‘DON’T RUN LIKE A DICK.’
I’m standing in the solo competitors’ area of the Rasselbock Backyard Ultra’s HQ marquee on a chilly March morning, and fellow runner Paul Miles is sharing his hard-earned learnings from his first attempt at the event 12 months before. The 49-year-old PE teacher from Buckingham had approached the race based in Sherwood Pines forest like any other and, at one point, found himself in the lead. ‘I’d done the first five laps in the quickest time,’ says Miles. ‘There was one lap that I’d won. All of that is completely irrelevant – I knew I messed up.’
After 33.34 miles, Miles couldn’t go on – his earlier pacing errors coming back to bite him. But he wasn’t the only one to DNF. In fact, all but eventual winner Richard Thompson, who clocked 150 miles, failed to finish the race.
Confused? This is no ordinary race – this is a backyard ultra. The brainchild of Gary Cantrell (aka Lazarus Lake, the big-bearded creator of the notorious Barkley Marathons), the race format is simple. Participants have to complete a 4.167-mile loop (known as a yard) on the hour, every hour, until only one runner remains. This last person standing is the race’s winner, while everyone else DNFs.
‘I moved on to my farm about 15 years ago,’ says Lake, from his home in Short Creek, Tennessee. ‘We built trails around the place and I wanted to have an ultra where I lived. We tried a regular timed run, but it’s only 150 acres and it was lacking something. The basic concept of the backyard ultra had been in my head for a long time. I was trying to think of something we could do with limited space and resources that would be fun.’
In 2011, Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra was born. The course was 4 miles, 880ft in length, which, although it seems mischievously specific, sees runners rack up 100 miles in 24 hours. Aside from the distance, Lake says, there are three simple rules: ‘You have to be in the corral and start when the bell rings; you don’t get any assistance until you finish the loop; and you
