Big’s Backyard Ultra and the Rise of Women Endurance Stars

On Monday evening, Maggie Guterl and Will Hayward set out for the 60th time on a 4-mile loop through the hickory-covered hills of central Tennessee. It was dark and rainy on day three of the Big’s Backyard Ultra, a running race of fiendish design. There’s no set distance, and no set total time, just endless laps around the 4-mile course, which participants must complete once an hour. To win, you basically just have to be the last competitor still moving your legs.

For hours Guterl and Hayward had been the only two runners left. They could theoretically have gone on forever.

Guterl finished her loop, and the crowd watched to see if Hayward’s head lamp would split the darkness, leading him in before the clock ticked 60. But as the final “time’s almost up!” warning whistles blew, no shards of light glimmered on the trail. He’d gotten a little lost mid-circuit, and Guterl became the first woman victor in one of running’s most epic, masochistic events.

“i figure everyone already knows / but if you are living in a cave / maggie guterl of colorado won the 2019 world championship of backyard ultra at the big’s backyard ultra,” the race director, Gary Cantrell (aka Lazarus Lake), wrote in an almost poetic post on Facebook. The “backyard” in the race title, by the way, is his backyard. “not the women’s world championship / the world championship of everybody, period.”

Guterl was once a regular, midpack road runner who wandered onto a trail on a run in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, one day. After that, she took on more trail races, powered through longer trail races, got a coach, and now finds herself a world champion. With this victory, she joined a small but growing cadre of women athletes who are competing with elite men, and winning.

Endurance sports may not exactly be a level physiological (or social) playing field, but women do earn, as Guterl did, top overall spots in the most grueling events—which they wouldn’t in, say, sprinting. These long-slog races aren’t all about gigantic lung capacity and muscle measurements. They’re also about repetition, pacing, fatigue so extreme you get zombie eyes, hormone fluctuations, spiraling thoughts, high highs, low lows—and, mostly, not listening to that voice in your head that says, “You could just stop.”

Photograph: Peter Zuzga/Getty Images

The phrase “Big’s Backyard Ultra” may sound like the quirky, sweat of the Earth name of one particular race. And it is that. But others have generalized the format into a lowercase “backyard ultra” style of race, each of which follows the same format. Racers must run a 4.166667-mile (6,706-meter) loop in under an hour. They can do it a half-hour, or they can clock in at 59:59. As long as they cross that line before the clock ticks 60, they remain in play (although if they finish in 30 minutes, they have more time to, say, sit down for a sec, sip some coffee, and pop some aspirin). Exactly one hour after a circuit starts, another begins, and racers set off on what ultrarunner Andy Pearson called in Trail Runner Magazine “a macabre, Sisyphean loop.” The last person who completes the proverbial boulder-pushing, after everyone else has dropped off, wins. Cantrell says the basic idea for the format—essentially a 4 mph race—goes back to his high-school running days. “I was not fast, but I could withstand a lot of abuse,” he says. “This would be a race I could win.”

After he bought this land in Tennessee, he decided he wanted to hold an ultra race there and built trails through his woods. “The parameters were to make it where it was easy enough to do that anyone could do it—but hard enough to do that, after a while, it would be difficult,” he says. People liked it, replicated it. “The majority of people who run backyard ultras are just people who like the low-key atmosphere,” adds Cantrell. “Not having to push really fast.” Plus, in long-course ultramarathons, you might not see a single other person for hours. In a backyard ultra, the field doesn’t spread as far, and everyone hangs out together (in chairs) every hour at the start/finish line. It’s a party.

Cantrell keeps a spreadsheet that currently lists 75 backyard ultras between late August 2019 and September 2020, although he notes their grassroots nature makes them hard to track. In a less official Google spreadsheet, data nerds can check out race maps, attrition rates for different events, and all-time records. The races now take place in the US and all over the world, including Denmark, Dubai, Estonia, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Cantrell says he attends five or six other races a year—just for fun.

Cantrell is also famous for the torturous Barkley Marathons, chronicled in a documentary subtitled “The Race That Eats Its Young,” which also takes place in Tennessee. “Many who have suffered through Barkley can attest that Laz is a true artist,” Pearson wrote. “The Leonardo da Vinci of pain. The Rembrandt of mind games. The Lady Gaga of suffering. A master of sadomasochistic craft.”

Just before this year’s event, Cantrell made an ominous Facebook post about Big’s participants. “they are coming / like turtles crossing oceans to lay their eggs / like monarchs crossing continents to return to their home forests / they are coming / driven by some invisible thing inside them / they are coming,” he wrote. “… god help them one and all.”

Cantrell’s line-broken posts read like Appalachian proverbs. After the race began, for instance, he noted on Facebook the many messages of support that loved ones were leaving for competitors, as they watched the video streaming from Cantrell’s property. “i wonder if any of them have the least idea that their friends and families, and even people they do not know, are so invested in seeing them succeed?,” he wrote, “or are they, here on the big farm in short creek tennessee, surrounded by nothing but trees, as oblivious as microbes on a slide to the fact they are being watched?”

