Aside from the current controversial DQs and resulting discussion over exactly what is meant by “aid” during a yard, the other topic we often get asked about (Julie more regularly than Iain, obviously) is what are our opinions on women’s competition in Backyard Ultra? Should we recognise the “Last Woman Standing” separately to the overall winner? Should we have quotas for women in championship races / teams? Is it fair that men can (usually) pee while out on the course while women can’t (as easily)? Does any of this matter, and if so, what should we do about it?
Big questions and complex issues! In this post we’ll take a deep dive into the data, keep our opinions to ourselves (for now!) and let you make your own mind up based on facts rather than speculation. If you’re not interested in all the details, here’s the headline stats.
- Under-representation: only 22% of all BYU runners are women – this is significantly lower than the population average (50%) and trail and ultra running (~40%).
- Performance gap: a significant and persistent gap exists between the performance of male and female BYU runners, both at the grass-roots and elite levels – about a 20% difference.
- The world championship selection processes are biased against women, resulting in even lower representation (~15% in team world championships and ~5% in individual world championships)
Let’s take a closer look at these numbers…
The Data
Before we begin, in the interests of transparency, all of the BYU stats presented in this post come from one of two sources.
Big’s Backyard Ultra website is the de facto source for all official Backyard Ultra results. It publishes a complete list of everyone who has run 24 yards or more at an affiliated Backyard event, as well as additional lists and stats from the world championship races from 2020 onwards. The website can be slow and difficult to query, so we are grateful to the admins for providing us with a dump of all the data (as of 8th June 2026). This data set also contains some runs of <24 yards that are not visible through the website.
Yardlore is a recent community project which gathers and publishes Backyard Ultra results. If you haven’t already, we recommend you check it out! It has a couple of advantages over Big’s data, which are that a much wider range of queries, charts and searches are possible on the website, and importantly it also records results (where available) for ALL backyard runners, including results below 24 yards. This is important because the vast majority (approximately 85%) of all backyard runs by both men and women are less than 24 yards. The site automatically ingests results from a variety of sources and while it is not (yet) error-free, it provides a valuable complement to the official Big’s data.
For the sake of clarity, we have kept the focus on the differences between male and female performance. For simplicity we will use the terms male/female, man/woman and men/women to refer to these two groups. This is not to be trans or non-binary exclusionary, but simply that the numbers of results logged as “NB” is very, very small. In the Big’s data there are 4 results by non-binary runners out of a total of 13,399. Similarly on Yardlore there are only 12 out of 114,617.
More significantly, around 13% of the Big’s data is labelled “NA”, meaning no gender was recorded, usually because the race director did not submit gender data for their event, or (less commonly) an individual runner did not declare a gender. Only 3% of the Yardlore data is “NA”. We have ignored the “NA” results in our analysis and report only where there is a definite “M” or “F” assignment of the results. Where data is presented below we have labelled the source it was obtained from.
Women’s Participation in Backyard Ultra
It’s no secret that Backyard Ultras have exploded in popularity. in the last few years From the first Big’s Backyard Ultra in 2011 the number of events grew slowly, reaching double figures in 2017, before rapid growth in the number of events post-COVID from 163 in 2021 up to 519 in 2025. 2026 looks set to exceed 500 again.
The growth in events mirrors a growth in the number of runners, both male and female. In the chart below we show the number of runs recorded per year broken down by gender. This is the total number of runs, meaning that if a single runner competed in 3 events in a year it would count as 3 runs in that year.
So far, so good, the number of men and women running backyards is increasing. However, if we instead show the percentage of runs recorded by women each year then we see that after growing steadily in the early years of Backyarding, the proportion of women participating has declined and stayed at 22% since 2020, despite the rapid overall growth in Backyard running. It’s worth noting that at certainly up to 2015 and maybe as late as 2018, the overall numbers of both male and female runners are quite small and so it’s hard to draw too much of a conclusion from them.
Since 2020 a trend has emerged: for every 4 male backyard runners there is approximately 1 female, or more exactly a 78:22 male:female ratio. Compare this to ultra running as a whole where 30% female participation was reported by Ultra 50:50 in 2023 or 40% in 2024 according to the Trail Ultra Project “State of the sport” report.
Why are women less likely to participate in Backyard Ultras than men, and if so is that a problem that should be addressed? That’s a topic for another day, but it’s clear that they are.
Female Performance in Backyard Ultras
For the women who do choose to run Backyard Ultras, how do they perform against the men? Looking at the median distance ran in backyards (the median is an “average” meaning that equal numbers of people run more and less yards), we can see that in every year apart from 2011 men on average run at least as far as women, and since 2015 the gap has remained at 2 yards. Across all Backyard results, there is a performance gap and since 2018 men have gone about 20% further than women. Similar performance gaps have been found in other endurance running events from 5k to Marathon distances (RunRepeat / IAAF data).
While the vast majority of backyard runners (~85% in Yardlore’s data for 2025) run fewer than 24 yards, let’s see if there is any difference between male and female achievement of this milestone. Completing 24 yards means 100 miles in 24 hours – a serious ultra running achievement.
