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Backyard Ultra Worlds are on

· 3 min read· updated

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Update, Thursday 22 October, 18:00

It’s over. Ivo Steyaert and Merijn Geerts 🇧🇪 finished their 124th yard together, and then stopped together. That’s a new world record: 124 yards, 124 hours, more than 830 km. They share it.

Belgium finished third with 1,058 yards. The USA won with 1,120, Australia came second with 1,069.

What an exciting race.

Update, Thursday 22 October, 7:00

Ivo Steyaert and Merijn Geerts 🇧🇪 are the only two runners left in the race. They just finished their 113th yard.

Two more yards each (4 in total) and Belgium jumps over Japan to third place. After that, the world record of 119 yards is in sight. And after that, nobody knows how far they’ll go. To take the win, they’ll need to keep running for 42 more hours.

The sun will come up soon here in Belgium. It will be a windy and cold day.

At this very moment, 55 national teams of up to 15 runners (M/F) are still running a loop - the same loop they’ve been running for 29 hours straight, so far - in their respective countries across the world.

And they don’t give up easily: 517 of the 776 runners who started are still going (!).

I’m in awe of these superhumans. I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine the pain tolerance level these people must possess, not just for the race itself but for the training regime a race like this must require. For reference: I (barely) finished two marathons, some time ago.

What a backyard is

A backyard is a pretty simple setup:

So, you start every hour for a loop, and you’re out if you can’t. There’s no pause, and the race usually goes on for days.

The current world record is at 119 yards by Phil Gore. That’s almost 5 days of running, with only power naps of a few minutes in between.

The faster you run, the more rest you have until the next loop starts. But the slower you run, the more energy you preserve for the future. It’s a game of balance. And pure endurance and exhaustion, of course.

In 2022 I went to watch a similar race in Bierbeek, with a slightly shorter loop.

A team championship

The world championship for teams started in 2020, during COVID. Runners couldn’t travel to Tennessee, where the individual world championship is held, so every country organized its own race at home instead, and they all started at the same time. And it stuck: this is the fourth edition, with 67 countries, and all teams started on Saturday 17 October at 14:00 Belgian time.

Each country sends a team of up to 15. Every yard any runner finishes counts for their team, and the country with the most yards in total wins.

And that’s what I love about this format: it’s not just about the last man standing, but it’s a real team effort. The star players matter, of course, but so does the runner who drops out first.

Belgium

The Belgian team has a pretty good track record here: we won in 2020 (574 yards) and in 2024 (1,147 yards), and came second in 2022 (788 yards, behind the USA with 860).

In 2024, even the first Belgian to drop out still ran 50 yards. To put that in perspective: the median national champion, so the last runner standing in their country, ran 38.

And on paper, Belgium wasn’t even the favorite in 2024. If you add up the runners’ best results before the race, the USA came out on top. Belgium then ran at least 250 yards more than its paper total. Kenneth Vanthuyne, for example, had a personal best of 38 yards going in. He ran 100 (!).

This year, on paper, it’s all very close: the USA (1,153), Japan (1,135), Belgium (1,127) and Australia (1,126) are within 27 yards of each other. Nine of our fifteen runners were also there in 2024, Kenneth included.

As I write this, all 15 Belgians are still in the race. And so are the US, Australia and Japan teams. Fingers crossed 🤞

Follow the race

There’s a very elaborate live page here and a livestream on YouTube.

To specifically follow the Belgian team, there’s the MyRaceResult live tracker page and a YouTube livestream as well.