A backyard ultra is looped race where you have an hour to complete a 6.7 km loop. At the start of the next hour, you have to be back in the starting corral ready for the next loop or you are out of the race. The winner is the last person standing; everyone else is a DNF.
I packed plenty of spare clothes for all weather and a big bag of snacks including some homemade chicken wraps and a pizza cooked freshly in the morning and packaged up into convenient pieces. The weather was much kinder than at the official recce and everyone set up their camp outside in sunshine.
It has “mountain” in the name for the reason: there were around 230 metres of evaluation gain in each lap. Each loop started with a 22-minute slog up the hill that almost everyone walked. There was then a short section along the top before the bog field and a technical off-road descent through the forest. Finally, it joins a gravel track going back down to base camp. This is the hard way around and the opposite way to how we were promised: perhaps a bit of Irish humour creeping in.
100 people entered the race and 87 people started. By lap three, we were four runners down. The adage is “run your own race” but this was difficult given there was such a big crowd walking the first few kilometres. Being a road runner, I was slower on the bog field so slower walkers would then want to overtake me, and then on the downhill where I would open out my stride (and my gravitational advantage) I would go back past them.
I took my backpack on the first loop to get some hydration but soon decided to ditch the extra weight and eat and hydrate at the end of each lap. This was no easy task, though. Laps would take 52-56 minutes which doesn’t give you much time to do more than one thing. If I needed to sort my shoes out, change some gear, or have a wee, as well as my hourly feed and drink, things got very tight.
I was pretty grumpy the whole day. I was grumpy on lap one because we were going the “wrong” way and the technical bits were hard. Then I sank into “why am I doing this to myself”. After lap six I switched from sports drink to caffeinated drinks, aiming to do between 10 and 12 laps. 10 seemed like a round number. But then 11 would be a night lap and 12 would be one better than God’s Own Backyard Ultra.
After lap nine I grabbed my backpack with a base layer in it and swapped my cap for a buff and a head torch. 49 of us set out on lap 10 as the sun went down. I was feeling relieved by this point that I had reached at least ten. By lap 11 the sun had fully set and I was half excited for a night loop but also suffering. I felt myself wheezing up the hill and the bog field was even harder to navigate because it was impossible to tell what was hard mud and what was soft mud. I got back with four minutes to spare but had already decided I couldn’t face a fourth loop. 33 runners outlasted me.
In total I managed 73.7 km (my watch measured 69) with 2,512 metres of evaluation gain. This is double my next hilliest race, Man Vs Coast. I was moving for 9:48:57 of the 11 hours. Congratulations to Kevin Leahy who ultimately won the race with a course record 29 laps, and to fellow Brit Myles Barnes for the assist.
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Tags: backyard ultra, running, ultramarathon
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2023 at 11:00 am and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.