Mark Dowdle led the U.S. to the team title, while two Belgian runners broke the Backyard Ultra World Record.
Backyard ultra racing just had a huge coming-out party. But unlike parties that start in the evening, rage through midnight and fizzle out in the wee hours of the morning, the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship started last Saturday, October 17, and kept going and going and going.
And going. And going. Until Thursday morning.
That’s when the final two remaining runners on the Belgian team, Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert, voluntarily stopped after completing their record-setting 124th yard to officially end the competition after five days. With each yard consisting of a 4.167-mile lap at the top of every hour, they ran 516.24 miles (or 830.8 kilometers) since last Saturday. By completing 124 yards, Geerts and Steyaert jointly surpassed the previous world record of 119 yards set by Australia’s Phil Gore in June 2025.
Their decision to stop also meant the U.S. team could be officially crowned world champions based on the cumulative 1,120 yards its 15-member team racked up on the U.S. course in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Mark Dowdle earned the U.S. title with 107 yards on Wednesday afternoon when fellow U.S. team member Jon Noll was unable to complete that lap. Australia (1,069 yards) finished second in the team standings, while Belgium (1,058 yards) finished third.
In all, 989 runners from 67 countries around the world participated in their own in-country races, racking up a total of 32,827 yards (136,779 miles or 220,125 kilometers). Next October, the top runners from each country will race in the Backyard Ultra World Individual Championship in Tennessee.
Here are a few of the many things that became apparent over the past six days of relentless running around the world in this year’s Backyard Ultra World Team Championship.
Results: Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra (The U.S. Event of the Backyard World Team Championship)
1. Backyard Ultra Racing Is a Wild Concept
Whether you tuned into the livestream or not, it doesn’t take long to understand how insane the backyard ultra discipline is and how it pushes the limits of human endurance in different ways. Invented by Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, the discipline originated with Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra in Bell Buckle in 2011. Yes, that Laz, the same “Hillbilly Scientist” who dreamed up the nearly impossible Barkley Marathons 40 years ago.
Decades in the sport, Laz continues to create and propagate entirely unique races and acute aspects of pushing the limits of human endurance. What makes backyard ultra racing special is that anyone who can run 4.167 miles at least twice can participate. It’s infinitely intriguing and accessible to new runners, road runners and veteran ultrarunners alike.
Laz hosted the first team championship in 2020, when the world was still mostly shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has alternated with the individual world championship ever since.
Backyard ultras are the only races where the finish line occurs when someone else fails. The format looks almost insultingly simple: run a 4.167-mile loop, complete the loop and be back in the start corral before the top of the hour, then do it again. And again. And again. Until you can’t. Ultimately, the last runner standing wins, while the second-to-last runner is known as the assist. The winner is the competitor who completes a loop that no other competitor completes. If no competitor outlasts every other competitor, there is no winner.
Each lap is a small victory, and each one buys you a few minutes to eat, refuel, change your socks, fix your feet and try to convince your brain that another loop is a reasonable idea. If you can keep running for 24 hours (and cover 24 yards), that’s 100 miles, and for the elite that’s only the warm-up.
There’s no distance to chip away at, no finish line to look forward to, and no way to know how long it will last, because the race doesn’t end until everyone but one person has quit. Pure fitness is only the entry fee. What decides these things is who can keep making the same decision, hour after hour, long after it stops making sense.
RELATED: Find Your Next Backyard Ultra Race at UltraSignup
2. Backyard Ultra Is About Managing Sleep Deprivation
In backyard ultras, you barely sleep, except in 5- to 10-minute increments. Whatever time you save between laps is all you get to recover, refuel and rehydrate. Early on, runners were clicking off 35- to 40-minute laps. By mid-week, many were in the 45- to 55-minute range, and the race turned into a sufferfest in which a few runners barely made the 59:59 cutoff to start another loop.
Early on, those breaks can feel luxurious. By the second night, they’re a cruel joke, because the faster you run, the more time you get to feel how bad you feel. Hallucinations, wrecked stomachs and blistered, swollen feet are all part of the routine, and managing those problems takes priority while getting ready for the next lap.
Sleep becomes a theoretical concept, with maybe a few minutes of it squeezed in before the starting bell of the next lap. Dirt naps on the course aren’t an option like they are in traditional ultras, because you could easily sleep too long and miss the cutoff.
3. Teamwork Was the Whole Point This Year
For this year’s Backyard Ultra World Team Championship, each country’s score was the cumulative yards of all of its runners (with a maximum of 15), so the 15th runner’s laps count as much as the first’s. Team USA ran with real solidarity, occasionally running a few of the early laps entirely together.
