Mud, sweat and tears — and a bond between runners.
Matt Shepard of Valleyview won the first Outrun Rare Backyard Ultra when he completed 32 6.7km laps to outlast Calgary’s Kevin Barata in muddy conditions that made Woodstock look like a day at the beach on June 21-22 at the Millarville Racetrack.
“Conditions were absolutely atrocious,” said race director Dave Proctor, a well-know ultramarathoner from Okotoks. “I don’t know if they could have been any worse for the runners… I have never seen that bad of footing on any course and I have run a lot of races.”
The format had the runners completing a 6.7km course in less than an hour. After that hour they ran it again – the winner was the last man standing.
The top two runners wound up helping one another during the grueling final hours.
“They really did need each other to get to that important 32-hour mark,” Proctor said.
Barata appeared to be finished at about the 28-hour mark, but got a boost from an unexpected friend.
“Kevin came in and told me ‘Dave, you won’t believe what happened — Matt ran an extra lap to help me come in,” Proctor said.
The favour was reciprocated. The rules state the race is over when the second to last runner drops out, and then the final runner has to run one more lap.
Had Barata dropped out at 28, Shepard would have won at 29 – three laps short of earning the golden ticket — an invite to the Big Backyard Ultra in Tennessee in October.
“Kevin told me: “I am going to run, finish my 31st lap and drop out and rest,” Proctor said. “He was feeling destroyed, but he wanted a stranger to be able to achieve a goal, so he pushed himself for three more hours.”
The course faced a few changes during the weekend due to the rain.
The first approximately 10 laps consisted of a loop on the racetrack — in conditions a team of horses would have trouble pulling a wagon through. They then headed off course before returning to the rest station at Creekside campground.
A decision was made to restrict the course to loops on the inside of the racetrack for runners safety as the creek on the course was rising and compromising the route.
Shepard said the opening laps were difficult.
“It was messy, but it was fun — super greasy, you don’t get to run in conditions like that very often,” he said after completing his 24th lap at 10 a.m. Saturday.
“The first 100 miles were going to be the hardest, now I am feeling the sky is the limit,” Shepard said while eating a breakfast burrito to refuel himself before heading out for his goal of at least 32 laps.
“Now that the mud is gone, it’s pretty runnable.”
He laughed when it was suggested he was slightly off his rocker to run all day and night in a storm.
“When you walk out that door, you don’t know how far you are going to go – can I do 100, can I do it in the pouring rain, can I go up a mountain,” he said. “You’re finding out what your potential is, I guess.”
There were 150 runners registered for the event, 10 were from the Foothills.
Andy Lethbridge of Black Diamond completed his goal of eight laps.
“It was wet and had been raining all night, it was so muddy,” Lethbridge said. “I had a good time, I had never done that format before.”
He blew a tire while running on the track.
“Every lap I ran I was on the track — and onetime the mud grabbed my shoe right off my foot,” he said with a chuckle. “I was running in my socks for a while… The weather is the weather. I had registered a long time ago, and I was going.”
He said he plans to run the event next year. He previously ran the Calgary Marathon 50k and signed up for the Death Race in Grand Cache this summer.
The race raised more than $25,000 for OutrunRare, which directs the funds to rare disease research.
The guest race director was Lazarus Lake, the founder of the Big Backyard Ultra in Tennessee and the infamous Barkley’s run.
He was impressed with the version in Millarville.
“They did a super job of handling the conditions,” Lake said. “They had to make course alterations twice.”
For information about the OutrunRare Backyard Ultra go to outrunrare.com
