This week I got a bit obsessed with following the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship 2024.
If you don’t know, a Backyard Ultra is a quirky type of ultramarathon on a 6.702km loop course (called a “yard”). Each yard (one loop) must be completed in 60 minutes, and runners must start each yard on the hour, every hour. The person who completes the most yards in total is the winner and everyone else gets a result of Did Not Finish. The odd distance of 6.702km per yard corresponds to 100 miles in 24 hours.
Each yard is typically run in 40 to 50 minutes, so runners get 10 to 20 minutes to rest, eat, sleep etc, before the start of the next yard. There are no other breaks, day or night, and a Backyard Ultra is an extreme test of physical and mental endurance.
Last week’s World Team Championship was an international competition with teams of up to 15 runners from 63 countries competing simultaneously at local events around the world. Teams were ranked by the total number of yards completed by their members.
For fun, I made a couple of charts with data from the offical results spreadsheet. The first shows the progress of each national team over the competition. Belgium won with an incredible team total of 1,147 yards and four of their team going for 100+ hours. The incredible performance of the Belgians is clear — they didn’t drop a single runner until 50 hours. Australia came second, edging out the US in an epic effort by their final runners. New Zealand achieved sixth place overall with 811 yards completed, despite the disadvantage of a 1am start time (all events started simultaneously). The best teams had a small core of runners who went much further than their teammates, with teams from eight countries going more than 72 hours.
Click the chart to see a bigger version
In terms of individual performances, three Belgians ended the race tied on 110 yards and hours (737 km!): Merijn Geerts, Ivo Steyaert and Frank Gielen. They beat the previous world record of 108 yards and I believe officially there was no winner as only a single winner is allowed! The local winner here in New Zealand was Sam Harvey with 73 yards (489km) completed (Sam is a legend of Backyard Ultra with a personal best of 101 yards or 677km).
The second chart below shows the individual performances. In reality everyone dropped out at a round number of hours and yards, but I’ve spread them a bit so you can see the points where more people dropped out. This shows the psychological factors at work in a competition like this. Very few people dropped out at 23 or 29 hours, but a lot did at 24, 25 and 30 hours. No one dropped out at 47 hours.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all the organisers and support crews for making it happen, it was an inspiring event to watch.
Click the chart to see a bigger version