If you've been running long distances for any real length of time you may have heard of a crazy, awesome character named Lazarus Lake. Laz, whose real name is actually Gary Cantrell, is a fantastically clever, incredibly unique, old codger who has been into running for many decades. No one knows exactly how old he is as he's intensely protective of his identity but he looks to be somewhere between 65-70 years of age.
He smokes like he doesn't care about his life, yet he's joyful like a child. And mischievous. Very mischievous.
One of the many outlandish things he's come up with over the years is an event that has grown from a once-a-year in his own backyard in Tennesee (USA) to locations all over the world. It's called the Backyard Ultra. His original one was called, "Big's Backyard Ultra". Big's because he is the Big Dog in the world of weird and wild ultra-marathons, Backyard because it was and is literally run in his actually backyard and Ultra because the event is designed to allow people to run a very long way.
At some point, people started asking permission to run events like his one in locations closer to them. You can call it by any name, and classify it as a "Backyard Ultra" if you follow Laz's small handful of totally wacky rules:
A clearly set route of exactly 4.167mi (6.706km) must be set up and all participants must complete this lap/loop in under an hour to be able to continue the "race"
All participants must start each lap together, on the hour, every hour to be able to continue
They must be in the starting corral (area) before the whistle blows for the start of the next lap
The race continues until the second last person can't continue anymore and the last person left must do one more full lap than their "assist" (the name of the second last person)
Every single person except the winner gets a "DNF" ("Did Not Finish") mark against their name as their official result
Crazy, right? Yet, there are now countless events of this format run in 48 countries around the world. I guess enough people are accomplished enough in their running now that your average marathon isn't enough, they needed something more entertaining.
We have an event of this format that's run once a year here in Brisbane. Brad and I have been out to the location one time during a race to see how our friends (who were racing) were doing. It was so cool. I love being at ultra races, they bring back soooo many memories and emotions from the times I did ultra marathons back in 2009-2014.
We keep talking about whether we'll do this race at some point. We go back on forth on it. I think I like the idea more than Brad does. But we're both not really fit or strong enough to do it justice. If we were going to participate we wouldn't want to do just 1 or 2 laps, we'd want to do at least 100km. That means running in this format (run/walk, rest, repeat) for 15 hours. It's a long time to be uncomfortable, starting and stopping, and fitting in toilet breaks in the 5 or 10 or 15 minutes before the next lap starts again.
Anyway, we'd been meaning to get out onto this actual course and walk the route. Since Brad is starting to ease into a retirement of sorts we used this free time on (this Friday) morning to go check out the course.
We walked. We remarked about the course. We saw birds. We took photos. I patted a cow. It was awesome.
And I'm probably less interested in doing this kind of format of race at this location, to be honest.
I got into ultras because I wanted to go to beautiful places without a heavy pack. (At the time I was working in the outdoors as a guide for a living and was regularly in gorgeous wilderness locations but had to carry a 20kg pack as a standard. I wanted to access the beauty without the weight, and voilà the idea of doing ultra marathons was born!) So I'm not sure that I really want to do an ultra in a dusty, weedy, farmed area. But we'll see. Stranger things have happened.
As you can see it took us more than one hour (DNF!) and despite our best efforts, we somehow still didn't manage to do the exact course. That or both our watches were off by a long way!
That's what the course looks like close up. Location: Oxley Creek Common, Rocklea (Brisbane. Australia).
It was a leisurely stroll in the sunshine on a cool, November day. Though... the evelation is weird, right? It is very low; the course is right next to a creek in a part of Brisbane that is one of the first places to flood. But -129 metres??? In terms of evelation gain over the walk, Brad's watch recorded 27 metres of gain/loss.
It's true, there were a lot of stops for photos as there were many more beautiful birds than either of us were expecting.
And that's it! Our recce of the Oxley Creek Common "Last One Standing Backyard Ultra" course complete. For more information on the Backyard Ultra concept go here.
All screenshots courtesy of Garmin Connect via my Google Pixel 2XL. All other photos taken by this awesome guy 👇 Brad, aka 
This is a HiveBloPoMo post. This is Day 4 of 30.