According to the International Trail Running Association (ITRA, online): ‘a trail race is a pedestrian competition open to everyone, which takes place in a natural environment, with the minimum possible of paved roads (20% maximum). The course can range from a few kilometres for short distances all the way to 80 kilometres and beyond for ultra-trail races.’ This definition of ‘trail’ by ITRA reflects consensus among the various stakeholders of this sport, including researchers.
Over the past twenty years, the practice of this sport has significantly grown in popularity (Hoffman & Fogard, 2012). In France, for example, Buron (2020) with Bessy (2012) counted 5 trail events in 1995 and 2240 in 2016. Finally, in 2019, the International Trail Running Association published a survey based on five million adepts across the world, which concerned only the competitors. These two examples chosen over others clearly demonstrate the weight of this practice, especially in the western countries.
However, after undertaking several research projects on trail-running in social sciences and humanities, we found that few literature reviews existed on this specific topic (Travert et al., 2019), which is often integrated into broader reviews on running. This article therefore aims to fill this gap and identify ‘blind spots’ to drive new research and scientific directions, without entering into theoretical considerations related to different schools of thought, like Cubizolles et al. (2018) who put forward the differences in analysis about long-distance running between the English-speaking countries and French-speaking countries…