SA runner goes the distance to set record in brutal last-man-standing race

In 1979, Stephen King wrote a novel called The Long Walk. It is a dystopian tale where 100 teenage boys complete a brutal annual walking contest. They must maintain a speed of 4 miles per hour (approximately 6.4km per hour) and continue walking without stopping for food or sleep until only one boy survives and wins “The Prize”.

Although this is an old fictional horror narrative, faint similarities can be found in backyard ultras – a long-distance race rising in popularity.

In a backyard ultra, runners must complete a 6.706km loop every hour on the hour until only one runner remains.

In the early hours of 27 April, Donovan Shirley set a new South African soil record for the event after completing 43 laps (288km) at the Potchefstroom Backyard Ultra.

This makes it the furthest distance ever run in a backyard ultra held in SA.

“My family thinks I’m crazy,” Shirley told Daily Maverick. “[But] I’m just a guy who just likes to run a little bit.”

Shirley, who is 51 years old, used the backyard ultra as a test and a training ground for an even bigger challenge he plans to take on later this year: a double Comrades Marathon.

The attempt forms part of a mental health awareness campaign he launched called “Get Back Up”.

“I’m starting in Pietermaritzburg at 5.30pm on Saturday night,” said Shirley, who has been in contact with Comrades officials to secure permission to take on this run.

“Comrades has a 12-hour cut-off, so I need to get down to Durban City Hall for the start of Comrades within 12 hours.”

After which he will run the official Comrades Marathon on Sunday 14 June at 5.45am, going from Durban all the way back to Pietermaritzburg where he started, within the 12-hour cut-off.

An extremely extreme sport

Shirley completed his first backyard ultra in 2023 after a few friends convinced him to give the unusual format a try.

There he managed 16 laps before ringing the bell signalling his run was over.

Since then, Shirley has participated in four more events, steadily improving with each outing, from 25 laps in his second race to 27, then 28, before shattering his personal best and the South African soil record in Potchefstroom.

The backyard ultra was created by Gary Cantrell, more popularly known as Lazarus Lake, the race designer best known for devising the Barkley Marathons.

Staged in Tennessee, the Barkley Marathons are some of the world’s most ruthless ultramarathons, where runners attempt five largely unmarked loops of roughly 32km through mountainous terrain within 6o hours.

In 2012, Cantrell introduced Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra, a very different kind of endurance challenge.

Cantrell chose 4.167 miles (or 6.706km) because if one runs that distance for an hour it will add up to 100 miles in 24 hours.

It was first held on his Tennessee farm, but the format has since spread across the globe, with hundreds of backyard ultras now hosted each year.

Unlike any other conventional road or trail running race, a backyard ultra has no fixed finish line.

“If you run a loop of 6.7 kilometres in 45 minutes, you’ve then got 15 minutes to rest, to refuel, to recover, to change your shoes, to go to the loo, to do what you need to. Then you line up on the start line at the top of the hour to do your next lap,” explained Shirley.

“And it just goes and goes until it’s the last person standing.”

A participant can only go as far as the second place runner, known as “The Assist”. Once “The Assist” drops out, the final runner must then complete one more lap to be declared “the winner”.

Everyone else, regardless of how far they have run, is marked DNF (Did Not Finish).

“You never really win a backyard, you only finish it,” said Shirley. “So, the guy who does one lap gets a DNF, and the guy who does 50 laps also gets a DNF.”

Last year, on 26 June 2025, Australian runner Phil Gore broke the backyard ultra world record by completing 119 loops or 797.3km at the Dead Cow Gully event in Australia.

That amounts to five days of running.

“There’s no finish line, so it’s so hard to actually measure how well you’re doing when you don’t know how far you are,” said Shirley. “It’s a complete mind game that you have to get through. You just have to focus on one lap at a time.”

For Shirley, success came down to consistency. He averaged between 48 to 50 minutes per lap, leaving just enough time to recover before the next one.

“I wanted to get into that routine,” said Shirley. “Be at a certain point at a certain time and use it almost as a metronome.

“Backyards are a different event and I think people too easily get confused in that you have to be fast to be able to run a backyard, and you don’t: you just have to be tenacious.

“You’ve got to actually be able to have that mental strength to get back up for one more lap.”

Community and Comrades

A backyard ultra cannot be run successfully without a support crew, the people who stay up through the night offering encouragement and making sure everything is ready so that when runners come in to recover, they can focus solely on resting and going again.

The Potchefstroom Backyard Ultra was Shirley’s last long run before he takes on a double Comrades in June.

His goal at Potchefstroom was to complete enough loops to equal 185km, which would have roughly equalled his personal best from last year. But Shirley went far beyond that.

“There were lots of things that I had to prove to myself with fitness, with gear, nutrition, all those sorts of things,” he said.

Shirley’s double Comrades attempt forms part of his “Get Back Up” campaign, an initiative aimed at raising funds and awareness for mental health.

The name echoes the sentiments of the mental strength it takes to get back up to complete multiple laps of the backyard ultra, even when physically and mentally depleted.

Funds raised through the campaign will go to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group as well as Matthew and Me, a non-profit founded in memory of Matthew Ernstzen, a 16-year-old boy who took his life in 2024. The organisation focuses on raising awareness around teenage depression and depression.

“The ‘Get Back Up’ campaign is 185km in 24 hours. I’m just waiting for the final Comrades route to be announced,” said Shirley.

“The idea is, even though I’ll be physically, mentally and absolutely emotionally exhausted by the time I get to Durban, with the right team I can find the courage and the strength to be able to get back up to Pietermaritzburg.” DM