A backyard ultra has a deceptively simple format: run a 6.7km loop, on the hour, every hour, until only one runner is left standing. No finish line, no fixed distance - you just keep going until you can't, or until everyone else stops first.
Phil Gore currently holds the world record. At the Dead Cow Gully Backyard Ultra, he completed 119 loops - almost 800km - over five days. We sat down with him to unpack how someone actually trains for, plans, and mentally survives an event with no defined endpoint.
An accidental start
Phil's first backyard ultra, in August 2020, came off the back of an entirely different challenge: 24 parkruns in 24 hours with a mate, averaging roughly 5km every hour. When he heard about the backyard ultra format - 6.7km every hour, no finish line - his reasoning was simple: I've done the 24-hour parkrun thing, I can probably handle an extra 1.7km an hour.
He went in without any real sense of what a "good" result looked like. That first event, he ran 39 hours and finished as the runner-up, badly broken by the final few hours - then discovered afterwards he'd come within two hours of the Australian record. That was the moment it went from a one-off challenge to something worth taking seriously. Six months later, with a coach and a proper plan, he set a new Australian record at 48 hours. From there, the records kept climbing.
The planning system
What stands out most about Phil's approach isn't raw toughness - it's the level of planning behind it. Early on, his notes were loose: what he ate, when he changed shoes. Now, his race plan specifies exactly what he eats at each hour (a ham and cheese wrap, then a chocolate custard, then Coke and Pringles) and exactly what pace he'll run on every single lap, planned out in advance for the full expected duration of the event. It's a much more extreme version of the intra-race fuelling principles we cover in how much fuel your running actually needs.
The plan isn't rigid, though. On hot days at Dead Cow Gully, he deliberately ran faster than planned to get back to shade, a fan and ice sooner - trading pace for recovery time in the break. His crew tracks what actually happens against the plan too, noting things like a knee twinge at a particular lap number, which often resolves and gets forgotten within days. Having it written down means nothing gets lost in the fog of multi-day sleep deprivation.
What happens when the plan breaks down
Not everything goes to plan. Phil has had nights of nausea where he couldn't eat what was scheduled, and one event - the World Championships at Big's Backyard in Tennessee - where pain in the tendon responsible for lifting his big toe started around lap 72 and gradually worsened until he eventually DNF'd in the mid-80s, after pushing to around 100 hours.
What's changed over the years isn't necessarily his pain tolerance - it's how he responds when something goes wrong. Where early in his career a setback could snowball into panic and derail the whole race, now the approach is simpler: eat what you can, drink what you can, remind yourself that missing part of your nutrition plan for one stretch isn't going to end the race, and get through to sunrise, when things generally feel better.
Why 30 hours in doesn't feel like 30 hours in
One of the more interesting things Phil describes is how gradually the discomfort builds. If you could transport him directly from lap one to lap 119, he says he'd probably be shocked at how much pain he was in. But because it accumulates so incrementally - lap after lap, hour after hour - his body adjusts to each new level before the next one arrives.
He attributes his ability to go further less to having an unusually high pain tolerance, and more to training that delays the point at which real difficulty sets in. In his recent record-setting performances, he says he never actually had to dig deep mentally to push through significant pain - he simply never reached that point during the event.
Following the plan, whatever the field looks like
Heading into Dead Cow Gully, there was real pressure: a stacked field, public predictions the world record would fall, and a competitor (Sam Harvey) publicly targeting 150 laps. Phil's approach to that pressure was to ignore the external numbers entirely and run his own system, regardless of whether an event was shaping up to last 40 hours or 100-plus.
There's genuine camaraderie in these events too - sharing headlamps, crew helping other runners in trouble - which coexists with real competitiveness as the event stretches into its final days. Phil describes one Australian record attempt where his fellow competitor, who had never expected to be one of the last two standing, dug in and kept pushing purely to help Phil reach the record, even through laps where he clearly wasn't enjoying himself.
Chasing an open-ended limit
Unlike a fixed-distance event, a backyard ultra doesn't have a natural endpoint you can measure yourself against. After finishing Dead Cow Gully at 119 hours - a genuinely enormous number - Phil says he still felt good, and felt like he had more to give. He only stopped because his competitor stopped first.
That's part of what keeps him coming back: watching the world record climb doesn't feel discouraging to him, it feels like proof of what's possible. Every time someone else pushes the number further, his reaction isn't that's out of reach now - it's if a human can do that, maybe I can too.
Training for the World Championships
At the time of this interview, Phil was roughly 13 weeks out from the World Championships at Big's Backyard in Tennessee - a notoriously hillier, more technical course than Dead Cow Gully. His peak training weeks sit around 170–180km, including one long run of 80–120km, sometimes using a standalone 50km race two weeks out as his last big effort before a short taper. Building and holding that kind of volume relies on exactly the training adaptations covered in what actually happens when you get fitter.
He's also maintained a running streak since 2014 - a minimum of 5km every single day - broken only by an Army deployment and a roughly 10-day forced break after the injury at Big's Backyard two years ago. He typically runs the day after finishing a multi-day event, including after covering almost 800km at Dead Cow Gully.
On suffering, risk, and why he does it
Phil draws a clear line between seeking suffering and seeking potential. He's not chasing pain for its own sake - if anything, his entire planning system is built around delaying discomfort as long as possible. But when it does arrive, he treats it as confirmation that he's genuinely tested his limit, not something to be avoided altogether.
On the long-term physical risk of pushing this hard, he's clear-eyed: he compares it to his day job as a firefighter, a role with well-documented elevated health risks that he accepts because the work itself is meaningful to him. His view is that living fully now matters more to him than optimising purely for a longer, safer life later - a philosophy that shapes how he approaches both his career and his running.