The Backyard Ultra Debut.

I tried a new format of Ultra Running, and I kind of had fun?

After being completely inspired by the 2025 BPN Backyard Ultra, and even more so by the second one in 2026, I searched for a Backyard event near me to give it a go myself and see what it’s all about. Coincidentally, I found out that the inaugural Gold Coast Backyard Ultra Marathon was taking place half an hour down the road from me, in 2 weeks time…

At this point my weekly running mileage was only between 30-40km and the last serious run I had done was a 50k around my home town on Christmas Eve, which was over 2 months ago. Curiosity was never going to allow me to forgo the experience, but I knew I needed to be clever about it and approach with caution. I decided to enter and just use it as a practice run, use the event as a way to understand the format, learn more about my nutrition, trial different runners/clothing and just go have fun with it without really breaking my body over it. Then the goal would be to select a second event, providing I didn’t hate every second of it, and really go and push myself once I can be a little more prepared.

I managed to squeeze in one simulation session where I did 5 ‘yards’, totalling just over 33km and felt absolutely sweet, my HR remained sub 130 and I even had 2 flights of stairs after each yard to get back up to my gaff. I used bananas, toast with honey, chocolate coconut water and full fat coke with some jelly snakes here and there too, I wanted to avoid gels as they would be far from sustainable over a long period of time. The 5 days leading up to the event I tried to be off the legs as much as possible apart from one super easy 6.7km trot 2 days out just to make sure the legs were still working. Whether this was the right approach or not I had no idea because when I spoke to a few other runners at the event, they’d said they’d been running nearly every day leading up to the ultra.

Race day came around quick, due to it being a 4pm start I worked a 7-2 at the gym, completed my first aid and CPR course until 3pm and then headed straight to the location from work, not an ideal start as most runners would have been banking as much rest and sleep on this day right up until the race began. I had over $200 worth of snacks and drinks on me, a recliner chair and a bag of spare clothes and 3 choices of running trainers, I made myself comfy in the community gazebo, which was stupidly crammed, and started eating into my fuel. The weather was super moody, clouds looked heavy and the wind was already picking up, the vibe around camp wasn’t great.

We set off at 4pm, around 200 of us, the morale had picked up and everybody was yapping away. For someone who normally likes to keep to themselves in these situations, I made sure to speak to those running around me and I’m super grateful to have met an abundance of interesting people. Speaking to others really helped the time pass as, funnily enough, running the same loop over and over can get rather tedious. The adrenaline and excitement for the event meant my HR wasn’t as low as it was from my simulation session, however the first few laps flew by. I refused to have any music on to begin with as I knew that was going to be a huge help when I needed it most later down the line.

By the time 8pm came around, 4 laps in, we headed out into the pitch black with everyone’s head torches lighting the way. Conversations still flowing but less and less at this point, nerves maybe beginning to play a part as realisation set in that we were in for a long night ahead. I’d been eating triple layered nutella and PBJ sandwiches, banana bread, timtams and powerade so far and was feeling okay. Food was definitely getting harder and harder to consume but by this point a few good friends of mine, Harry, Russia and Max had turned up so they were, kindly, forcing me to keep up with the nutrition.

By lap 8 had came around, now at 12am, mentally I was starting to get fed up, the body was feeling okay, not great, but I was looking too far ahead rather than focusing on the current lap, I remember thinking ‘still 4 hours until I even get to lap 12’ and this was killing myself mentally. It also didn’t help that we were now running in a torrential downpour with seriously aggressive winds that meant each time I had returned from a lap, someone had lost their gazebo to the winds. My poor mate Harry would spend the whole 50 minutes I was away holding down the gazebo I was in, getting completely drenched, and so were the other fellow crew members. So as you can imagine the vibe back at camp was seriously low, this was the time to pull out the headphones.

I changed the full fit, brushed my teeth, and tried a mental reset on lap 9. Harry had gotten me a pot noodle at this point and what a difference a genuine meal, a hot one for that matter, made. The caffeine tablets, electrolyte tabs and everything else was doing it’s job perfectly, my legs felt okay but each time we made it down to the beach my legs were getting battered by the sand to the point where the stinging was lowkey painful and we were basically forced to walk this full stretch. Once we got past the beach, mentally it felt like the loop was over but the hard pavement slabs awaited us and this really took its toll on the joints. Once I got back to camp on loop 10 I tried to get some shut eye, the eye mask went on, music in ears and legs were elevated but I was far too restless to even begin to nod off.

As I set off for loop 11 I eagerly told harry this would be my last and once I returned we could finally go home. After 73km and 11 hours of running, I managed to run my quickest kilometre to finish at around a 5 minute pace to prove to myself the body was still good for more, which is exactly how I wanted to end it. I hit the gong to signal I was quitting (horrible feeling) and left the last 60 runners to it. Mentally this was way tougher than expected, ultra running is never pretty and to give up to the weather, no matter how bad it is, isn’t really how I saw myself going out. After packing up our stuff and waiting over an hour for an uber at 5am, we finally got in and passed Russia on her way out for work. Gnarly.

Plenty of lessons learnt from this experience and so I’ve ended up signing up to another on on the 14th of August for round 2. This time I have every intention of leaving it all out on the course, I don’t want to quit in the chair and I hopefully my mental doesn’t break before my body, the only way I intend on going out is not making it back in time for the next loop. I’ve given my crew the heads up that I don’t plan on stopping before 100km so they can mentally prepare for a long day/night too and we’ll see how we go. This time we’ll have a better set up at camp, more actual meals rather than quick carbs, a better layout to try and get some naps in-between laps and better vibes in general with hopefully getting to start the race with my friends Max and Sophie too. Let’s have it.