Being wrenched out of deep sleep by your alarm and forced to leave the comfort of your bed can be a horrible experience at the best of times. To go through that process again and again over the course of one night sounds like a bad dream. But last week, for six days and 15 hours, it was Phil Gore’s reality.
It gets worse – or better, depending on your penchant for self-inflicted suffering. Each time ultra-runner Gore was woken he had two minutes to put on his shoes and headtorch before a bell signalled it was time to start his next 6.71km running lap. He had slept for no more than 15 minutes. Pounding the pavement in the dark while the Perth suburb of Forrestdale slept, Gore would return about 40 minutes later and jump straight back into the bed he had set up at the Armadale Soccer Club. Rinse and repeat, all night, then all day (minus the sleep), all week.
This particular combination of voluntary sleep deprivation and physical exertion is a feature of Backyard Ultra running events. In this endurance race format participants run one 6.71km-lap every hour. Completing a lap with time to spare means time to rest until the top of the next hour – and the start of the next lap. But failure to complete a lap within the allotted hour results in elimination from the race. The format has no time limit, ending only when there is one runner left.
One lap might sound like a walk, or run, in the park, but once the kilometres start to add up and the shadows grow long it’s a totally different game – one in which Gore is a world champion and world record-holder.
“I do actually sleep pretty well in these events,” he says. “The deeper I get into the event, I am getting into those deep sleep stages, and I can lie down for 15 minutes, and it might feel like I’ve been down for two or three hours. My crew will have to wake me up because I would just be passed out … and then that time from getting up out of bed to getting to the start line, that’s the hardest time of the whole event, because all you want to do is just go back to sleep.”
When the Australian athlete set the 119-hour world record at Dead Cow Gully in 2025, he did so with the feeling he had “a lot more left to give”, but the traditional Backyard format requires the final runner to stop one lap after the second-place runner drops out – limiting the potential boundaries of the winner.
“Because I’ve done a lot of these now – I’ve done 16 and I’ve won 14 of them – whenever you win, you don’t get to push yourself to the limit,” Gore says. So, his Project 168 was born – the goal to run 6.71km every hour for a whole week, two days more than his world record. “[It was] a personal challenge for myself to see how far I can go, but also to help set a benchmark that other up-and-coming Backyard athletes can strive to reach,” he says.
Fuelled by Nerds, meat pies and Coco Pops, and supported by a small crew of friends and family, Gore finished just short of the 168-hour target, barely scraping in for lap 152, which he completed in his slowest lap time of 58 minutes. Two minutes later, at 4pm on day seven, he set out on lap 153.
“I [was] just moving even slower than I was for the lap before,” he says. “I got about 25 minutes into the lap and I wasn’t even at 1,800 metres yet. That was when I gave up and realised there’s not a way that I can move at a pace to finish this lap in time … I just stopped and collapsed on the ground and got my crew to scoop me up and put me in the car.
“I wanted it to be a challenge where I could find my limit, that’s what I’ve done. Maybe [there is] a little bit of disappointment that I wanted my limit to be a bit further away”
The 40-year-old can still add to his accolades an unofficial record for the longest Backyard Ultra – 152 hours. A remarkable feat of physical and mental endurance sustained by regular injections of sugar and the occasional meal, which along with sleep, toilet breaks, massages and gear changes, were squeezed into the roughly 15 minutes left in the hour after each lap. For nutrition, his strategy was simple: keep it interesting and stay flexible.
“I’ve been using the speckled snakes and Nerd clusters, jelly cups, custard pouches, simple sugars like that,” Gore says. “Then stuff that’s a bit more substantial like Coco Pops with choc milk or meat pies or a microwave meal like a chicken curry with rice.
“I don’t normally eat McDonald’s cheeseburgers, but someone brought them down, and I was just like, ‘Oh, that looks amazing.’ And so I had this cheeseburger and it just worked really well.”
A live-stream broadcast every detail of the event to a growing audience over the week, with the endeavour managing to raise $285,000 for Telethon to help fund medical research and health services for children in Western Australia. Smashing his initial fundraising goal further sweetens the personal achievement and helps put the recovery ahead into perspective.
“This one has definitely taken a lot more out of me than previous events,” he says.
“I’ve been bobbling around on crutches for the last two days.
“Yes, that was the limit on the day, but I know what went wrong. I’ve spoken with my doctor and my physio and we have a plan to stop this from happening again in another race.”