Belgium’s top runners also hung back early with slower teammates to bank as many yards as possible. It’s a strategy that makes a team deep rather than just top-heavy. Getting brief views on the livestream feed to see how the other countries were running and supporting their runners was really amazing and insightful, as was the national pride that each country exhibited after their last runner bowed out. It’s long been said that there is a universal language of running, and it is certainly true in the quirky discipline of backyard ultra racing.
While it looked like Dowdle could have kept going after his 107th yard, Noll gave everything he had before stopping and walking back, and he nearly matched the 111 yards he racked up while finishing fourth in last year’s individual championship in Bell Buckle.
Aside from Dowdle (107 yards) and Noll (106 yards), the U.S. got exceptional efforts from Nicholas Steel (94 yards) and Greg Fall (92 yards) and strong contributions from Levi Yoder (86 yards), Nick Petterson (84 yards), Harvey Lewis (83 yards), Megan Smyth (82 yards), Jeff Walker (75 yards) and Ryan Snickles (69 yards). But everyone played a crucial role, which is why the mileage of Scott Snell (56 yards), Stephanie Rosebaugh (51 yards), Jennifer Russo (49 yards), Scott Martin (44 yards) and Ron Wireman (42 yards) was equally important to the team championship.
Australia had 11 of its 15 runners reach 70 laps or more, while the U.S. had nine, Japan had six and Belgium had five.
For complete team and individual stats, visit Big’s Backyard World Team Championship.
4. Women Are Central to the Team Race
Women were in the mix deep into the week at this year’s Backyard Ultra World Team Championship. The top American woman was Megan Smyth, who lasted for 82 yards, while Stephanie Rosebaugh chipped in with 51 (212+ miles) and Jennifer Russo completed 49 (204+ miles). Smyth was the top woman in the event, but British ultra stalwart Sarah Perry chalked up 76 yards (316+ miles) for the UK team.
Women have been at the forefront of backyard ultra racing since its inception. Marcy Beard was the assist in the second Big’s Backyard Ultra in 2012, finishing second to Joe Fejes (28 yards). Colorado ultra star Courtney Dauwalter was the runner-up in 2018 to Sweden’s Johan Steene (68 yards). Colorado’s Maggie Guterl was the outright winner of Big’s Backyard Ultra in 2019 with 60 yards, and Dauwalter won outright in 2020 with 68 yards. Perry holds the women’s record at 95 yards, set at the 2025 individual championship, while American Megan Eckert set the women’s team-championship record of 87 in 2024.
5. The Event Was Streamed Live for Five Days
More than 21,000 people watched the livestream at its peak during the USA-Belgium-Japan-France showdown on the fourth and fifth days of running action. The livestream of a backyard event isn’t very exciting, mostly because you only see runners for a few moments every hour, but this one rotated among numerous country race locales. While some countries had more engaging action, it was really just a sneak peek into the ongoing process that every runner in every country was going through: line up to start, run the lap, stop, rest, refuel, problem-solve and get ready to go again.
The chat had a wide range of commenters, but they seemed to include a lot of mainstream road runners and traditional trail runners who don’t usually follow a race with no finish line. Many were asking what it was all about, which seems to illustrate how interest is growing outside the narrow realm in which backyard ultra has existed. It’s different from watching a 100-mile race like UTMB or Western States in that no one has a clue how long it will go or when it will end. It’s the same pull as watching someone walk a tightrope. Nobody can look away. Or maybe it’s like watching molasses drip off the kitchen counter, because the “action” happens slowly over maybe days.
6. Mark Dowdle Is a Rising Star in Backyard Ultra
Mark Dowdle has been on fire in the backyard ultra scene in 2026. After winning the traditional Arrowhead 135 race in International Falls, Minnesota, in January, he won the BPN Go One More backyard event in early April in Texas (covering 73 laps and 306 miles amid sloppy, muddy conditions), followed by another victory in the Wausaultra Backyard Ultra in Wisconsin in early May. In August, he won Last Soul Ultra in Germany with 94 yards and 391.7 miles after arriving via private jet moments before the event started.
Dowdle has been one of the most consistent backyard racers since 2024. He’s obviously physically fit and adept at covering the miles, but he also seems to have exceptional mental acuity for the extreme monotony and endurance of backyard racing. In a sport marked by more of the same, he’s a one-of-a-kind, for sure. He engaged in some mind games with Last Soul Ultra runner-up Ayyoub “Ello” El Osrouti, a German ultrarunner, which have been the talk of the sport since August. He’s a guy who rode his bike 456 miles from Minneapolis to Chicago to participate in the beer mile world championships in 2024.
RELATED: Mark Dowdle: “A Level of Enthusiasm that is Immeasurable”
7. Dowdle Is Also the Face of a New Kind of Ultrarunner
Trail and ultrarunning are growing in new ways, with new participants coming to new disciplines from a variety of backgrounds. Dowdle has become one of the biggest rising stars in the backyard discipline, both because he’s racked up the results and because he’s a social-media natural and not lacking in confidence. He’s been increasingly prolific on social media, often posting bold commentary with a brash vibe stating his goals. He also recently sat down with Cam Hanes for the Keep Hammering Collective podcast. During the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship, he was even blasting out competitive barbs to the Australian team.
