Phil Gore Ends 168-Hour Solo Run After 152 Laps

Phil Gore ended his attempt to run for a full week on Saturday, stopping after 152 hourly laps at Alfred Skeet Reserve in Forrestdale, Western Australia, 16 short of the 168 he had set out to complete.

Gore, a firefighter and father of four, started at 8 a.m. on Aug. 23 and called the attempt Project 168. The plan was to cover a 6.71 km loop (about 4.2 miles) at the top of every hour for seven consecutive days, which is 168 hours, until the week ran out. Finishing all of them would have taken him 1,127 km, close to 700 miles. He reached 152, or 633.75 miles (1,019.92 km), and the official timing page for the attempt records the result as a DNF.

The format he used is the one governing backyard ultra racing, in which runners set out on the same loop at the top of every hour and anyone who fails to start or finish inside the hour is out. Whatever time is left at the end of a loop is all the runner gets to eat, change and sleep before the next one begins. Gore ran his alone, with no competitor on the course and no assistance, and every hour he completed raised money for Telethon 7, the Western Australian appeal for sick and disadvantaged children. The campaign had taken A$267,667.56 by Sunday morning in Perth.

The lap splits show how the week ended. Gore’s quickest loop, 37:17, came on his 65th, and his average across all 152 was 46:03. His final lap took 58:01, the slowest of the attempt, leaving under two minutes before the next was due to start. Jared Beasley, an UltraRunning Magazine columnist who followed the attempt through the week, wrote on X that Gore “collapsed on his 153rd Yard.”

No total he reached was going to be ratified, and Gore said so before he started. A backyard ultra ends only when every runner but one has missed an hourly start, which means the winner’s number is set by whoever lasted second longest, plus a single loop. Gore’s world record of 119 laps, set at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland in June 2025, exists because Sam Harvey of New Zealand lasted 118. At Forrestdale there was no second runner to outlast, and so nothing to turn 152 laps into an official result.

“This isn’t just about seeing how far I can push myself. It’s about creating a new benchmark for endurance athletes, the way Roger Bannister made the four-minute mile feel possible,” Gore told Max Kagi of Your Local Examiner, which reported the attempt locally before it began.

The number he reached sits well beyond anything the sport has certified. The record before Gore’s belonged to Łukasz Wróbel of Poland at 116 laps. In June, Dmitry Klimov of Russia reached 123 at the Biotropika Backyard Ultra in the Leningrad region, but Gary Cantrell, who invented the format, voided the result in July after footage showed people who were not competitors on the course. No runner has yet been pushed past 119 in a race that counts.

Measured as ground covered, the week reads differently. Yiannis Kouros ran 1,036.800 km in six days, a distance the International Association of Ultrarunners still lists among his records, and it is more than Gore managed in 152 hours. The format accounts for the difference, because a runner who finishes a loop in 40 minutes then waits 20 minutes for the next hour to arrive.

The week itself has not stopped. The official livestream, produced by the Backyard Ultra Podcast and carried on Gore’s website, switched on Saturday evening to a relay run by his support crew, who are taking the hourly loops in his place. They are due to keep going until 8 a.m. Sunday in Perth, the hour at which Gore’s own 168th lap would have ended.