Long distance dedications
A tenuous link between my second longest run ever and links to education.
Melbourne Front Yard Ultra 2026
11 loops (73.7km)
Fate fell short this time.
For those of you not in the loop, a Front Yard (or more commonly Back Yard) Ultra is an endurance running event where participants run a ‘loop’ which is 6.71km (4.2 miles) every hour, on the hour until the can’t anymore. It differs from other long distance running formats as strategy comes into play in terms of pacing and rest as whatever remaining time exists in the hour upon your return can be dedicated to rest, nutrition and recovery before the next loop starts. The race keeps going until there is only one person left. When the second last person drops out, the potential winner has to complete one final lap to secure the win, otherwise there will be no winner. This style of event was the creation of Lazarus Lake, the madman who also created the almost impossible Barkley Marathons. Currently, the world record for this insanity is held by Phil Gore, an Australian athlete who managed to run 119 loops (almost 5 days!) last year and seems to be only limited by having someone else who can run longer.
On a whim, I’d competed in this exact event last year in its first iteration. There’s a specific challenge to this event in that it starts at 4pm and there’s just over an hour of daylight before you are engulfed by darkness for the next 12ish hours. This particular course is special as it is located incredibly close to the Melbourne CBD and despite the darkness, there is an ambient glow of the city to keep you company through the loneliest hours of the night.
Last year, I went in with one goal in mind. I wanted to run 100 kilometers. Nothing more, nothing less. Previously, the furthest I’d ran was 50 in a trail ultra marathon years prior. I was a little spoiled by luck in this first iteration as I’d signed up in the week of the event, shared a marquee with a few friends and crewed for myself. I’d simply had enough mileage in the lead up to make it happen (despite some ongoing physical damage the course dealt to my ankle that year).
In the following week when they announced the event for 2026, I saw the date was the 2nd of May and instantly told my partner Rachael that I was going to do it because our wedding anniversary is the 3rd of May (12 years and counting now) and she suggested not only that I still do it, but that we drop the kids off to her parents and she crews for me for the event. You see what I underestimated and what onlookers don’t see from outside these events is the energy and sense of community that exists at them. The race directors, volunteers and crew of every other participant become like a weird adopted family. Everyone learns oddly specific intimate details about each other and does whatever it takes to help each other out. This year the event grew from around 70 participants in 2025 to over 270 for 2026 which shows the rising popularity of this niche format.
Before we get into how this year went there’s one last detail to this specific event you must know. We talk a lot in education about the importance of routine and how they can create an almost Pavlovian response within us (hopefully this reference rings a bell). At this event as a 5 minute warning before the next loop begins they blare Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’. I cannot hear this song anymore without my brain being alerted into action and thinking that I must run. The relationship with the song is fascinating too. At first it hypes you up, the it starts to become annoying as it robs you of your rest, then a point comes around where suddenly your brain breaks and you love it again. A toxic relationship with a tune.
The Course:
Before getting into my specific performance this year I should probably describe the course to give some more context to the uninitiated. Located in Yarra Bend on Deep Rock Rd, the course heads out and down a switchback to a river trail which you follow until you reach Kane’s Bridge. Now Kane’s Bridge is an old wooden suspension bridge which when presented with a couple hundred endurance athletes becomes a simulation of drunken movement as the bridge bobs up and down and side to side through every step. Having to cross this bridge to complete an 800m loop of a bush trail before coming back across was always novel and a good excuse to get a walk in (which was almost as challenging as running on it)
After returning over the bridge, participants follow the river all the way back to the switchback and then follow the trail out over the highway along Yarra Bend Rd on a slight uphill all the way to what we could only refer to in caveman-esque terms of “Bigrock bigtree” where we’d be able to turn and begin to enjoy a gentle descent all the way past Dights Falls (which in 2 years I’ve still never seen) and back down to a section of the river trail which we’d follow for another 800m before marching up a surprisingly harsh hill to finish the loop. Then rinse and repeat until you can’t. Simple right?
So how did this year end up going?
It was an unexpectedly warm 24 degrees Celsius to start the event and only dropped to a low of 20 overnight. This was slightly scary when being based in the southern states of Australia you are acclimated to running in the low teens and single digits and so anything above 20 means that I am losing precious sodium through sweat at a rate of knots.
Everything went to plan early. Body felt amazing. The mind was ticking along having fun and goofy thoughts. Food was going down between laps. With the warmth I ditched my hydration pack a few loops in and just carried water by hand to keep cooler. After the first 9 loops all being consistently around 48 minutes I was thinking that 16 laps or beyond was going to happen. I’d completed most of the laps without my headphones and just talked to whoever else was running a similar pace and then on the laps without headphones I was listening to the audiobook of ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ by Matt Dinniman which as a book series has surpassed all of my expectations. On the 9th loop between midnight and 1am at around the 60km mark I started to think I might be going loopy as I ran past two runners having a conversation that went like this: “my university professor told us that not everybody learns the same, you know like every brain is different. Some people are visual learners right?”. Somehow even in the depths of an endurance event, I couldn’t escape the neuromyth of learning styles.
Having a crew is so important in these style of events or at least planning every loop very explicitly as your ability to make decisions or process information in working memory is greatly diminished. So having someone who can make those decisions for you helps so much for managing that cognitive load.
On loop 10, I think the warmth of wearing the pack early caught up to me. It was weird, my heart rate was low, my mind was still super positive but everything else was seeming to shut down. When I took walking breaks my breathing felt really irregular and I couldn’t explain why. I was still getting in on these laps close to 50 minutes and it is surprising how often in long events that problems come and manage to go away. In this case though it just managed to compound and get worse. In my younger days (before kids) I probably would’ve kept going until I collapsed on course somewhere, but now there’s a more responsible part of my brain that thinks “okay, what is the limit before I won’t be able to bend over and wash William in the bath tomorrow”. It can be the difference between recovery taking a week or months.
When you finish up, because there is only one actual finisher of the event, you must ring the DNF (did not finish) bell and then collect your medallion as a totem of your efforts. I do love that everyone gets the exact same medallion unless they win because it’s not about rankings or placement, it’s about finding out how far you can go.
Still super chuffed with my second longest run ever. It’s just such a fun and challenging event type and a beautiful course.
It shows the importance of repeated practice and slowly building mileage over time (something I struggle with, with a young family). It also shows you that you are capable of a lot more than you think. So often it’s the mind that tells you to stop even though the body can keep going.
The race is still going now as I write this post and there are still 10 runners shuffling out there. Last year the winner ran 58 loops but with how strong the field is and how many remain it could go for quite a big longer. You can follow live at this link to see updates every hour and even see everyone’s lap times to have you mind blown about their consistency and discipline.
Addendum: bonus cool moment to seeing an owl in the wild for the first time when ducking off course for a toilet stop.
Awesome write up. Definitely have one of these on my bucket list. All about building good routines.