What a Backyard Ultra actually is

Most ultramarathons have a finish line. You know the distance before you start, you know roughly how long it will take, and you plan backwards from there. A Backyard Ultra takes that away. There is no distance, no cut-off at the end, and no finish line. There is only the next hour.

The rules fit on a napkin

A yard is one loop of 6.706 km, or 4.167 miles. The number is not arbitrary: run it 24 times and you have covered exactly 100 miles in a day.

Every loop starts on the hour. A bell rings, and every runner still in the race leaves the corral, the start area, together. You have 60 minutes to run the loop and be back. Whatever is left of the hour is yours. Then the bell rings again, and everyone starts again, together.

That is almost all of it. Two more rules make the format what it is:

• Miss the bell and you are out. If you are not in the corral when the bell rings, or you do not finish the loop inside the hour, your race is over. There is no grace period, and it does not matter whether it happens on yard 3 or on yard 93.
• Last one standing. The winner is the runner who completes one more loop than everyone else, alone. If the last two runners both fail on the same loop, nobody wins. Everyone is recorded as a DNF.

You cannot bank a lead

In a normal race, running faster buys you something: a better time, a buffer for later, a lead over the runner behind you. In a Backyard Ultra it buys you almost nothing. Finish a loop in 40 minutes and you wait 20 minutes for the bell. Finish it in 50 and you wait 10. Everyone starts the next loop at exactly the same moment.

So the only thing speed buys is rest. And rest is where everything else has to happen: eating, drinking, changing shoes and socks, treating a blister, changing into night clothes, swapping a headlamp battery, sleeping. All of it comes out of whatever is left of the hour.

Most runners settle into loops of roughly 44 to 51 minutes. That leaves 9 to 16 minutes between arriving and the next bell. Run faster and you pay for it hours later. Run slower and there is no time left to look after yourself.

Nobody knows how long it will last

Because there is no fixed distance, a Backyard Ultra lasts exactly as long as the last two runners can keep going. That can be a day. It can be five.

The second season of Last Soul Ultra in 2026 gives a sense of the scale: 160 runners started. After 24 hours, 57 were still in the race. After 48 hours, 13. The winner was the last one standing after 94 yards, around 630 km. The world record stands at 119 yards, just short of five days of running one loop every hour.

That uncertainty changes how you prepare. You cannot plan for a distance. You plan for a rhythm that you can repeat indefinitely, and for everything that will go wrong along the way: the first night, the second night, the stomach that stops cooperating, the feet that start to fall apart.

Think loop by loop

The experienced advice is always the same: do not think about the finish, because there is none. Think about the next loop. Then the one after that.

It sounds like a mental trick, and partly it is. But it is also the literal structure of the race. Every hour is a small, complete race of its own: run 6.706 km, come back, recover, prepare, go again. What matters is not any single strong hour but doing the same thing well, again and again. As the Last Soul Ultra team puts it in their checklist: planning beats talent, and consistency beats individual strong hours.

The race happens in camp as much as on the course

Here is the part that surprises people who have never watched one. While the runner is out on the loop, nobody can help them. Outside assistance on the course means disqualification, and there are usually no spectators out there. For about 45 minutes, the runner is on their own.

Back at base camp, the crew is not resting. They use those 45 minutes to prepare the next break: the food for the next loop, dry socks, the right jacket, a charged lamp for the night. When the runner comes in, there are only a few minutes, and everything has to already be ready.

A good crew is the difference between a runner who spends their rest resting and a runner who spends it searching for things. At Last Soul Ultra, a runner can register up to four crew members, with three allowed on site at the same time, sharing a base camp of three by three metres. Many teams have no power there, and patchy mobile signal at best.

That is the setting for everything else on this blog: a small camp, a tired crew, a clock that never stops, and a runner who has fewer good decisions left in them every hour.

Where to go from here

If you are thinking about your first Backyard, the next posts go deeper:

• The minutes between loops: what actually happens in a 10-minute break, and in what order.
• Fuelling a Backyard Ultra by the hour: how much to eat, when, and what to do when the stomach says no.
• The crew runs everything else: roles, shifts, and handing over at 4 a.m.
• Why paper fails at 3 a.m.: why we think a crew needs software built for exactly this.