024 but had a hard time repeating the magic in 2025. Stressing about her paces and splits, she started feeling burnt out and unmotivated.
On a mission to make running fun again, Abrams took to the trails in Marin County, California, where she’d been living for two years. Today, at 39, the mom of three leans on the sport to explore, be adventurous, and feel like a kid again as she zooms down the hills. She’s rejuvenated her relationship with running—and many others are doing the same, for similar reasons.
Running in general has boomed over the past three to five years, and trail running is no longer hiding in the shadows of glamorous road races—it has fully entered the mainstream. The sport is growing annually by 8 percent, with more people entering races like the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, which has 2.4 times more participants now than it did in 2022. The fan base is growing as well: The 2026 Cocodona 250-mile race amassed over 1.4 million total views on its livestream, compared with 841,000 in 2025.
Those are extreme ultra-based examples, yes, but there’s also this: The number of athletes who uploaded trail runs on Strava increased when comparing the first half of 2025 with the first half of 2022, with female users logging twice as many trail runs in 2025 as in 2024. Over on the AllTrails app, trail running has gone up by 11 percent since August 2024. And the entire trail running market is worth over $14 billion—even everyday fitness brands like Lululemon and Alo are now dropping trail-specific shoes.
Women like Abrams are gravitating to the sport because we’re “looking for a different relationship with running,” says Alysha Flynn, a Road Runners Club of America–certified running coach specializing in performance, sustainable training, and the realities of women’s lives, and the founder of What Runs You. By nature, trail running requires you to let go of pacing and PR pressure (and comparing yourself to others) and instead just enjoy the challenge. Here’s what else is behind the boom.
Being in nature does wonders for your mental health, research shows, and those benefits increase tenfold with trail running. It requires you to drop your speed, concentrate on the terrain, and stay present, which can feel almost meditative. Salazar, PhD, a professor of social and cultural anthropology and the founder of the Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) cluster at KU Leuven in Belgium.
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