Who were the best trail runners of 2025?

Trail running media community Freetrail has opened voting for its annual Trail Runner of the Year (TROY) awards, and the 2025 edition comes with a few tweaks and a bigger role for fans. If you’ve followed the season, you already know it was packed with standout races and breakthrough performances. Now the public gets to help decide who defined the year. Here’s a look at what’s new, what’s familiar and how to cast a ballot.

With a couple of updates, the awards have settled into three parts, all meant to capture different sides of the sport.

Trail Runner of the Year (TROY)

This is the main award and the one people argue about all year. It’s essentially the sport’s MVP: athletes who didn’t just win one big race, but delivered across distances, conditions and calendars. Freetrail calls it recognition for “the top athletes of the season,” with voters ranking 10 men and 10 women. This is meant to recognize a full-season display of dominance instead of a single highlight. Canadians nominated include Quebec’s Marianne Hoganne, Jazmine Lowther of Nelson, B.C. and Vancouver’s Jade Belzberg.

Canadian trail runner Jazmine Lowther on her standout 2025 season

Trail Performance of the Year (TPOY)

This category focuses on the edge-of-your-seat moments; the course records, times where athletes rose to the top amid wild challenges, or world-level breakthroughs. Voters select five men and five women. This is where fans can focus on rewarding a single day that changed how we talk about an athlete or race. Think Swiss runner Rémi Bonnet’s insane new vertical kilometre record, or Australia’s Phil Gore setting a new backyard ultra record, running 800 km over 119 hours at Dead Cow Gully Backyard Ultra.

Trail Team of the Year (TTOY)

New this year is a team award, introduced with a nod to Formula 1 racing’s Constructors Championship (a year-long points race that crowns the best Formula 1 team based on the performance of both of its drivers). Instead of voting directly, TTOY is derived from TROY results—meaning every ballot helps shape the eventual team standings. Brands’ teams combine their men’s and women’s results into a single score. For fans, this should mean another reason to take their ranking seriously.

How to vote

Voting runs for two weeks and closes Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 12 noon PST (3 p.m. ET). The ballot is available through Freetrail’s site and linked on their social channels. Fans can submit once, and the results start rolling out on Jan. 1, which has become a bit of a tradition for Freetrail’s year-end awards. Because TTOY depends on TROY, filling out the full 10-deep ranking matters more this year than it has in the past. It’s also one of the few moments when fans of the sport can directly add their voice to a global conversation, which is part of what has kept these awards growing.