Backyard Ultra World Team Championship 2024 – where are we now?
Lets start with the basics, a backyard ultra is where you run one lap of a road or trail per hour. Seems simple enough right? Depends how far it is? Well it’s actually just 4.167 miles or 6.7 kilometres for the metrics out there (me), an awkward but purposeful distance. If you multiply that distance by 24, you hit the magical 100 mile marker, thus encouraging runners to run at least that distance. To run 4.167 miles in an hour you have to run an average of 14 minutes 24 seconds per mile or 8 minutes 57 seconds per kilometre.
One of the genius parts of the backyard, is that you can’t start your next lap until the next hour begins, so there’s a really painful stop/start system that really restrains runners from getting into a rhythm. You also have to consider, restocking your nutrition, going to the loo, maybe needing to change your clothes, or the most important part for 100+ mile distances, sleeping.
So, who was the world’s best at running lap after lap, hour after hour at the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship this year? Well you don’t have to travel far from here, but sadly it isn’t the UK, we placed 13th, it’s just across the channel…Who was it who ran more laps than any other person on the planet? Who was the victor?
The victor, yes, well, there was no victor. Normally in a backyard its continued until there is only one runner remaining. Everybody else other than the winner is considered to have DNF’d! However in the world championships, there were three who all retired at once and all three were from Team Belgium! The point scoring system for the world championships is a little different. Each country has 15 runners and every lap run, is worth one point. Belgium had three runners left after every single other person had long since called it a day and they decided to stop after an unbelievable 110 laps, all three of whom broke the world record by 2 laps, previously set by Harvey Lewis last year at Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra 2023. In second was Australia, overtaking USA (third) late in the day with Phil Gore running an amazing 96 laps. The final standings were as follows but you can see yourself here.
The Backyard Ultra World Team Championship hasn’t been around long, it only began in 2020, starting with just 21 countries. This year there were 63 countries! Running is just getting bigger and bigger and people are continuing to run further and further, where will it end? We’ll be looking at the Spine Race like a parkrun in a few years (maybe I’m being dramatic). For the people who aren’t a fan of mental maths, 110 laps equates to 458 miles, it also means 110 hours of on/off running, 4 ½ days of 5-10 minute naps. Can you imagine the mental state, any of these people would be in even after two nights of very little sleep? Let alone 4!! I don’t know what techniques Belgium have managed suss out but I think we need a reconnaissance mission to try and find out their secrets. We’ll call it a tactical survey.
The three Belgians who managed to pull off the unthinkable were Merjin Geerts, Frank Gielen and Ivo Steyaert, I hope to find a podcast with at least one of them on in the coming months, is backyarding a bigger thing in Belgium? How did they do it? The people need to know.
The above is just the men’s world record, it wasn’t just this one that was broken but the women’s too. The women’s wasn’t just broken, it was obliterated! Megan Eckhart of the USA broke fellow compatriot, Jennifer Russo’s previous record of 74 laps…by 13! She ran 87 laps! If ever there was proof that the margin between men and women is narrowing, then this is it. If you scan your eyes across the results of the National backyard results, you can see that women are starting to finish higher and higher. There’s a belief growing that women can outperform at longer endurance distances and it’s already happening:
- USA – 1st Scott Snell 2nd Megan Eckhart
- Iceland – 1st Thorleifur Thorleifsson 2nd Elisa Kristinsdottir
- UK – 1st Sarah Perry 2nd Alex Sweet
I haven’t been able to delve deeper into the stats of each individual team of 15, but I’d be willing to bet big that women are finishing higher this year than any other year before. Imagine if women attended these events as much as men do, I’d love to see the stats turned on their head.
With Belgium taking top spot with three runners all at once, it meant that there was no individual winner. The individual winner of each National Championship normally gets invited to the original Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra, held by Lazarus Lake himself in Tennessee, so did Belgium lose out on a technicality? No. Thankfully it’s actually a very thorough and well thought out system. People don’t just qualify finishing top of their national championships, they also qualify through outstanding performances in the last couple years. Here’s the list:
As you can see there are 7 Belgians going, will they be able to build the same comradery there next year? I’m very excited to see!
I really loved following the British Championships of the backyard and watching Sarah Perry win was a real joy. Especially smashing her own British womens backyard record. Before this year the record was 35 laps, then in March, Sarah ran 41 laps. Narrowly losing out to Mike Raffan, who retired the very next lap. This looked to have lit a fire and after winning the 13 valleys ultra, with a course record just a few weeks earlier, she rocked up to the Backyard and ran 59 laps. Where is the limit for Sarah? We’ll find out next year at Big Dogs.
We’ll also see fellow Brit Matthew Blackburn there, who at the Suffolk Backyard Ultra, ran an astounding 87 laps breaking the men’s British record. He actually already had the event won at 83 laps, but he carried on to do a few more laps after saying to the organisers “I’ve nothing better to do this week”. That’s the type of laissez-faire attitude I love in ultra running, no big egos, just people going out to see what happens. Thank you Laz for another brilliant year of ultra running entertainment.
