Round and Round at Suffolk Backyard Ultra

Last weekend, I took part in what was probably my biggest running challenge yet. A backyard ultra.

Otherwise known as a "last one standing" event, the main goal is to complete 4.17 miles within an hour, every hour, for as many hours as you can. The only person said to have finished the event, and so is not given a DNF, is the person that runs further than everyone else. Everyone starts each lap together, so it never really felt like a race to me, because it doesn't matter where you finish as long as you're back on the start line for the next hour.

On the face of it, 4.17 miles in an hour sounds easy. A 14 minute mile will get you in with just over 90 seconds to spare, which is a lot slower than my normal easy running pace. This is not a test of speed, just pure endurance and this is why it seemed like an exciting challenge. How long can I really keep running for?

Lining up at 12 noon for the first start line, I was very nervous, probably the most nervous I've been before a race. How fast should I go? When and how much should I walk? What will I need between loops? Although I had watched the pre-race video recce of the course, the first lap was about finding a pace and mentally noting some personal checkpoints. The walking bit actually fell into place quite nicely, as each mile seemed to have a long-ish uphill section which almost everyone walked. I completed lap 1 in 48:30, leaving me with 11 minutes before I had to be back on the start line. It turns out you can get quite a lot done in 11 minutes when you have to!

 

 

The next few laps slipped by pretty easily, the hardest part was trying to take on enough fuel between laps as it didn't really feel like I needed it in those early stages but I know that skipping it would have resulted in a pretty short day out. Soon, it was night time and the headtorches came out from lap 6 onwards. The trail seemed to change completely in the dark and I took a couple of laps to get to grips with it again. Whilst I've done plenty of training in the dark before, I haven't done a huge amount late in the evening, so running after about 10pm started to feel a bit strange. At midnight, after 12 hours of running, I hit my first personal goal - 50 miles. This is the furthest I've ever run in the past so was somewhat of a benchmark for me and I got there feeling pretty good! It seemed like my consistent lap times (just under 50 minutes) and fuelling plan (Tailwind, potato soup and instant noodles) were working nicely.

From 50 miles onwards, my plan was essentially just to finish the lap and see what happened. The next distance goal for me was 100km. At the beginning of 2020, pre-Covid19, my aim for the year was to complete a 100km race, so this was a distance I was keen to make it to. Whilst I would have loved to have kept running until dawn, by the start of lap 14 I was getting cold, my legs were painful on the walk sections and I was finding it harder to take on calories (probably because I rarely eat at 2am!). I made the decision to give everything to get to 100km and then stop. Unfortunately for me, 100km (by my watch, at least) fell 1 mile into lap 16! I had decided before the event that the only way I wanted to stop was to get timed out, as I knew that if I got back within the time, I would just have to go out again. So, I set off on lap 16 with the intention of timing myself out. I ran the first mile until my watch ticked over to 100km and then began the long, dark walk for home. It turns out that walking 3 miles, alone, in the dark, cold forest at 3am, is not the most pleasant way to spend an hour so I did jog a fair amount of the rest of the loop. Strangely, I had felt fine all night in the forest until this last lap, knowing there was no-one behind me.

I crossed the line of lap 16 in 1 hour, 2 minutes and 14 seconds and to be honest, was pretty glad to ring the bell to signal to all that I was done. I had run 105km and had been going for 16 hours. After a quick photo with my commiseratory dog tags and a full change of clothes (difficult in a tiny tent!), I did what was probably the most sensible thing I've ever done after an ultra and downed a protein-packed recovery drink (tasty chocolate flavour Tailwind Rebuild).

 

Whilst the race itself wasn't hard at all intensity-wise, I woke up that morning (3 hours later) with the stiffest legs imaginable. I couldn't straighten my legs or put my feet flat on the floor, which made walking and clearing away our tent quite challenging. I spent the rest of the next two days mostly in bed, occasionally undertaking a hands-and-knees crawl up and down the stairs. Weirdly, my muscles themselves felt fine. I think the problem was the tendons in backs of my knees, likely strained by so much fast walking up hills, which is definitely something I would practise for next time. If it wasn't for this, I think I could have kept going for a fair while longer. In hindsight, I'm glad I stopped when I did as I think if I had pushed on, I would have risked doing some proper damage to those tendons, although I was slightly disappointed when I realised the last woman standing had finished having completed lap 16 within the hour (maybe because she realised I hadn't come back in time).

 

Overall, the backyard ultra was a great event and a very different sort of challenge to a "normal" ultra. I'm proud of what I achieved, although I think I was far from finding my limits, and it creates a good baseline for another attempt in the future!