Last Soul Ultra 2026: Results and How a Backyard Ultra Ends

Mark Dowdle won the Last Soul Ultra 2026 on Tuesday morning, four days after it began, running his 94th yard alone after Ayyoub El Osrouti, the last man with him, stopped at 93. The American covered about 630 kilometers, roughly fifteen marathons back to back, and the two of them carried the race somewhere no backyard ultra on German soil had been: the old mark was 90 yards, and they went through it side by side on the fourth night. Everyone else in the 169-runner field was long gone.

What the Last Soul Ultra is

The Last Soul Ultra is a German backyard ultra held at a venue the organiser deliberately keeps secret, and it is built to be watched from home rather than from a fence line. No spectators are admitted. Instead the race runs a 24-hour livestream in German and English, alongside a live dashboard and a timing leaderboard, around the clock until the last runner stands alone. It was created by the ultrarunner Kim Gottwald and the former Germany footballer André Schürrle, and the first edition, in October 2025, started 93 runners and took 67 hours to settle. Gottwald won it himself. He is not defending it: a hairline crack in his right foot, found after April's Go One More, has the founder hosting this year's stream instead of running it.

Entry works like nothing else in the sport: the organiser calls it a lottery but chooses the field by hand, picking 150 names from open applications and describing the result as international ultrarunners, well-known sports personalities, content creators and selected applicants. The mix is the point. The stream needs stories, and this year it got them.

How a backyard ultra works

A backyard ultra is a last-one-standing race. Every runner starts the same loop at the top of every hour, here 6.7 kilometers through German forest. Finish the loop inside the hour and you wait for the next start; miss the hour, or fail to answer the bell, and you are out. The format was invented by Gary Cantrell, better known as Lazarus Lake, at Big Dog's Backyard Ultra in Tennessee, and its cruelty is arithmetic: there is no set end time, and the organiser says so plainly. To win, a runner must complete one more lap than everyone else, alone, after the second-to-last runner has failed. Everyone who is not the winner, however far they ran, is recorded as a DNF.

The pace is never the problem. A 6.7-kilometer hour is a brisk walk for most of these runners. The problem is that the reward for finishing a lap is another lap, at 3 a.m., in the rain, on the third night, forever.

The format has grown into a sport with its own championship cycle, and countries are part of it: in odd years Big's hosts an individual world championship, and in even years national teams of 15 race simultaneously at sites around the world in the World Team Championship, adding their yards to a team total. This is one of those even years, with the team championship due in October. The world record has a national flavour too, having changed hands from an American to a Pole to an Australian in under two years.

The final two

Mark Dowdle, a 29-year-old from St. Paul, Minnesota, came into this race as the reigning champion of Go One More, the backyard ultra Bare Performance Nutrition holds on Nick Bare's ranch in Texas. He won it in April with 73 yards, ahead of two men who are part of this race's own story: Harvey Lewis and Kim Gottwald. Dowdle is not a full-time professional, and he nearly missed the start, flown in at the last minute around Thursday work commitments, part of the way by private jet. He learned to run through backyard racing after playing college football and lacrosse, won the frozen Arrowhead 135 in Minnesota in January, and is on the US team for October's backyard world team championship. He passed his own 73-yard best here on Monday evening and finished 21 yards beyond it, a jump of more than 140 kilometers on the biggest stage the format has in Europe.

The other man is Ayyoub El Osrouti, a German from Wuppertal who goes by Ello; the race's own start list registers him under the nickname alone. He is the returning story of this edition. At the first Last Soul Ultra he was the last man standing beside Gottwald, and he ended the race himself, stepping off with an irritated Achilles tendon and handing the founder the win. German media reported the same Achilles troubling him again through the race. He matched Dowdle hour for hour anyway, walking longer and longer stretches through the final morning and still making the bell, until 93 yards was where it ended. That is the second-best backyard performance by a German runner ever, seven yards short of the national record Hendrik Boury set at the 2025 world championship, and Boury was in this field: the record holder went out at 68 while Ello was still running.

The field, and how it fell

Harvey Lewis was the biggest name on the start list. The 50-year-old teaches at Cincinnati's School for Creative and Performing Arts, has won Badwater twice, and arrived here less than three weeks after his fifteenth consecutive Badwater finish. He won Big Dog's Backyard Ultra in 2021, set what was then the backyard world record there in 2023 at 108 yards, and pushed his own best to 111 at the 2025 world championship, running the last of it on two broken ribs. Here his legs never recovered from Death Valley: he stopped after 46 yards, a hundred meters into the 47th, and walked back through base camp shaking hands to a standing ovation.

Mike Egan covered 30 yards, 201 kilometers, in a wheelchair. The Marine veteran and bilateral amputee, who lost both legs in Afghanistan in 2012, set a Guinness World Record last November for the greatest distance covered in 24 hours by wheelchair, 152.37 miles around a track in San Antonio. His Go One More run in April went viral when the rain turned the course to mud, his chair stopped rolling, and he got out and pulled himself and the chair to the line. Here he pushed past his Texas mark, and the organiser posted his exit with the words: honor the effort, the fight, the commitment.

Caroline Maria Bolte was the last woman standing, and her 52 yards, 348 kilometers, broke the German women's backyard record that had stood at 51 since 2020, in the first backyard ultra she had ever entered. Deeper into the race than Lewis and still feeling strong, she stopped on her own terms, telling the course she would ring the bell with a heavy heart and hopefully not start crying. Andrew Glaze, the Californian firefighter whose streak of 100-mile weeks is in its seventh year, stopped at 20 in his first backyard.

The deep end of the field tells the story of how hard this edition ran. Norman Mascher-Aspensjö was the last man out before the final two, at 80 yards, thirteen more than it took to win this race last year. The Berliner is the reigning German 24-hour champion two years running, with a top-ten Spartathlon finish behind him, and had never gone past 38 yards in a backyard: he said on course at 79 that he could not run any more, walked that lap home inside the hour, and still completed one more. Hendrik Boury, whose 100 yards at the 2025 world championship stands as the German record, reached 68 before stopping on Monday morning, one yard past the 67 that won the whole race last year. Martin Stiller went at 66, Norman Junker at 56, Dennis Musche at 54 and Adrian Gröschner at 53.

Where this edition ranks

The 2025 Last Soul Ultra was decided at 67 yards; this one took 94, and the field passed the old race mark on Monday morning with four runners still on the loop. The bigger line to fall was national: no backyard ultra held on German soil had gone past 90 yards until Dowdle and El Osrouti went through 91 together. The world record stayed out of reach. That mark fell twice in a matter of weeks last year: Poland's Łukasz Wróbel took it to 116 in May 2025, and Australia's Phil Gore answered with 119 that June at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland, outlasting New Zealand's Sam Harvey, who stopped at 118. Gore's 119 yards, nearly 800 kilometers over five days, ended a full 25 hours beyond where this race's bell rang for the last time.

The results

The full field, all 169 of them, is on the race's results page, and the edition lives on its own page here: Last Soul Ultra 2026. Every yard count in this post is the organiser's own figure.