May 14, 2026
PALISADES TAHOE, CA — TrailCon Presented by On continues to build the most ambitious programming in trail running with another wave of high-profile names joining Day 1 – June 22 – at Palisades Tahoe.
Matt Carpenter — 12-time Pikes Peak Marathon champion, past Leadville Trail 100 record holder, and one of the most transcendent mountain runners the sport has ever seen —highlights Day 1 “Stakeholder Day’“ at TrailCon.
His performances in the 1990s and 2000s weren’t just dominant — they were prophetic, so far beyond the field that many of his records remain untouched more than 30 years later.
As previously announced, Rich Roll, Katie Schide, and Travis Tygart round out a Day 1 slate that spans the full breadth of what this sport is and where it’s headed.
Before the sport had a professional class, before GPS watches and carbon-plated shoes, before trail running was a global industry — Matt Carpenter was setting records that still stand today. Training at altitude in Manitou Springs, competing across disciplines and distances that most runners wouldn’t dare combine, Carpenter operated in a category largely of his own making.
Decades later, the sport is still catching up.
The numbers alone are staggering. Twelve Pikes Peak Marathon victories. A course record set in 1993 —over thirty years ago — that has never been broken. A Leadville Trail 100 record shattered by over ninety minutes in a performance so dominant that the publisher of Colorado Runner said simply: “He
finished in daylight. No one has ever done that before.” Five Everest SkyMarathon Tibet titles. World records for the fastest flat marathons at both 14,000 and 17,000 feet. A VO2 max of 90.2, tested at the
U.S. Olympic Training Center. And a racing philosophy distilled into a single, unmistakable line:
Go out hard, when it hurts speed up …
But Matt Carpenter was never just a collection of records. He was a culture unto himself — a runner who boycotted races over principle, co-founded the Incline Club to build community from the ground up, co-created the Barr Trail Mountain Race because he believed race directors could do better, served on his city council, and eventually opened a custard shop on the main street of the mountain town he’d made his home with his wife, Yovonne and his daughter, Kyla.
During this incredible session, Matt will take us back to what the sport looked like in the ’90s and early 2000s — the culture, the training, the mindset — and what drove him to keep pushing the boundaries of what was possible on two feet in the mountains. He’ll share how he views the current state of the sport— the explosion of technology, professionalization, and global attention — through the lens of someone who was doing things thirty years ago that the rest of the world is only now beginning to fully appreciate.
The session also will explore how training methods, nutrition, technology, and the sheer scale of the community have transformed the sport — and what it means to have performances that people are still talking about thirty years on.
Stay tuned for an exciting moderator for this dynamic session.