Everything You Need to Know About the Big’s Backyard Ultra World Team Championship

At 7 a.m. Central time on Saturday, Oct. 17, runners will start a loop in Lazarus Lake’s backyard in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and at that same moment national teams in 73 other countries will set off on loops of their own. The Big’s Backyard Ultra World Team Championship is held every second year, it has no set distance and no finish line, and none of the 74 teams can know in advance when its race will end.

Lake started the original race on his own property and named it after his dog, Big. Most runners know the individual version, where one survivor is crowned after days on the same loop. In the team edition the yards from all 15 runners on a squad add up to a national score, which changes how the race tends to finish.

How a Backyard Ultra Works

Every runner gets an hour to complete a loop of 4.167 miles (6,706m). Any time left over is theirs to eat, sleep or fix their feet, and anyone not back in the corral when the next hour starts is out. The distance was picked so that 24 loops, known as yards, add up to exactly 100 miles a day. In a normal backyard ultra the race carries on until one runner completes a loop nobody else does, and the last person to drop is the assist, who leaves with a yard count and no win.

Australia’s Phil Gore holds the world record of 119 yards, just under 500 miles, set at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland in June 2025. A Russian runner reached 123 yards this summer, but Lake voided the results of that race after footage showed non-competitors on the course alongside the athletes. The women’s record belongs to Britain’s Sarah Perry, who ran 95 yards at last year’s individual world championship in Tennessee.

How the Team Scoring Works

At the team championship each country stages its own official race with a squad of 15, and the national score is the sum of the yards all 15 runners complete. A runner who stops after 30 hours adds 30 yards to the total, so a squad with one record-holder and 14 early drops will lose to a squad that keeps everyone going deep into the race.

Winners of designated Silver Ticket races take automatic places on their national team, and the rest of each squad comes from an at-large list ranked by every runner’s best result between Aug. 16, 2024 and Aug. 15, 2026. The last runner standing in each country becomes that nation’s champion, and the top 50 of those champions qualify for the 2027 individual world championship in Bell Buckle, which alternates years with the team event.

Belgium Has Won It Twice

Belgium won the first team championship in 2020, and the U.S. took the title in 2022 with 860 yards. In 2024 Belgium won it back with 1,147 yards, ahead of Australia’s 971 and the United States’ 969, in a year when 63 countries took part.

Merijn Geerts, Ivo Steyaert and Frank Gielen set a world record in Belgium’s 2024 race, running together until 110 yards and finishing level, so their race never produced an individual winner at all. Geerts and Steyaert had done much the same in 2022, when they stopped side by side at 101. “Every athlete ran more than 50 laps. We are incredibly proud to have been able to do that,” Gielen told the Belgian broadcaster VRT afterward.

Who to Watch on Oct. 17

Belgium looks deepest at the top again, according to the official 2026 rosters. Steyaert ran 113 yards as Gore’s assist at last year’s individual world championship, and Geerts, Kenneth Vanthuyne and Brecht Vandamme (98) all bring marks near or above 100. The American team will race on Lake’s own loop, led by Harvey Lewis and Jon Noll, who both reached 111 yards at Big’s last year, along with 2024 Big’s winner Scott Snell.

Łukasz Wróbel, whose 116 yards at Belgium’s Legends Backyard in 2025 briefly stood as the world record, tops Poland’s list. Kazuhiro Kawahata (106) heads Japan’s squad and Hendrik Boury (100) heads Germany’s, while Perry runs for Britain.

Gore, the world-record holder and reigning individual champion, is not on Australia’s 15-person roster. He ended his solo Project 168 run in Western Australia after 152 laps in August, and in September he said an infection in his leg needed surgery. Australia, runner-up in 2024, will be led instead by Jonathan Ash, whose qualifying best is 100 yards. Megan Eckert, who set the women’s world record of 87 yards at the 2024 team championship, is not on the U.S. list either; she broke her own six-day world record in Hungary last month.

In 2024 the three Belgians finished their 110th loop about four and a half days after the start, iRunFar reported, and this year’s title will again be settled only when the last runner in the last country stops.