Your first backyard ultra: 10 mistakes and how to avoid them

A backyard is the ultrarunning format with the lowest barrier to entry — you set the pace — and, at the same time, the one that punishes unforced errors the hardest: there are no aid stations to save you and no split times to warn you. These are the ten mistakes that cut the most debuts short, listed roughly in the order they show up. All of them can be avoided from home.

1. Going out too fast

The classic of classics. In the first loops you feel like running: you’re fresh, there’s a buzz, and finishing in 35 minutes gifts you half an hour in the chair. The trap: rest doesn’t accumulate, but wear does. The bill arrives around loop 10–12, just when the race really begins. Set a target loop time with a margin (the calculator gives it to you in a minute) and nail it from the first loop, even if you’re the last to leave the start corral. The full strategy is in what pace should you run a backyard at?.

2. Running the hills because ‘I still can’

Being able to isn’t the point: on loop 3 you can do anything. Running the climbs is the costliest expense in the format, and all it buys you is seconds. Walk the hills from loop 1, like the veterans who will overtake you walking… on loop 20.

3. Waiting until you’re hungry to eat

After a certain hour, hunger disappears just when you most need to eat. The rule is to eat something at every rest, from the very first one, with food you’ve already tested in training. The full strategy — what, how much and what to do when your stomach shuts down — is in eating and drinking between loops.

4. Ignoring the first rub on your foot

A hot spot is a blister with an hour’s deadline, and the race gives you a pit stop every 60 minutes. It gets treated at the next stop, always. The full protocol is in blisters and foot care.

5. Setting up camp like a living room

Sleeping mat, sleeping bag, gazebo, camping table, cool box… A comfortable camp is a double trap: it takes you longer to get in and out of it, and at night it invites you never to get up again. What you really need fits in two boxes — it’s in the minimal base camp list. Spare comfort doesn’t help you keep going: it helps you stop.

6. Improvising the night

The night isn’t just a darker loop: it’s slower (adjust your margin), colder (the warm layer goes on before you’re cold) and lonelier. Main head torch, spare and batteries are sorted in daylight; at 3 in the morning you don’t think, you execute. Full guide in running at night with a head torch.

7. Sitting down to negotiate during a low

The early-hours low will convince anyone that their race is over. It almost never is: it’s usually glucose, cold or sleep dressed up as an argument. The defence is prepared beforehand — written rules for dropping out, the rule of never quitting during a low — and it’s set out in your head in a backyard.

8. Having no plan for sleep

‘I’ll hold on’ is not a plan. Knowing when to start the micro-naps, how to cut them off in time and when to spend the caffeine (hint: not on the first day) is what separates getting through the first early hours from ending your race in them. All of it in sleeping in a backyard.

9. Cutting it fine with the bell

Getting back at 55 minutes leaves five for everything: eating, drinking, feet, warm layers. Two loops like that in a row and you’re into the spiral of rests that don’t restore you. A reasonable margin is one that gives you time to eat, drink, see to your feet and get to the start corral without stress, and you measure that yourself by timing your transitions; if your loop time doesn’t give you that consistently, the problem is almost never fixed by running faster, but by spending less time stopped on things that don’t matter. How to choose that margin is in what pace should you run a backyard at?.

10. Going along to ‘see what happens’

Without a goal, the first excuse wins. Take two: one public and modest (tell everyone) and one private and ambitious (tell no one). And remember how this works: only one person finishes; every other result is a number of loops to be proud of — as long as your body made the decision, and not a chair that was too comfortable.

If you have a date for your debut, the next step is a training plan with simulation weeks built in: prepare your first backyard in 12 weeks.