Free. You can start with nothing.
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.
16 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
2023 Big Dog's Backyard Ultra Results: Harvey Lewis Wins After 108 Hours, 450 Miles of Running
+ 8 more.
These are other people's work and we link straight to them. Watching costs nothing and needs no account. More of them: every race we hold, on film.
Nobody sees it until we have read it. No account, no sign-in.
This changes nothing on the page on its own. Somebody checks it against the race first.
Somebody watches it before it goes anywhere near this page. What we are after is footage of this course, on the ground. If it would be just as true of any other race, it is not this.
We want the address of the file the race publishes, not the file. We download it from there so the page can say where the line came from.
We read every one of these and we write back. Every fact here carries the source it came from, and the way a wrong one gets fixed is a person checking it against what you tell us.
Cutoffs move, races get postponed, lotteries open and close. We read the race's own sources and record where every fact came from. Put your email in and we will send you what changed, and where we read it.
No account, and nothing to cancel.
What happens to your email. Nothing else. I do not sell it, and I will not send you anything except this race changing. One click gets you out.
I keep this catalog because the information is scattered and hard to trust. Telling you when it moves is the same job.
