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. 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.
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. 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.
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