It’s that time of year again. Welcome to the ​2024 Trail Runner of the Year​ awards. Voting is open now! This is the third edition of our annual end-of-season award, celebrating the great performances and the great athletes of the trail running world.

What follows is an explainer for our motivation for TROY, along with some instructions, and practical information you’ll use to shape your ballot.

Why We Do This

Over the last fifteen years, trail running has evolved into a legitimate international sport. It’s also experienced rapid professionalization. Like many global professional sports, trail running deserves a year-end distinction for those athletes whose performances have stood out on the international racing circuit. Trail Runner of the Year (TROY) and Trail Performance of the Year (TPOY) are an extension of Freetrail’s mission to elevate the profile of the professional athletes in our sport, while helping casual observers and the general public feel connected to their stories – hopefully creating diehard fans in the process.

The Parameters

• TROY is a ranking of race performance portfolios from only the 2024 season. Performances from previous years should not be considered.
• TROY is a trail running specific award. While we have nothing but respect for athletes who race on the road or track, those performances should not be considered.
• TROY is trail racing specific. While FKTs are always awesome, TROY aims to focus on head-to-head competitions, leaving FKTs to be celebrated in their own category with the folks over at Fastest Known Time.
• TROY is distance agnostic. We are grouping everything from VKs to 200+ mile races under the greater discipline of trail running. It is the responsibility of voters to be informed about the performances across this vast spectrum and to endeavor to eliminate personal bias for certain distances, instead deferring to the criteria listed below.
• TROY is not a popularity contest. One of the great things about trail running is that the pro athletes are genuine, friendly, and humble people. It’s why we want to recognize their achievements. However, this vote should not reflect who you most love to follow on social media, but instead who performed best on the race course.
• Trail Performance of the Year. In addition to the season-long award, we also recognize the best single-day performances through ​Trail Performance of the Year​. We ask that voters rank the top-5 individual trail performances of 2024 for both men and women. It is ok to vote for the same athlete multiple times for TPOY.

Voting Considerations

For those who do vote, we encourage you to take that responsibility seriously, applying research and deep consideration to the ranking. We hope you’ll meditate on the following criteria before submitting your ballot:

• Depth of competition – Reward those athletes who performed best on the biggest stages, against the deepest fields.
• Consistency of performance – Consider the whole season in context and reward those athletes who raced well consistently, while weighing outstanding single performances accordingly.
• Versatility of performance – As I mentioned, TROY is distance agnostic. As such, consider and reward the athletes who display ability to compete across distances and terrain variation.
• Geographical Bias – Freetrail has an international audience, but we are North America based and english speaking. We hope the voters will have advanced-level knowledge of the international dynamics in the sport, including which races are significant across the myriad of international event series (World Mountain Running Association, Golden Trail Series, UTMB World Series, Skyrunning, etc.).

Vote Weighting

For TROY and TPOY, we implement a weighting system to increase the voting impact of three categories of voters.

• Selected trail media and industry professionals
• Professional trail runners (PTRA)
• Top fantasy predictors of 2024

By increasing the weighting of select informed individuals, we hope to increase the overall quality of the results, while still including the voice of the general public, similar to what Major League Baseball does for their all-star game. For 2024, the three categories listed above will account for 80% of voting power, with the general public vote making up the remaining 20%.

Instructions for Voting

• Voting is open now for ​TROY​ and ​TPOY​!
• Voting will be open for two weeks, closing at Noon PST on Monday, December 16th.
• Pick 10-deep for both the men and women in TROY. Incomplete ballots will still be counted. If you don’t feel confident picking all ten, feel free to stop early rather than picking randomly.
• Athletes are listed in alphabetical order to eliminate bias that could result from ranking by UTMB Index or UltraSignup rating – read the whole list!
• When you click on an athlete’s name, you’ll find deep resources to inform your ballot including results from the season, links to databases, and the athlete’s various social media accounts. Take your time and use the information provided!
• While we did our best to assemble what we thought were the top performers of the year it’s possible that we missed someone or a specific result for an individual athlete already on the list. If that is the case, please ​contact us​ with TROY in the subject line.
• When you submit your ballot, you’ll have the ability to make edits all the way up until the time voting closes at Noon PST on Monday, December 16th, at which time picks will be locked in.
• The winners will be announced starting January 1st 2025.

Finally, a huge thank you to​ Travis Loncar​, who created and built the TROY & TPOY platform from scratch. The inventor and steward of Freetrail Fantasy, Travis is a very talented software engineer and a critical member of the Freetrail team. He’s been working tirelessly on this for months and we are grateful.

Let’s end this season on a high note. Let the toggling begin!

Love,

DBo