What Is Her Trails and Who Is It For
Trail Notes | About Her Trails
a place built for the woman who runs
What Is
Her Trails.
Her Trails is a women's trail running platform. But the longer answer to what we are is more useful, especially if you have just landed here and want to know whether this is the kind of place that might suit you.
We are a coaching community. A program library. A blog catalogue. A group run network. A retreat and adventure host. An evidence-informed source on female endurance, fuelling, hormones, recovery and life on the trails. And, more than any single one of those things, we are a culture. A specific way of being with women who move.
This Trail Note is the orientation. What Her Trails is, who it is for, what we believe, what you can do here, and how to take the first small step in.
Her Trails exists because women deserve a different kind of running culture. Less ego. More honesty. More room to be exactly where you are on the day.
A place built by women, for women, around the bodies, lives, hormones and stories we actually have.
Trail Note · 01
What we believe
Her Trails is built on a small number of strong beliefs. They show up in how we coach, how we program, how we write and how we run together.
Our core beliefs
Women are not small versions of men. Female physiology deserves its own coaching, fuelling and programming.
Consistency over heroics. The long horizon almost always wins.
Strength is not optional, especially across the cycle, perimenopause and beyond.
Fuelling is the foundation. Under-fuelled training is not athletic. It is fragile.
Recovery is part of the work, not the reward for it.
Mindset matters, but mindset cannot solve a fuelling, sleep or recovery problem.
Community is medicine. Women move better in good company.
These are not slogans. They are the editorial filter behind every program, blog post, weekly intro and coaching call we put into the world.
Trail Note · 02
Who Her Trails is for
Her Trails is for women who run, hike, train, race and adventure on trails. The platform welcomes women across a wide range of experiences and ambitions.
You are in the right place if you are training for your first 10km, your first half marathon, your first trail ultra or your tenth one. If you are returning to running after children, injury, perimenopause, illness or a long quiet season. If you have always run road and want to find trail. If you have never raced and are not sure you want to. If you are looking for a community, not a competition.
You may especially feel at home here if the running culture you have encountered so far has felt loud, performance-focused, body-focused or under-supportive. We are deliberately building something else.
If you have ever wondered whether the rest of trail running culture was made with you in mind, this one is.
Trail Note · 03
What you can actually do here
Her Trails is several layered offerings under one roof. You do not need to engage with all of them. Most women begin with one, and discover others over time.
Race programs
Race-specific structured programs. Marathon, trail ultras, mountain races, stage races, more. Built around female physiology.
Strength programs
Her Strength and Peri Power. Resistance training designed for the female athlete, including perimenopause-specific programming.
Community group runs
Trail group runs held in multiple regions, led by Her Trails-trained Mavens. Free to attend, designed to welcome new women.
Retreats and adventures
Curated trail-based retreats and adventures, locally and internationally. Held by women, for women, with care.
Trail Notes blog
An ongoing library of evidence-informed coaching journals. Written for women, in plain language, on the topics that matter most.
Membership
A deeper home for women who want ongoing coaching, deeper content, and a more involved community connection.
Trail Note · 04
How our programs are different
Her Trails programs are written by women, for women. That is not branding. It changes the inputs of the program in concrete ways.
We think about the cycle and where it sits in a build. We think about energy availability and how it changes across heavy weeks. We think about perimenopause, recovery debt, fuelling, sleep, life load, and the realities of training while parenting, working, caring or carrying invisible labour. We program strength alongside running, not as an afterthought.
We write weekly intros that explain the why behind the work. We include weekly reading. We build in deload weeks, taper structures and recovery practices the same way we build in long runs. We treat athletes as adults who deserve a complete picture, not a list of sessions.
Trail Note · 05
Why we run together
Her Trails is not only a coaching platform. It is a community. The Community Group Runs are one of the most visible expressions of that. Free to attend, held in multiple regions, hosted by Mavens, designed to welcome women across every stage.
You do not need to be in a program to come to a group run. Many women begin with us this way. They show up on a Sunday morning, run with other women on a local trail, share coffee at the end, and quietly notice that they want more of this in their lives.
The trail is the excuse. The women are the reason. We have written more about what to expect at a group run in a separate Trail Note, if you want to know exactly what the morning looks like before you come.
Trail Note · 06
Why evidence matters
Trail running culture is full of advice that was never written with women in mind. Fuelling guides drawn from male athlete research. Programming that ignores the cycle. Strength philosophies that assume a body that does not exist in midlife. Recovery advice based on physiology that does not match the women we coach.
Her Trails is evidence-informed. That means we draw on the best available research, especially research conducted on female athletes, and translate it into language and programming that real women can use. We are not interested in trends. We are interested in what holds up across seasons.
Where the research is still emerging, we say so. Where coaching experience extends beyond the data, we say that too. We trust women to handle nuance.
Trail Note · 07
What we are not
It can be helpful to know what a place is not, as well as what it is.
We are not a body-composition program. We are not a no-rest, no-fuel, no-mercy training brand. We are not a place that asks women to suffer harder to prove themselves. We are not a community that celebrates over-training, under-eating or pushing past warning signs.
We are not interested in any version of trail running that requires women to be less themselves in order to belong here.
Trail Note · 08
Where to start
If you are new to Her Trails, the easiest entry points are also the smallest.
Three small first steps
Join the email list. You will hear about new programs, group runs, retreats and new Trail Notes as they go live.
Come to a group run if there is one near you. It is the fastest way to feel what Her Trails is in person.
Read a few Trail Notes on topics that matter to you. The voice of the blog is the voice of the platform.
If you want a program, you do not have to pick the biggest one first. Most women begin with whatever race or distance is in front of them and grow from there. There is no hierarchy. The 10km program and the 100km program are built with the same care.
Trail Note · 09
What you can expect from us
If you decide to be part of Her Trails, in any of its forms, you can expect a few constants from us.
We will speak to you as an adult woman, not a statistic. We will be honest when we know something, careful when we do not, and clear about the difference. We will design for the body you have today, not the body the internet wants you to have. We will hold the door open for new women whenever we can. We will protect a community where women feel seen, safe and supported.
We will keep building this slowly, carefully and with the long horizon in mind. Because that is the same way we believe athletic lives are best built.
Trail Note · 10
An invitation
If anything in this Trail Note feels like it could have been written for you, it probably was. We did not build this for elite athletes or perfect runners. We built it for the woman who wants to keep moving, with skill and with company, across the long arc of her life.
There is no perfect moment to start. There is only the next small choice. Join the email list. Find a group run. Open a program page. Read another Trail Note. Whatever feels like the right size step today.
We are glad you are here. Trail Notes will keep arriving. The community will keep gathering. The programs will keep evolving. The door, in every form, is open. We hope you come through it.
built for the woman who runs, by the women who run
Written by the Her Trails team
Trail Notes are evidence-informed coaching journals written for women who train, race and run on trails. Made to be absorbed in ten minutes and remembered for a season.
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