Unless you’ve been kept in a box in a dark room for the last few years, you can’t help but have noticed the skyrocketing of interest around Backyard Ultras. It all started with Gary Cantrell AKA ‘Lazarus Lake’ of the Barkley Marathons. His ‘Big’s Backyard Ultra’ lit the blue touch paper and then before you could shout “fire in the hold” Backyards started popping up all over the world.
The principle is really, really, simple. Runners have to complete a 4.167 mile lap every hour and this would equal completing 100 miles in 24 hours, if you can complete that number of laps. This is a ‘last person standing’ competition and the person who is able to start a new lap, when everyone else has failed to complete the previous lap in the 60 minutes allowed, is the winner.
Now all this is straightforward enough but during a conversation with a competitor from one of the UK races, the question arose as to whether Sport Walking could be the ideal approach to going really long in a Backyard Ultra because of its energy efficiency? Now, on the one hand, you might think, well yes, as long as you can maintain a strong pace, you’re using less energy than runners, so you should be able to go longer but the more you think about it, the more questions form in your mind.
First of all, speed. Now for this, we’re going to shift to metric because it’s what we deal in for speed and distance ourselves, so it’s just easier to get the numbers to tally up for us! 4.167 miles is 6.706 kilometres and you have to complete that distance every hour. Now, for a race walker, 6.7 or, to be safe, 6.8kmh is not that fast – they happily cruise along at around 13kmh – but for a challenge focused Sport Walker using a normal walking technique or, let’s say, a runner tactically using Sport Walking to get a better result, this speed is fairly close to the top end of what’s viable for longer distances.
But that’s not all. We’re not simply talking about beating the cut off each hour, you also need to go to the toilet, eat, change clothes, put your rain jacket on, take your rain jacket off, deal with any issues that arise, maybe with blisters or other problems. Then, the further you go, you also need to be able to build in opportunities to sleep, even if it’s just a power nap for a short time and all this means that you need to be traveling a lot faster than 6.8kmh, to build time into the lap to accommodate these essentials and get you back at the start line ready for the next lap.
So, sadly, this doesn’t seem like one of those occasions where Sport Walking with a normal technique can be an advantage…… on its own. You see, there’s nothing to stop you mixing running with walking and, in fact, many, if not all runners, do – it’s part of how they manage their overall effort. So having a good Sport Walking technique so you can be efficient and effective while still holding a good speed could be really valuable on Backyard Ultras.
This Speed Hiking approach (run/walking) is already prevalent in these events, so gaining knowledge about walking efficiency and power would be invaluable for a Backyarder. The application of this approach would be exactly the same as using walking tactically in a normal ultra – the key lies in the word ‘tactically’.
If you think walking is there for you as an option if or when you can no longer run, then you’re going to fail in your quest to get a better result with a hybrid Speed Hiking approach. This is because by the time you implement walking, you’ve probably already used too much energy to allow you to maintain a strong walking pace – which requires a pretty decent amount of energy itself – so all you’re doing is slowing down and in the case of Backyard Ultras, probably slowing down catastrophically!
The key to success is to see both options – running and walking – as equal in value and to use each tactically to get the best outcome overall. Now different people function in different ways and they also have different preferences for running or walking in certain situations but as a baseline rule of thumb, you’d walk all climbs, even shallow easy ones, run all descents and then mix running and walking on the flat, depending on how you’re feeling but if time allows, you’d probably want to keep taking tactical walk breaks on the flat simply to manage your effort.
The other thing you can do is to run more for a few laps to give you more time to take a power nap, change clothes or eat something more substantial, then perhaps, walk more after that to recover before rebalancing your effort between the two.
We should stress though that this is all conjecture because none of us at Sport Walk Towers have taken on a Backyard, so we’ve never put our money where our mouth is. The approach we suggest though is based on logic and experience of going up to 100 miles, so the theory stands the test, it’s just a question of whether it actually pans out in practice but we’d probably need a guinea pig to find out!
One thing’s for sure, Backyard Ultras are here to stay and they’re really getting people’s attention, so perhaps an organiser might develop one aimed at walkers? The only thing with that, is that it might take so long to get a winner that it’s not viable because if you make the cut offs for this type of event more achievable for pure walkers, you could have an event that lasts all week! So, we think this could be more about how Sport Walking can help runners do better in a Backyard Ultra, than whether Sport Walkers could have an advantage and that’s OK. Some events are suitable for Sport Walkers to shine and others aren’t – Ski Jumping for instance!