Team USA Wins Backyard Ultra Worlds as Belgians Run 517 Miles

The United States won the 2026 backyard ultra world team championship this week with 1,120 yards, racing on the original course in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. The bigger story came from Belgium, where Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert ran 124 hours, about 517 miles, and then stopped together. Their record run produced no winner.

That paradox is the whole sport in miniature. A backyard ultra has no finish line, and the clock, not the distance, does the damage. Here’s how the format works, how the Americans won it, and what the hourly math does to a body after five days.

One loop every hour until one runner is left

The format comes from Gary Cantrell, better known as Lazarus Lake, the race director behind the Barkley Marathons. Runners start a 4.167-mile (6.706 km) loop at the top of every hour. Each loop is called a yard, and 24 yards make exactly 100 miles.

Finish early and the leftover minutes are yours, to eat, change or sleep. Miss the next start, or fail to finish inside the hour, and you’re out. The last runner standing has to complete one more yard alone to be declared the winner.

The team championship, held in even years, turns that into a nation-against-nation contest. Each country fielded 15 runners on its own home course, and every yard by every runner counts toward a team total, Canadian Running explained.

All nations started together at 12:00 UTC on Saturday, October 17, according to the official live results site. That meant 7 a.m. in Tennessee and 2 p.m. in Belgium.

Eight Americans past 80 yards won it in Tennessee

The US team ran Lazarus Lake’s original loop in Bell Buckle. Its race ended Wednesday evening, after Jon Noll couldn’t finish the 107th loop within the hour, Marathon Handbook reported. Mark Dowdle, 29, completed that loop alone and won with 107 yards, about 446 miles.

Dowdle’s previous best was 94 yards, set two months earlier at the Last Soul Ultra in Germany, according to Marathon Handbook. The 2026 US title earns him a place at next year’s individual world championship at Big’s Backyard in Bell Buckle. Men’s Journal noted that he also won the Last Soul Ultra and BPN’s Go One More earlier this year.

Depth, not Dowdle, won the title. Eight of the 15 Americans passed 80 yards on the provisional leaderboard, including Harvey Lewis (83) and Megan Smyth (82). Japan’s DogsorCaravan reported that Smyth’s 82 was the most by any woman in any country.

The final standings read:

Canada placed ninth with 830 yards, a national best. Australia raced without Phil Gore, the previous record holder, who was out injured.

The hour math: about 12 minutes, then less

The rules set a hard floor. To finish 4.167 miles inside 60 minutes, you need a pace of 14 minutes 24 seconds per mile, a brisk walk. Speed isn’t the problem. The problem is that every minute you save becomes your only rest.

Real numbers show how thin that is. Kengo Takahashi, who finished second in Japan’s race with 104 yards, averaged 48 minutes 3 seconds per loop, DogsorCaravan reported. That left him just under 12 minutes an hour.

Add it up and Takahashi had roughly 20.7 hours off his feet across 104 hours, our calculation shows, all of it in slices of minutes. His last loops slowed to nearly 58 minutes, which left about two minutes before the next whistle.

The same sum applies to the Belgians. At an illustrative 50-minute loop, 124 hours yields about 20 hours 40 minutes of break time, cut into 124 slices of 10 minutes. Sleep has to fit inside those slices, with food, toilet stops and changes of shoes.

Steyaert described the trap before the race started. “The ultrarunner’s real enemy creeps into your head,” he told VRT NWS on October 18 (our translation from Dutch). “We only have a few minutes per hour to eat and sleep. At the start you have most of those minutes left over, but that’s when you need them least.”

Why 124 yards in Retie produced no winner

Geerts, 52, and Steyaert, 56, ran every yard side by side in Retie, in Belgium’s Antwerp province. Shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday they passed Gore’s 119 yards, set at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland in 2025. Then they kept going for four more hours.

At 6 p.m. Thursday the bell rang for the 125th loop, and neither man stepped forward, Marathon Handbook reported. Under backyard rules, a winner needs to complete a yard that nobody else completes. Because they stopped on the same yard, they share the record and the Belgian race has no winner.

It’s the third straight team championship in which they’ve finished side by side, after 101 yards in 2022 and 110 in 2024 with Frank Gielen. Sporza, the Belgian broadcaster, put the distance at 831.5 km, which is 124 times 6.706 km. Canadian Running’s figure of 824.1 km doesn’t match that sum.

Teammate Bert Verbist said the pair had spent days helping others. “The two men running the world record here are mentally rock-solid,” he told VRT NWS on October 22 (our translation). “In recent days they often waited for slower runners to come in together.”

Catching the US was never realistic. Belgium’s total was 62 yards behind the US, so each man would have needed 31 more yards, to 155. A tie on yards goes to the nation whose race went farther, the official rules say, which would have handed Belgium the title. Six more yards each would have been enough for second place, Marathon Handbook calculated.

The record still needs the officials’ sign-off

The results are provisional. Each nation’s race director enters yards hourly and officials check them, the championship site says, and Marathon Handbook reported the record had not yet been confirmed. A rival mark has been thrown out before. Lazarus Lake voided Dmitry Klimov’s 123 yards in Russia this summer after video showed non-competitors on the course, according to Marathon Handbook.

The official leaderboard lists 69 nations, but two of them, Mauritius and Singapore, recorded no yards. That leaves 67 that raced, which is the figure Belgian outlets used.

Lake’s other creation, the Barkley Marathons, is built on the same idea of a course that beats almost everyone, as we saw when Jasmin Paris became the first woman to finish the Barkley. Backyard racing sits at the extreme end of a broader boom in timed endurance formats, alongside events like Hyrox, the fitness race that went global.

Dowdle’s next test is the 2027 individual world championship at Big’s Backyard in Bell Buckle, which takes the top 50 national winners from this week, according to Marathon Handbook.