Phil Gore's Project 168 Ends at 152 Laps and 1,020 Kilometres

Phil Gore ran one 6.71-kilometre lap every hour, on the hour, from 8 am Perth time on Sunday, August 23. He stopped on Saturday afternoon, on lap 153. He finished 152 of them: 1,020 kilometres, 634 miles, and six days and eight hours of answering the clock, sixteen laps short of the week he set out to run. It is thirty-three laps further than anyone has gone in a backyard race, and because he ran it alone it counts as no record at all. Every lap is on the chart below, and how it ended is at the bottom of the page.

What is Project 168?

A solo run built on backyard ultra rules. A 6.71 km lap started at the top of every hour at Alfred Skeet Reserve in Forrestdale, on Perth's southern edge. He did not run the same course all week. From 6 am to 6 pm he ran a loop the organisers recorded at 6.779 km; from 6 pm to 6 am he ran an out-and-back recorded at 6.714 km, turning around about 2.9 km from the start. Both count as the 6.71 km lap, and that is the number every distance here is built on. Run the lap faster and the minutes left over are yours to eat, change, get treated, or sleep in. Miss the start of the next one and the attempt is over. There was no finish line in the usual sense, only the 168th hour, which would have left him at 1,127 kilometres, or 700 miles.

The number is the point: 168 hours is exactly one week. His own world record, the furthest anyone has gone in a real backyard race, is 119 yards, one for every hour. Finishing would have taken him 49 hours past it.

The attempt raised money for Telethon, the Western Australian children's charity. The in-person companion laps sold out, virtual laps were open worldwide, and the pledge page sold lap 167 under the name The Assist, the backyard term for the runner who pushes the winner to their result and drops one lap short.

Who is Phil Gore?

A firefighter from Perth, a father of four, and the winner of 14 of the 16 backyard ultras he has started. His world record came in June 2025 at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland, a two-man duel that ran four days: Sam Harvey of New Zealand stopped after 118 yards, and Gore ran the 119th yard alone to win. Last October he won Big's Backyard Ultra, the world championship held on the farm where the format was invented, at 114 yards. The championship runs again this October.

Did it count as a backyard ultra world record?

No, and Gore says so himself. A backyard ultra record is competitive by definition: the race runs until one runner is left standing, that runner completes one more yard alone to win, and the mark only exists because somebody else pushed it there. Harvey's 118 yards is what made Gore's 119 possible, and Harvey holds the assist for it. A solo week has no second runner, so however far it went, there is no official result. He reached 119 laps at 6:49 on Friday morning, four days and 22 hours in, and went past it on the next one.

What he has said he wants instead is a benchmark: a mark out past the record, the way the four-minute mile once sat out past what anyone had run, for other backyard runners to chase. Whether the sport ends up treating the idea that way is up to the runners who come after him.

How did he sleep?

Mostly, he didn't. The days all had the same shape: daylight laps took close to 50 minutes, an easy pace that kept the legs in one piece and left about ten minutes of chair time each hour. From 7 pm the laps dropped to around 40 minutes, and the difference was the sleep plan: a faster lap bought a gap long enough for a micro-nap before the next start. The rhythm broke every fourth hour. The 6 pm, 10 pm, 2 am and 6 am laps averaged 46:39, 45:53, 49:27 and 48:12, against 41:30 for every other hour of the night, and the 2 am lap was slower than his daytime average. His fastest lap, 37:17 on lap 65, started at midnight. His slowest was the last one he finished, 58:01 on lap 152.

Add up every gap and he spent about 35 hours off the course across the six days, in slices no longer than 23 minutes. That arithmetic was the whole attempt, and it is why the solid overnight dots sit clear of the hour line on the chart: the fast laps were not surges, they were how he slept. The same habit carried on past dawn for five days. The 7 am lap closed each 24-hour day, and the first five were the five fastest daylight laps of the week: 37:37, 40:18, 38:58, 37:47 and 39:50, on laps 24, 48, 72, 96 and 120. The sixth, lap 144 on Saturday morning, took 48:29.

Friday night broke that pattern. His 7 pm, 8 pm, 9 pm and 11 pm laps came in at 42:40, 44:38, 47:51 and 51:04, each the slowest he ran at that hour all week. The 11 pm lap showed the size of it: that hour had averaged 40:21 all week and never taken longer than 42:30. The fast block was what bought the naps, so the cost arrived in the same hour, and lap 136 left him 8:56 off the course. It turned again after midnight. His 2 am lap, 47:18, was the quickest he ran that hour all week, and the 3 am lap came back inside its usual range at 43:24. Those two bought him 12:42 and 16:36.

What is a backyard ultra?

A race with no set distance. A lap of 6.706 km (4.167 miles) starts every hour on the hour, and the race continues until only one runner can keep answering the bell. The winner is the last one standing; every other runner is scored a DNF, however far they went. The lap distance is chosen so that 24 laps make 100 miles in a day.

Gary Cantrell, better known as Lazarus Lake, the man behind the Barkley Marathons, invented the format as a race he could hold in his own backyard in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. From that one race it grew into a sport with its own elite, a de facto world championship that became a real one, and team world championships in the even years, which Belgium won in 2024. Championship fields now draw from more than 50 nations. Cantrell's explanation for why millions tune in is the structure: "sudden death overtime every hour." Nobody can build a lead.

The last-man-standing shape keeps producing races that end in strange, personal ways. Two weeks ago the Last Soul Ultra in Germany ran to 94 yards before Mark Dowdle won it alone, and Go One More reached 73 yards this year. Project 168 pushed the idea a step further out: same clock, same laps, nobody else on the course.

Where can I see every lap?

The chart above carries all 152. philgore.com.au is the hub, with a lap page that lists every completed lap time, the day-by-day YouTube streams, and the donation page for Telethon. Perth is eight hours ahead of UTC, and each event day ran 8 am to 8 am.

How did Project 168 end?

The 168th hour never came. Lap 153 started at 4 pm Perth time on Saturday, August 29, and Gore did not complete it inside the hour. That ended Project 168 at 152 laps, 1,020 kilometres and 152 hours on the clock, sixteen short of the 168 he was chasing and about sixteen hours from the finish.

The last lap he finished took 58:01, the slowest of his six days, and left him under two minutes off the course before the next one started. Nobody has said what ended it.

He had already passed the mark he came for. His own world record of 119 yards fell on Friday morning, and he ran thirty-three laps beyond it. None of it goes in the record books, because a backyard ultra record needs a second runner and he ran the week alone. What he said he wanted was a benchmark for the runners who come after him, and 152 hours is now the number sitting out there.

His Telethon campaign passed $250,000 on Saturday evening, with the total still climbing.