Well, the Big’s Backyard Ultra championship is over and a winner has been crowned. As a reminder, this is a race that covers laps of 4.1667 miles every hour and every runner must start at the top of the hour until there is only one runner left to finish a lap. That runner is the last man standing and the winner and everyone else gets a DNF (did not finish). Well, this incredible event has concluded and with a new world record!
After four and a half days and 460 miles, Harvey Lewis has won BIG’S #backyardultra with 108 loops. A new WORLD RECORD. He is… the last one standing. pic.twitter.com/lQrKKzVrMA
— UltraRunning Magazine (@UltraRunningMag) October 26, 2023
This is how incredible this effort is. The biggest rest time Harvey had at any point during these 4.5 days was 17 minutes with an average of just 7 minutes and 38 seconds per mile in between each lap. Imagine that – this meant that he would have slept no longer than like 16 minutes at any time (and most of the time it would have been half of that) for 4.5 days.
In many of the laps, videos showed Harvey dashing off when the cow bell clanged to signal the start of the next lap. There were some times during the race that I thought Harvey may not make a cutoff but he hung and finished his last lap with a per mile pace of about 11:40 per mile – after 4.5 days of running.
Incredible! 8 Runners Have Each Run 400 Miles in 4 Days – and They Are Still Going!
The runner up that pushed him along was Ihor Verys who hung with him (and even went faster than him throughout the race) until the start of lap 108.
This kind of event is something that most of us cannot even comprehend. Congrats to all the runners that took part in this unbelievable event!
Visit this page and click on Harvey Lewis to see all his splits.
Featured image from UltraRunning Twitter
