The Golden Trail World Series reaches Japan for the first time on 20 September, when Myoko City in Niigata Prefecture hosts race six of the 2026 season. The course is built around Suginohara Ski Resort in the Myoko range, a venue better known for winter tourism than for mountain running, and the race is entirely new to the calendar rather than an existing event absorbed into the series.
The championship distance is 23.5km with roughly 1,800m of cumulative climbing, which places it squarely in the short, steep and largely runnable territory the series has made its own. Two open categories over 11km and 5km run alongside it, a familiar structure for the Golden Trail rounds that are as much local festivals as elite fixtures. Racing is spread across 19 and 20 September, with the main event on the Sunday.
Myoko opens a compressed Asian swing that will decide most of the remaining series points. A week later, on 27 September, the circuit moves to the Jinshanling Great Wall Trail Race in China, a course whose 2025 debut produced the most widely circulated images of the season as athletes picked their way up the Wall’s uneven steps. That race is the last significant scoring opportunity before the Grand Finale, which moves to Muju Trail in South Korea for the first time.
The scheduling underlines how different this end of trail running has become from the ultra-distance events that dominate late-season coverage. While Tor des Géants sends 1,100 runners over 330km of the Aosta Valley this month and UTMB fields spend most of a day on the move, the Golden Trail rounds are decided inside three hours and are designed to be watched from start to finish. The two formats now draw largely separate athlete pools, separate sponsors and separate audiences.
For Japan, the round is also a piece of destination marketing. Suginohara and the surrounding Myoko resorts have been the subject of sustained investment aimed at extending their season beyond the winter months, and a Golden Trail fixture is a low-cost way of putting the summer terrain in front of an international audience. Whether the race establishes itself will depend on how well the course reads on camera and how deep a field the series can persuade to travel for a single September weekend.