Glenn Tomlinson is not quite sure how he ended up doing ultramarathons but here he is, having recorded the third-biggest lap total of a 15-strong New Zealand team last month.
Tomlinson, 42, completed 69 laps of a 6.706-kilometre course in the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship. That’s 462.7 kilometres – the equivalent of nearly 11 marathons – completed in just three hours short of three days.
The event entailed 63 national teams, each comprising 15 runners, competing in their own country. They all started at once and were linked by Zoom. Lap distance was the same at every course.
New Zealand’s team tackled a course at Otematata in the South Island’s Waitaki District.
The backyard ultra lap distance is calculated to yield 100 miles (160km) in 24 hours at a lap an hour. Competitors get an hour to complete a lap and get what rest they can before starting the next lap on the hour. Runners who don’t complete a lap within the hour or are not in the starting corral for the start of the next lap are recorded as DNF (Did Not Finish).
The runner who completes the second-most laps is often referred to as the “assist”, as it is this person’s effort that determines how long the race is allowed to continue.
Individual’s total kilometres count towards their country’s total in the World Team Championship. The event finishes in a country when only one team member is able to complete a lap within the hour allowed. That person gains entry into the individual world champs in Tennessee, in the United States, in October 2025.
In individual backyard ultras, if no competitor manages one more lap than the other runners, no one is designated winner ... all are marked DNF.
Belgium won this year’s World Team Championship with a team total of 1147 laps. Three of their runners completed 110 laps.
New Zealand achieved a team total of 811 laps, good enough for sixth.
The Kiwi runners who ran farther than Tomlinson were John Bayne (72 laps) and Sam Harvey (73).
Harvey’s total is a record for an event on New Zealand soil, improving on a 52-lap effort in Northland this year.
Julia Chamberlain, one of two women in the team, set a record of 51 laps for female runners on New Zealand soil – one lap better than the previous mark.
At the last world champs, two years ago, USA won with 860 laps. New Zealand totalled 497 for 11th.
The limits of human endurance seem to be stretching, but it’s not as simple as that.
“There’s quite a lot of science to this,” Tomlinson said. “It’s nutrition and sleep and the speed you are trying to run at to conserve energy. It works differently for everyone, I suppose.
“Looking at the individual world champs last year, by the time people were in the 80s or 90s [with their laps] some of them weren’t very coherent and didn’t know why they were doing it. They were quite far gone.”
For the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship, Tomlinson and his 14 teammates set off at 1am on Sunday, October 20. It was 10pm on Tuesday when he called “time” on his effort. The longest rest he’d had between laps lasted 18 minutes and five seconds. Had he started on a 70th lap, he would have had a recovery time of 2m 46s.
“When you finish it [an ultramarathon], the last thing you want to do is another one,” he said. “Then you get to thinking what you could have done to go a little longer.
“I’d done three [backyard ultras] before this one. I did 30 laps in my first, then I went down to Arrowtown last year and improved it to 38. That put me into the New Zealand team for the backyard ultra world team champs, but there was a fair chance the bottom limit would be raised.
“I went to Christchurch in June and did 41 laps to make sure I made the team. It turned out the bottom limit was 39.”
Tomlinson didn’t really have a running background as a youngster. He grew up in North Canterbury, where his father was a farmer.
He played rugby at school but didn’t carry on with it much after that. He went shepherding around Queenstown. They were a long way from town so rugby was out, but the nature of the country kept him physically fit.
Three and a half years ago, Tomlinson and his family moved from Otago to the Gisborne district. He manages Otara Station near Te Karaka.
He and wife Bea have two daughters and a son – Pippa (9), Izzy (7) and Tate (5).
It’s too early to say whether any of the children have a future in running, but the genes are promising. Bea was a member of the New Zealand team who won gold in the coxless four at the 2010 World Rowing Junior Championships. She went on to compete in the New Zealand elite women’s eight at the World Rowing Championships that year.
Running came late to Glenn.
“I sort of took it up three or four years ago,” he said. “It was during Covid. I was trying to stop smoking, and I wanted to look after my mental health.
“My wife pushed me towards running. She’s the sporty one. She took me for a few runs and got me going. I went for a run every day that month to lock it in.”
A race he had entered was put off a couple of times because of Covid-19 concerns.
He said he “needed something to keep me going” and a 100-mile race seemed just the ticket.
“I trained pretty solidly for nine months leading up to that, topping at about 120km a week.”
One thing led to another.
“I had seen something about one of these things [backyard ultramarathons] and thought it would be interesting to see how far I could go.
“I have a fair bit of willpower. These races are as much about being mentally able to work your way through them as being physically able to do them ... just being able to make yourself stay out there. You go through a lot of highs and lows.
“There will generally be a time you don’t want to be there any more. Then it comes down to managing sleep and sleep deprivation.
“We had a day course and a night course. At night we had a flat out-and-back route that we could run a lot quicker. I was coming back in about 43 minutes and would put on noise-cancelling headphones, jump in a recliner and try to get about 10 minutes’ sleep.
“My crew would wake me up, throw some food in me and give me a bottle of sports drink.
“During the day I’d try to conserve energy a lot more, run slower – more like a 50-minute lap – and in the 10 minutes before the next one I’d down some food and see to any foot care that needed doing.
“The camp had portaloos and toilets but generally you’d try to do that sort of stuff while you’re out on the lap so it’s not impacting on your time back at camp.”
Tomlinson had a three-person support crew for the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship – wife Bea and their friends Karen Metherell and Andy McWilliam.
They took turns on duty.
“After 24 hours of it [an ultra] you don’t have much cohesive thought,” Tomlinson said. “You have to rely on them to do your thinking for you. You put a lot of trust in them.”
‘The race that eats its young’
Backyard ultras are the invention of Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell. He was one of the founders and race directors of the Barkley Marathons, a trail race so difficult that it has been described as “the race that eats its young”.
The Barkley event, named after Cantrell’s longtime neighbour and running companion, Barry Barkley, was first run in 1986. Its start is signalled by the race director lighting a cigarette.
Backyard ultras are so named because they are held in a backyard. The original backyard ultra is Big’s Backyard Ultra. It is held on Cantrell’s property in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and is named after his dog. It was first contested in 2011.