Guterl, like women achieving major things anywhere, was likely very aware of the microscope.

There aren’t many sports in which women can compete alongside with men and win podium spots. But endurance events present an exception to that general rule. Take Pam Reed, who won multiple Badwater Ultramarathons, which sends racers across 135 miles from Death Valley to the Mount Whitney trailhead. Or Amelia Boone—who, by the way, ran the 2019 Big’s Backyard and cheered Guterl on after she herself dropped—who came in second overall at the 2012 World’s Toughest Mudder. And then there’s Rory Bosio, who in 2013 placed seventh overall in the North Face Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, beating the women’s record by 2.5 hours and making herself the first woman in the top 10 finishers.

The records aren’t just in endurance running. In 2016, cyclist Lael Wilcox won the 4,300-mile Trans Am, and in 2018—as the second woman ever to compete—she came in second in the Navad 1000 “bikepacking” race. Outside magazine’s “the Longer the Race, the Stronger We Get” details these victories, along with one 2016 weekend when “women runners took five outright victories in ultramarathons across the country.”

On average, men still outperform women in ultra races. But it’s hard to tell exactly how the genders compare, in part because the demographics of ultra-ing still skew heavily male. According to a 2018 Frontiers in Physiology review paper, 100-mile races in the US had almost no women participants in the late 1970s. By 2010 women accounted for about 20 percent of the contenders. Men were always, on average, faster—but the degree of sex difference in performance was highest when the ratio of women to men was smaller. Logic suggests that if more women (or fewer men) participated, the average difference would decrease, at least to a point.

Cantrell notes that women are disproportionately at the top of his backyard ultra. While they represented around 16 percent of all participants this year, when only four competitors remained, two were women. And when there was only one, it was Guterl.

There are reasons why women might present a formidable challenge in endurance sports. Some research suggests women’s muscles might be less fatiguable than men’s. Women tend to have more slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are better at longer-lasting tasks. Women can also access and use their stores of fat, which metabolize more slowly than carbohydrates, better than men. In short, the extremes of athletic capacity that men exhibit just aren’t as vital in the ultra world. “Anything where speed and strength are a factor, the men will always be on top,” says Cantrell. “What I like about the backyard ultra is it removes the speed and strength from the equation.” Men and women can just battle it out.

Then there’s the psychology of these grinding affairs. We could wax philosophical about how women are better at handling the emotions and hardship of endurance sport, but there’s not much research to back up those squishy ideas. There does seem to be, though, a truth about how women perceive their abilities and parcel out their power: A 2016 Journal of Sports Analytics study looked at the predictions that male and female participants in the 2013 Houston Marathon made for themselves, and found that “men consistently overestimate their abilities relative to women.” Men also, in general, started out too quick and cut their pace in the backends of races, while women stayed steadier across the distance.

Ultras break you down psychologically, but also physiologically. That 2018 review paper, called “Physiology and Pathophysiology in Ultramarathon Running,” sums this up in stark terms: “Undoubtedly, the completion of an ultramarathon has no immediate health benefits.”

An ultramarathon can damage your red blood cells, in a process called hemolysis. Your cortisol jumps, as may other stress hormones called catecholamines. You tend to get more serotonin but less tryptophan. Testosterone dips. In women, estradiol—the estrogen steroid hormone that affects, among other things, the reproductive cycle—increases. Your liver and kidneys might not work as great as they would if you were standing still. Also, just try to have a normal digestive process. (No, really: We’ll wait.)

Most of these potential fluctuations return to normal soon after the race, the effects fading away along like the feeling that someone had walloped your quads with a medieval morning star. In a blog post Guterl wrote last year, just before last year’s Big’s Backyard Ultra, she said: “I want to prove a woman can win this. If my body can hang with my mind then we will be OK. This is going to be hard and I will need more than pure stubbornness (of which I have endless amounts.)” That year she ran (a mere) 183 miles, or 44 loops. And then she signed up to do it all over again.

For ultra addicts, the call of the wild, the call of the difficult, and the call of the angel-devil dueling voices in your head—”you could just stop” or “you could just keep going”—lead you straight back to www.ultrasignup.com. You click “Register.” And on race day, you line up with everyone else. Yeah, you’re nervous, but not about your estradiol. More important than any other backyard quality, says Cantrell, is this: “You have to be willing to keep stepping to the line even when it’s hard.”

As Guterl and Hayward dueled this past weekend, Cantrell posted about that struggle. “she has to be wondering what it will take to put this guy away,” he wrote. “he simply refuses to surrender.”

She refused harder.

Several hours after that post, Guterl crossed the final line, an inflatable arch with the words “There Is NO” scrawled above the printed “FINISH,” for the last time. She’d been on the course for around 60 hours and had traveled 250 miles, ending up exactly where she’d started in space but with a new way to think of herself, and for everyone else to think about her: world champion of everybody, period.