Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra: record-setter Harvey Lewis completes 85 hours of running with a broken hand and a wild animal howl
- Harvey Lewis runs the final laps of his Backyard Ultra victory with a broken hand, and howls into the night like a ‘wild animal’
- The Backyard Ultra is the ‘race with no end’, as runners complete 6.7km laps until there is just one participant left
“When I fall, (I fall a lot, like three times the first day), normally I’m really good at rolling, at catching myself. But with my energy being gone, it was like a deadweight. I had no energy to stop the motion and it was just like ‘BAM’. I hit my knee, and I looked it at it because the knee is vital, but is was the hand, so I just kept on running,” Lewis, 45, said.
The Backyard Ultra, in Tennessee, is one of the more testing formats in running. It was created by Gary Cantrell, known as “Lazarus ‘Laz’ Lake”. Participants have one hour to complete a 6.7km loop. They have to be on the start line for the start of the next hour. They run the loop on the hour, every hour until there is just one runner left. The final runner is only allowed to do one more loop and then is declared the winner. They run on trails during the day, and the road during the night.
Lewis was struggling on the trails on day four, and was only getting a four- or five-minute break between loops.
“Then there’s a lot of pressure to get liquid and nutrition. I was depleted, I was dehydrated and I just fell on rocks,” he said. “I knew immediately something was not good. I thought ‘OK, this might be broken, I cannot fall on that side again’.”