\n<\/p>\n
Phil Gore can be forgiven for thinking about retirement. The West Australian firefighter had just run 764km to win the Backyard Ultra World Championship in Tennessee.<\/p>\n
Over nearly five days, with little time for sleep let alone his personal hygiene, he proved himself a class above the rest of the field in one of the world\u2019s premier endurance running competitions.<\/p>\n
At the finish line was his wife Gemma, who met him with tears and a kiss \u2013 and told him he stank. \u201cYou\u2019re done, that\u2019s it,\u201d she said. \u201cForever,\u201d Gore replied.<\/p>\n
The 39-year-old has little more to prove. He had already set a world record in the format earlier this year at the Dead Cow Gully Backyard Masters event outside Nanango, around 200km north-west of Brisbane, where he ran almost 800km.<\/p>\n
In Tennessee he didn\u2019t have to go quite as far. Just 114 laps, each 6.7km within an hour, until he was the last runner left.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just tired, I just want to sleep,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of time throughout this event where I\u2019ve been really confused, like I was out running on the road by myself and I was like \u2018how did I get here, what am I doing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely been an adventure, and I\u2019m going to be happy to go and get some proper sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two years ago he ran 670km until he couldn\u2019t complete his 101st lap, and finished sixth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was still really proud of my race back then but it obviously didn\u2019t turn out the way that I wanted. To get back here, it\u2019s so much sweeter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the extraordinary feats of Gore and his rivals, backyard running is very much on sport\u2019s periphery.<\/p>\n
When Gore\u2019s achievement was posted on the Perth subreddit yesterday, he was recognised not as a world record holder, but as a former manager at Domino\u2019s Pizza in East Fremantle.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n A former colleague commented: \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing I remember about Phil, it\u2019s that he wanted to be a fireman more than anything so it\u2019s nice to see he\u2019s still following his dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n He was named Australian Ultra & Trail Runners Association male ultrarunner of the year in March for a string of performances including running 270km over 24 hours, an Oceania record.<\/p>\n Stephen Parker, author of the book There is No Finish: The Backyard Ultra Story, said on Facebook: \u201cFor years, Phil has been regarded in many circles as the king of the backyard, but without a world championship title, the crown was in dispute. No longer.\u201d<\/p>\n Gore looked dazed but happy on the event\u2019s livestream at the end of the race, and said he just wanted to have a sleep and a shower.<\/p>\n \u201cI might retire from backyards now and go and do something else,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Phil Gore can be forgiven for thinking about retirement. The West Australian firefighter had just run 764km to win the Backyard Ultra World Championship in Tennessee. Over nearly five days, with little time for sleep let alone his personal hygiene, he proved himself a class above the rest of the field in one of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[17766,12103,546,17764,17767,17765,1581,4025,344,286,593,1259,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-30186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-764km","9":"tag-covers","10":"tag-days","11":"tag-endurance","12":"tag-gruelling","13":"tag-runner","14":"tag-shower","15":"tag-sleep","16":"tag-sport","17":"tag-time","18":"tag-title","19":"tag-win","20":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}