We ended 2023 on a high note. Our community not only grew in numbers but also in passion and active participation in the club’s activities. We ended the year with more people turning stakeholders than just members of a club. And as we continued into 2024, we started the year for CapitalTrails with a strong foundation - built over the last 5 years, and powerful enough to boost us into the next 5.
As we cross the halfway mark on another round trip of the sun, we’re excited at what lies ahead for CapitalTrails. There have been challenges, which have only given us learnings, the fuel to work harder and build this community in an ever stronger manner.
Here’s what the future holds for CapitalTrails for the remainder of 2024 and beyond.
Year 2 of CapitalTrails Race Series
In 2023, we introduced a new racing format in India with the CapitalTrails Race Series. Organised as a minimalist and self-supported race with featherweight economics, the vision was to develop the CapitalTrails Race Series into an annual event with 3 races. Fast forward to July 2024, CapitalTrails Race Series has completed one year, and we have successfully executed 3 races, one in each significant green belt of Delhi/NCR. To that effect, CTRS-Panikot, held in March 2024, also had a carbon footprint that was one of the lowest in India - an achievement that deserves its own detailed article. With each race, we’ve seen greater and more diverse participation and even greater enthusiasm from our community members to join the races as volunteers to plan, organise and spectate as self-sufficient racing takes off in the country. September 2024 will see the CapitalTrails Race Series kick off year 2 with CTRS-Asola 2nd edition for which we’ll be awarding ITRA and UTMB Index points (CTRS-Panikot already awards ITRA Index points for the Long category). We’ve officially turned one!
Opening Up CapitalTrails to More Diverse Groups
We tried a ‘walks’ category in February, and based on feedback that we’ve received from our community members, we’ll be making CapitalTrails Walks a full-fledged activity along with our monthly outdoor group meets. We’ve always wanted to introduce more diverse groups of people to the NCR outdoors, and we believe that restricting our activities to trail running alone was obstructing that goal. With a dedicated Walk/Hike category in addition to the Short and Long running distance categories, we believe we can get more participation and change the perceptions towards nature and the outdoors for more diverse groups of people in the NCR. We’re also exploring the feasibility of adding other outdoor activities to our experiences list, but we’re happy to take one step at a time and make sure we deliver the best possible outdoor experience to all genders and age groups - a sense of curiosity, passion and adventure is all that’s needed to experience the trails of NCR.
Re-establishing the CapitalTrails Core Committee
CapitalTrails is nothing if not for the people who are a part of the community. And it gives us nothing short of a feeling of exhilaration when our members voluntarily come forward to help us out with everything related to the club’s operations. Whether it’s promoting the community at events, volunteering at the CapitalTrails Race Series, helping out with marshalling the group runs, helping out with organising activities, helping us get more members, our folks are doing it all - for which, we are extremely grateful. To do justice to the trust placed in us by our community members, and also the responsibility of growing this community into a larger and stronger presence, we’ve re-initiated the formation of a CapitalTrails Core Committee. We are building on the learnings from our last attempt in 2022 with an aim to collaborate better, become more efficient operationally, and to get more diverse ideas on how to grow the community.
More Explorations and FKT Routes
Somewhere in 2022, after the Nilgai Forest Trail was finalised and published, we stopped exploring. Much also has to do with handling the growth of CapitalTrails and the time commitments such growth placed on us, and barring a handful of new trails, we pretty much stuck to what we had mapped. While we have no complaints, we want to start re-focusing on what started CapitalTrails in the first place - the sense and joy of exploring the vast forest expanses in and around NCR. There are green pockets in Delhi that we still haven’t explored and want to add to our group meet calendars. This also means we'll be taking Project TrailConnect to resolution and a usable form. On the FKT side, with Nilgai Trails leaving a nice large gap between 37km and 90km, the opportunity is ripe for creating more FKT routes in this sweet-spot. And before the ultra-minded runners out there take a shot at us, the idea of creating a 100km+ route in NCR has certainly crossed our mind!
Building an Online Community Platform
Starting with Kaustav’s race report for the prestigious Malnad Ultra 50k which he got a top 10 position in, we opened up the CapitalTrails blog as a platform where our community members could share their experiences, thought pieces, race reports - essentially anything to do with trail running. After a brief lull period, this was followed by more folks from the CapitalTrails community coming forward to share their own race experiences. From Arjun’s stunning race at Summit Run Sethan-Hamta 25k to Udayan’s experiential and explosively detailed tight-budget triathlon journey at the Bergman 113 Mysore and then Saumya’s journey while running in the Land of the Thunder Dragon - we now have an open space where anyone can pen their thoughts and experiences and have a platform where their voices can be shared with the world.
Continuing Thoughts
We’re only halfway done with 2024. With six months left before we complete the round trip, we have the opportunity to fix the misses, scale up the hits, and take on newer paths to discover the beauty of this community in a way that we haven’t before. In many ways, even though it has been 5 years of CapitalTrails, we feel the energy and freshness of having just started up. We’ve been building the foundational framework for CapitalTrails (and we’ll continue doing so with fresh learnings) and it’s time to take the first journey to a path of scaling up. Join us as we take on this exciting uphill trail running journey for us and our community, and turn it into a movement for India.
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