Ultra-running legend Phil Gore Requires Surgery on His Leg Two Weeks After Project 168

Phil Gore spent six days and eight hours running a lap every hour around a reserve in Forrestdale, Western Australia, in August, and stopped 152 laps in, 16 short of the full week he had planned. Marathon Handbook covered the attempt and its ending. What has happened to him since came on Monday from Gore himself, in a video filmed from a hospital bed and posted to his Instagram account.

Doctors at Royal Perth Hospital discharged him on Wednesday, he said, after telling him the trouble in his leg was a hematoma, a pooled collection of blood, and that it would clear up on its own. They did not want to operate on it or drain it. “I just didn’t quite feel right about it, so I wanted to get a second opinion,” Gore said, and booked a sports doctor for Monday.

That doctor was willing to draw the fluid off. What came out was pus, which meant an infection, and most likely an abscess. He sent Gore back to the emergency department and called ahead to a colleague at Fiona Stanley Hospital.

“So this is the third hospital I’ve been to, just doing a whole tour of Perth,” Gore said in the video, which he posted with a note thanking the people who had been checking on him.

The two diagnoses point to different treatments. A hematoma is blood that has leaked into tissue, and the body can reabsorb it given time. An abscess is a pocket of pus walled off from the tissue around it, and the NHS lists surgical drainage as the usual way to clear one. Gore said he expected to go in on Tuesday to have the leg cleaned out properly and to start his recovery from there. He did not say what caused the problem, or whether it has anything to do with the run.

Gore holds the backyard ultra world record at 119 laps, set at Queensland’s Dead Cow Gully in June 2025, and he won the 2025 world title in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, with 114. Project 168 was neither a record attempt nor a race. There was nobody to outlast and nothing to ratify, only a loop of 6.71 km (about 4.2 miles) to be run every hour on the hour for seven days, 1,127 km in total. He got to 1,019.92 km, or 633.75 miles, which his results page logs as a DNF.

The fundraising has carried on without him. Project 168 was built as an appeal for Telethon 7, the state’s annual children’s charity drive, and the campaign had taken A$267,667.56 by the morning after Gore stopped. The tracker on his website read A$290,601.23 on Tuesday, more than two weeks after the last lap. Telethon counts its total over a broadcast weekend, this year on Oct. 17 and 18.

The first of those two days is already on the backyard ultra calendar. Australia’s leg of the world team championship, a 15-runner race whose laps are added to a global points tally, is listed for Oct. 17 in Perth. The course record there, 76 laps, belongs to Gore, who set it in 2022. He has not said whether he expects to be on the start line.