Two Belgian Runners Set Backyard Ultra World Record With 124 Laps

By The Arena Staff

RETIE, Belgium, Oct. 22, 2026 — Belgian runners Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert set a new Backyard Ultra world record this week in Retie, Belgium, each finishing 124 laps, or 831.5 kilometers (about 516.7 miles), over more than five days at the Backyard Ultra World Team Championships, iRunFar and La DH reported on Thursday.

That is a lot of running. It is also a lot of running in circles.

The Backyard Ultra has one of the simplest and most brutal formats in sports. At the top of every hour, every runner still in the race has to start a loop of 6.706 kilometers, a little over 4 miles. Finish it inside the hour and you can rest for whatever minutes are left. Then the clock hits the hour again and you go back out. Miss the cutoff, or fail to show up at the start line, and you are done.

There is no finish line in the usual sense. The race keeps going, hour after hour, day after day, until the field runs out of people willing and able to keep lining up.

This year's event started on Saturday, Oct. 17. It was a team competition, with 67 countries each sending 15 runners to their own course of the same lap length, all running at the same time. Belgium's course was at Domein Beverdonk in Retie.

One by one, runners around the world dropped out. By Thursday, the only two people still going anywhere on Earth were Geerts and Steyaert, running side by side in Belgium.

Around midday Thursday they completed lap 120, passing the old record of 119 laps set by Australia's Phil Gore in 2025. Then they kept going for four more hours, stopping after lap 124. According to iRunFar, the new mark beats Gore's by five laps and about 20.8 miles.

Do the math and it gets silly fast. One hundred twenty-four laps means 124 hours, which is more than five days of starting a run every single hour, with sleep squeezed into whatever minutes were left between laps.

How the two of them chose to end it is the part fans are talking about. The pair stopped on the same lap, side by side, just as they have done before.

"As in previous years, they decided to finish together on the same lap," iRunFar wrote.

This is not their first time owning the record. In 2022, Geerts and Steyaert became the first runners to pass 100 laps, setting the mark at 101. In 2024, Steyaert and Frank Gielen pushed it to 110 laps. Now it is 124, and it belongs to Belgium again.

Belgium did not win the team title, though. In the team event, a country's score is the total laps run by all 15 of its runners. The United States finished first with 1,120 laps, Australia was second with 1,069, and Belgium placed third with 1,058.

So the two men who outlasted the entire planet did it for a bronze medal team. Somehow that makes it better.

> What We Know
> - Who: Belgian ultrarunners Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert
> - Record: 124 laps each, 831.5 km (about 516.7 miles)
> - Old record: 119 laps, Phil Gore of Australia, 2025
> - The format: A 6.706 km lap every hour, on the hour, until runners drop out
> - Where: Domein Beverdonk, Retie, Belgium; race began Saturday, Oct. 17
> - Team results: USA 1,120 laps, Australia 1,069, Belgium 1,058

Reported by iRunFar, The Brussels Times, La DH/Les Sports+

Arena verdict: Five days, 124 laps, and they still refused to leave each other behind. That's not a race. That's a buddy comedy with blisters.

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<small>Photo: Josephine Wentholt / Unsplash, CC0.</small>