Your First Backyard Ultra: How to Fuel It, and Actually Enjoy It
A guest guide for She Strides, with fuelling advice from the team at Veloforte
So you've entered a backyard ultra. Possibly after a conversation that started with "how hard can it be?" and ended with a confirmation email you're now slightly frightened of.
Here's the good news: the backyard format is one of the friendliest ways into ultra running there is. And the thing most likely to end your day isn't your legs or your lungs. It's your fuel. Which means it's the part you can most control, and the part worth getting right before you line up.
First, what actually happens at a backyard ultra?
The rules are almost absurdly simple. You run a 4.167 mile (6.7km) loop. You have one hour to complete it. When the whistle blows on the hour, you set off again. Whatever time you have left over is yours to rest, eat, change your socks and talk yourself into the next one.
You keep going until you don't. There's no finish line to chase and no medal for a distance - the only measure is loops completed.
That format changes everything about how you approach the day:
The pace is genuinely gentle. A steady 7min/km brings you home in around 47 minutes, leaving 13 minutes to refuel before the next whistle. Walk the hills. Chat the whole way round.
You come back to base camp every single hour. Your kit, your food and your people are all right there. Nothing to carry, nothing to plan around, nowhere to get lost.
The whole thing is a mental game. Can you stand up and do one more? That's the entire question. Which is why the runners who do well are rarely the fastest ones.
Why fuelling is the real skill
Ask anyone who's crewed a backyard ultra and they'll tell you the same story. The runner is moving fine at hour eight. By hour eleven they've gone quiet, stopped eating properly, and started making poor decisions. By hour thirteen they're sitting down for a bit longer each time. Then they don't get up.
Almost none of that is fitness. It's an energy deficit that started small at hour three and compounded, quietly, all day.
The maths is straightforward and slightly unforgiving. You're burning through energy every hour whether you eat or not, and once you fall behind you cannot claw it back mid-race - your stomach won't let you. So the whole strategy is simple: stay topped up from hour one, before you feel like you need it.
That means a target, every hour, without negotiation:
What | How much, every hour |
Carbohydrate | 60-909 (roughly 300-400 calories) |
Fluid | 500-750ml |
Sodium | Around 600-900mg |
Write it on your hand if you have to. At hour fourteen you won't be able to work it out from first principles.
We asked Veloforte for their tips
If you haven't come across them, Veloforte make performance nutrition from real food. Not powders engineered in a lab, but recipes built from ingredients you'd recognise in your own kitchen - fruit, nuts, honey and natural botanicals.
Their whole position is that the nutrition industry has come to rely on artificial shortcuts, and that there's a better way to do it. Their range is built around four things an active body actually needs: Perform for fuelling the effort, Nourish for everyday eating, Recover for afterwards, and Restore for the longer game. It's an approach that's earned them 50 Great Taste Awards and more than 33,000 customer reviews, which is a decent sign that eating real food doesn't have to
mean compromising on taste.
That last part matters more than you'd think in a backyard ultra. When you're sixteen hours in, the deciding factor isn't the carb content on the label. It's whether you can actually face swallowing it.
The weeks before: practise your gut
This is the tip that first-timers skip and later regret.
Your gut is trainable, and asking it to absorb 60g of carbs an hour for a full day is a big ask if you've never rehearsed it. So over your long runs, practise your exact hourly intake with the exact products you plan to use. Not similar ones. The same ones.
The golden rule of race day: nothing new. Not one product, not one flavour. Race day is a terrible time to discover something doesn't agree with you.
Two weeks before, start tapering your training. The goal is rested legs, not peak fitness:
Two weeks out: drop your weekly volume by around 30%, and cap your long run at 10km - that's two laps
One week out: cut running by 50-60%. Two or three easy 20-minute jogs, just to keep things loose
Final two days: nothing
The three days before: carbs up, fibre down
Carb load: Build up to 8-10g of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight across the final two to three days. In practice: roughly three-quarters of your plate as carbs, a quarter as protein. Extra rice, extra toast, jam, honey, juice, smoothies.
Drop your fibre from two days out: White bread, bagels, white rice, white pasta, potatoes. Less fibre in your system means less to go wrong once you start moving. This one small change prevents an enormous number of race-day problems.
Hydrate properly: Two-plus litres of water a day, adding electrolytes on the final day.
Protect your sleep: Quiet social calendar, eight hours a night, cool dark room. Veloforte's MagnesiumPro from their Restore range is an easy addition to a wind-down routine in the run-up.
Pack, then pack again: More on this below.
The hourly rhythm: what to eat and when
Here's the pattern that works, and it's the same every hour: sports nutrition while you're moving, real food when you're sitting down.
Gels, chews and bars are designed to go down easily while you're running. Real food is bulkier and slower, but it satisfies in a way gels never will - and it's what keeps you eating long into the night.