Dowdle didn’t come up through the trail-running pipeline. He played football and lacrosse at the University of St. Thomas and took up running after college. His first run came at 2 a.m. after losing a lacrosse game. He ran his first ultra in January 2020, the Wildcatter 50K in Graham, Texas, then found backyard racing and won his first one in 2024. “Gym bros” and hybrid athletes like Dowdle are a new, fast-growing type of participant coming into the sport. The unique challenges of backyards perhaps suit them because strength, sleep management and stubbornness matter as much as aerobic fitness.
8. Sponsors Should Be Eyeing This Category
Laz Lake hasn’t had a global sponsor of this event until this year, when Rappid, a performance-focused running apparel and streetwear brand from Germany, signed on as the title sponsor. It had numerous ads interspersed on the livestream. The brand also sponsors Dowdle, and there was a wild moment in which Rappid co-founder Kim Gottwald was on the phone with Dowdle between laps, trying to inspire him to get through a very dark spot late in the event as he struggle to meet the time cutoff. After that, Dowdle seemed to be rejuvenated and took over the lead from Noll and looked strong through his 107th yard.
” I had a conversation with my friend Kim and APL and they held up the mirror that I talk about in my personal life, my professional life, my online social media life,” Dowdle said after finishing. “And they said, ‘The words you tell us are that you are not able to leave unless you know you’ve given everything you’ve got.’ And I was pouting out there on the course because I was going through so much pain. There was all this doubt in my mind, this narrative being built that I could never beat Jon. And what was I going to allow to be the story? And it, it’s not even about beating Jon or beating the other competitors. It’s about, ‘Did you give everything that I had when I had the opportunity to do it?’ And so I looked at my watch and I looked at the distance and I said, ‘Well, if I empty the tank, at least I’ll have a chance.'”
There’s an awkward wrinkle, though: Rappid’s site says U.S. shipping is paused while it works out direct shipping without customs duties. That’s bad timing for a brand riding an American star’s moment.
9. Belgians Took Down the Backyard Ultra World Record
When Dowdle and Noll ended the race for the U.S. team on Wednesday evening, Belgian runners Geerts and Steyaert were the only ones still racing. They continued on for 17 more hours into Thursday to reach 124 yards, successfully surpassing the previous world record of 119 yards set by Australia’s Phil Gore in June 2025.
Gore’s world record of 119 laps came at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland in June 2025. He then went solo for Project 168 in Perth in August, stopping after 152 hourly laps, about 633 miles, 16 short of his 168 goal. None of it counts officially, because there’s no second runner to outlast. He sat this one out with an injury. If you want to learn more about Gore and the insanity of backyard ultra running, check out this documentary about Gore that just launched.
RELATED: Everyone’s got a shot at a backyard, right?
Upcoming Backyard Ultra Events
- Oct. 24, 2026: The Barnyard Backyard Ultra, Erie, CO
- Nov. 6, 2026: Barn Creek Backyard Ultra, Jamestown, TN
- Nov. 7, 2026: The Last Cowboy Backyard, O’Neill, NE
- Nov. 14, 2026: Rooster’s Backyard Ultra, Bonita/Chula Vista, CA – Sold out, with a waitlist.
- Jan. 16, 2027: MAD Backyard Ultra, East Ridge, TN
- Feb. 13, 2027: Soil Mates Backyard Ultra, Thomaston, GA
- Feb. 20, 2027: Endure Better Backyard Ultra, Lakeland, FL
- Mar. 5, 2027: Queeny Backyard Ultra, St. Louis, MO
- Mar. 20, 2027: Capital Backyard Ultra, Lorton, VA
- Mar. 2027: Ohio’s Backyard Ultra, Lucasville, Ohio. (the 2026 page; look for the 2027 listing)
- Mar. 27, 2027: Bad Ass Backyard Ultra, Rio Linda, CA
- Apr. 23, 2027: BC Backyard Ultra, Sicamous, BC. It’s billed as the sixth and final edition.
- Oct. 2027: Lion King Backyard Ultra, Rolla, MO
- Mid-Oct. 2027 (approx.): Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra, the individual World Championship, Bell Buckle, TN
- 9 Takeaways from the Mind-Blowing 2026 Backyard Ultra World Team Championship
- Take 2 Trail Gives Used Trail Gear a Second Life
- The art of accepting abject failure and moving on
- The Race is Over, Now What? Your Nutrition Guide to Recovering from Ultra-Distance Trail Races
- Introducing The Claims Department Podcast
- Hit Me Where It Hurts: How Ultrarunners Manage Pain
