One 4.1667-mile loop, run every hour on the hour, until only one competitor can complete a lap that no one else can match. All other finishers are recorded as DNF.
The course alternates between two different loops of the same 4.1667-mile length depending on time of day: an 11-hour daytime loop that includes singletrack trail and climbs about 475 feet per lap, and a 13-hour nighttime loop run on paved road that climbs about 100 feet per lap. The daytime/trail loop is considered the more physically demanding of the two. No artificial aids, including trekking poles, are permitted anywhere on course, and no non-competitor (including an eliminated runner) is allowed on the course at all, which as a practical matter rules out pacers and muling.
The original backyard ultra: a 4.1667-mile loop run every hour, on the hour, until only one competitor can complete a lap that everyone else fails to match. Every other finisher is recorded as a DNF, however far they went.
Invented in 2011 by Gary "Lazarus Lake" Cantrell on his property in the Short Creek community near Bell Buckle, Tennessee, this race originated the backyard ultra format and has run every October since, except 2015 when it was not held. In 2020, COVID-19 travel restrictions replaced the single Tennessee race with simultaneous satellite national championships; the event has continued in that expanded shape, now alternating each year between a World Individual Championship (run at the original Bell Buckle farm) and a World Team Championship (run as simultaneous races in each competing country, compared by combined team mileage). Harvey Lewis set the men's world record of 108 laps here in 2023; Phil Gore broke it with 114 laps in 2025; Sarah Perry set the current women's world record of 95 laps at the same 2025 race.
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