Split your hourly target roughly in half. Around 30g on the loop, around 30g at base camp.
A worked example
Hours 1-4, while everything still feels easy:
Hour | On the loop | At base camp |
1 | Medium banana (25g) and a glass of juice | |
2 | Small handful of salted pretzels (20g, plus sodium) | |
3 | One small cold boiled potato with sea salt (20g) | |
4 | Slice of white bread with honey, jam or peanut butter (35g) |
Hours 5 onward, when it starts to get real:
Hour | On the loop | At base camp |
5-6 | Half a cup of warm salted white rice (25g), and a mug of vegetable or chicken broth | |
7-9 | Small pot of mashed potato or noodles with salt (20g, and barely any chewing required) |
Then repeat, rotating flavours as you go.
Three things to know about the food
Vary everything, deliberately. Sweet then savoury. Soft then crunchy. Cold in the daytime, warm as the sun sets. Palate fatigue is a genuine reason people stop eating, and people who stop eating stop running. Build variety into your box before you need it.
Something warm after dark is worth more than the calories in it. Broth, warm rice, a pot noodle from a flask. At 2am it does more for your morale than any gel will.
Avoid the obvious traps. Anything high in fat sits too heavily to run on - burgers, chips, pastries. Anything high in fibre can cause cramping. Spicy and acidic food will make your mouth sore over many hours. And nothing new, ever.
Hydration, without overthinking it
Aim for 500-750ml an hour, sipped during the loop and topped up straight after. Don't try to chug a litre at base camp - it rarely ends well.
Add electrolytes every hour rather than relying on plain water. Sodium losses build quietly across a long day, and Veloforte's Passo hydration mix from the Perform range is one of the easiest things to get right, because it needs no thought: one bottle, one scoop, every loop. Do factor in the salt in your food and the electrolytes already in your gels and chews.
On a hot or humid day, expect to need more than you planned. Drink to thirst, and keep an eye on the white salt marks on your cap - if you're a salty sweater, you'll need more sodium than the person next to you.
Your base camp box: a first-timer's checklist
The runners who last longest are almost always the ones with the best-organised table.
Fuel: gels, chews and bars, sorted into hourly piles so you're not choosing when tired
Fluids: two bottles so one is always ready, plus your electrolyte mix
Real food: the sweet and savoury options above, plus a flask of something warm
Feet: blister plasters, two pairs of fresh socks, a second pair of trainers
Temperature: ice and a fan for the afternoon, then every warm layer you own for after dark. It gets colder than you think.
Light: headtorch and spare batteries
Morale: a camp chair, your playlist, and someone whose job is to hand you food whether you've asked for it or not
Top Tip: Label food bags per loop to take away decision making as the hours progress.
Afterwards: the first 45 minutes
When you're finally done, recovery starts before the celebration.
Within about 30-45 minutes, aim for around 1g of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight alongside 20-309 of protein - Veloforte's Nova recovery shake covers both, and chocolate milk works too. Replace around 1.5 times the weight you lost in sweat, prioritising sodium in the fluid you drink. Then eat a proper meal: carbs, protein, and now that it's safe, fibre and healthy fats.
First-timer questions
How many loops should I aim for? Pick a number that scares you slightly and treat everything beyond it as a bonus. Many first-timers target somewhere between six and twelve hours. Fuel from hour one as though you're going long, because the alternative - starting to fuel properly once you feel bad - doesn't work.
Do I need a crew? It helps enormously, but plenty of first-timers manage alone with a well-organised table or kit pack. If you're solo, do more of your preparation in advance: pre-portion your food, pre-mix your bottles, and write your hourly plan somewhere you can read it when you're tired.
What if I can't stomach anything? Switch format rather than giving up. If gels have stopped appealing, move to chews or a bar. If solid food is a struggle, drink your carbs - juice, flat cola, sugary milky tea. Something is always better than nothing, and the sooner you correct it the better.
Is it embarrassing to stop? No. Every single person there will stop at some point except one, and that's the format working as designed. Deciding to finish at seven loops when you'd planned six is a good day out, not a failure.
Should I fuel differently as a woman? The core numbers here apply to everyone, scaled to body weight. Individual tolerance varies enormously though, which is exactly why the two-week rehearsal matters more than any generic plan. If you'd like guidance specific to your training phase or menstrual cycle, that's a conversation for a registered sports dietitian.
The one thing to take away
Fuel from hour one, before you feel like you need to. Practice it beforehand. Change nothing on race day.
Do those three things and your first backyard ultra becomes what it should be - a long, strange, brilliant day out with a lot of other people wondering whether they can do just one more.
Thanks to the team at Veloforte for their fuelling advice. You can explore their Perform range of real-food gels, chews, bars and hydration at veloforte.com.
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