Free. You can start with nothing.
The full Ode to Laz. A 4.167 mile trail loop starts at nine on Saturday morning and repeats every hour, as long as you wish. At nine in the evening the race moves to a closed paved park road, and at nine the next morning it goes back to the trail. The last runner standing, the one who completes one more lap than everyone else, wins.
Two loops of 4.167 miles. The trail loop is two thirds technical single track and one third moderate walking or hiking path, with a few hundred yards of pavement and bathrooms along the course. The race gives it approximately 350 feet of climbing a lap. The night loop is an out and back on the paved park road to Fisherman's Bridge with 250 feet of climbing. Runners start lap 13 on the road at nine in the evening and return to the trail at nine the next morning.
The Ode to Laz is a backyard ultra in the Holly State Recreation Area in Holly, Michigan. Runners start a 4.167 mile loop at nine o'clock on Saturday morning and start another one every hour after that, for as long as they can keep finishing inside the hour. Twelve laps run the trail loop through the woods above Wildwood Lake, then at nine in the evening the race moves onto the closed park road for the night and goes back to the trail at nine the next morning. There are no aid stations. Runners set a pit up at the start line, and their crew can only help them there. It has been run every July since 2019, and it calls itself the place where finishing last means the most.
The first Ode to Laz was run in 2019 and the 2026 race was the eighth. It is affiliated to Lazarus Lake's Big's Backyard Ultra, so a result here counts toward the at-large list. For the qualifying cycle that ran from 16 August 2024 to 15 August 2026 it was one of six United States Silver Ticket races, which meant its winner went straight onto the fifteen-runner United States team for the world team championship. The 2026 winner took that place with 63 yards, 262.50 miles, over three days. Silver tickets are handed out again for each new two-year cycle, so the list changes.
9 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
+ 1 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.