Clearly, many women are hitting the 24 yard mark – and the number is growing year on year. However, similarly to the overall participation numbers, we can see that the number of men achieving 24 yards vastly outweighs the number of women. It’s even clearer if we express the data as a percentage:
Apart from a few outliers in the early years when the overall participation numbers were very small, we see that out of all the 24 yard or more runs, around 10-12% of them are done by women. Compare this to the 22% female participation rate, and it is clear that on average, women are much less likely (around half!) to complete 24+ yards than men.
Let’s look at female performance at the very highest level. How does the women’s world record compare to the men’s? After 2020 (and remember the data before is from relatively small sample sizes), we see a gap of around 20% between the male and female world records – similar to the gap in the median (average) yardage.
The gap in performance certainly exists and seems to appear consistently in both at the grass-roots (median), competitive (24+ yards) and at the elite level (WR). At the very top, look at the number of times runners have recorded over 100 yards. Since it was first done in 2022 by Ivo Steyaert and Merijn Geerts, a total of 35 runners (all male) have recorded 100 yard finishes (Data from Big’s), while no woman has ever passed the mid-90s. The women’s record is still improving, but it is currently 5 years “behind” the men’s and there is no sign of the gap closing.
It’s well known within backyarding that women can (and do) win races outright. Notably, Maggie Guterl winning Big’s Backyard in 2019, or Sarah Perry and Edit Furész winning their respective national championships in 2024. However, this is the exception rather than the rule. If we look at which gender runners are winning races overall we see that in recent years around 4-8% of races are won by women. Based on 22% of all entrants being female, then women are roughly 3 to 5 times less likely than men to win a race. Interestingly, the data also shows that women are slightly more likely to be the assist than winner.
In summary, the data clearly shows that women’s performance is not equal to that of men. Statistically speaking, if we look at female performances as a whole, we find that both the median and the maximum (world record) are about 20% below the male equivalent – if male and female performances lie on a bell curve, we would say that there are two different distributions, one for the men and one for the women. Or put simply, men and women are not competing to the same standard.
It is interesting to consider some of the reasons for the performance gap (and probably a PhD’s worth of research to be done on the topic) but irrespective it is the case that in Backyarding today, women are not competing on an equal footing with the men. Despite racing to the same rules, the outcomes achieved by women are significantly lower than that of men, and even taking into account the lower female participation rate, the gap still exists.
(Few) Women at the World Championship
So far we’ve seen that women are underrepresented in BYU running, and perform worse than men. What does this mean for women’s chances to compete on the biggest stage, the Backyard Ultra World Championships?
The World Championship in any sport is intended to showcase the best athletes competing against each other. Almost every other major sport now gives equal prominence to both male and female athletes, but backyarding is an exception to this. Up to 2019, anyone could in principle enter Big’s Backyard which was the de facto world championship. Since 2020, a qualification path to the World Championships was defined and is open to all runners, male or female. Win a silver ticket race or place in the top 15 runners (exact number of silver tickets and at-large spots varies per country) and you can qualify to run in the World Team Championships held in even years 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026. Win your team’s championship race or place in the top 25 in the world at-large list and you earn a spot at the World Individual Championship, held on the alternate (odd numbered) years. As we’ve seen earlier, the chances of women winning races is even smaller than their participation rate would suggest (at least 3x worse). The chances of women placing near the top of the at-large list (nationally or globally) is similar.
If we look at the gender of the top 100 (or 200) runs in each given year we can see that around 5% of the top 100 results were by women and slightly more of the top 200. Note that the data from 2026 is not complete and in particular the 2026 World Championship has not yet taken place, so we may yet see some women’s performances break into the top 100 this year.
Selecting for world championships is effectively taking a fixed-size “slice” at the top of all the backyard runs in the qualifying period (globally and/or by country) The smaller the grouping we pick, the smaller the chance of a woman being in it. Because women typically have a lower yardage than men, they are under-represented at the top end of the sport, and the World Championship selection process compounds this by a two tier process – first selecting teams from the top runners in each country (which are overwhelmingly male), and then for the individual championship, selecting the winners from the teams, and adding a small number of global at-large runners (which are again almost all male). Let’s look at the female participation stats in the World Championship races:
In the earlier years up to 2021, female participation was around 20% (sometimes a bit above or below), similar to the overall proportion of women participating in BYU in those years. Since 2022 we see something quite different. In the even years (World Team Championships) around 15% of the participants are female, a small but consistent under-representation compared to the 22% overall BYU participation rate. However, due to the selection process for the Individual World Championship, only 5% of participants are female in the end!
Interestingly, if we look specifically at the teams which were ranked as “Large” in the 2024 World Team Championships (meaning they have established BYU community and typically place near the top of the scoring), we see that in 2024 only 9% of their teams were female, and in 2026 only 7%. This means that the female participation rate in the World Team Championship is being “propped up” by lower-ranked countries where the qualifying standard is lower, making them more accessible to female runners!
So what?
We hope that the data tells its own story, all we ask is that you look at the facts and draw your own conclusions from them. What we do with it as a community is up to us. While Backyard Ultra was originally the brainchild of laz, it has grown to the point where other voices need to be heard and changes made to the governance. Just look at the recent debate over rules clarifications – it’s no longer sustainable for one man to make all the rules. Just because laz says that equal opportunity for men and women is enough, is he right? Equality (the same rules for all) does not result in equity (fair outcomes for all), and the data clearly shows that in today’s BYU structure, women are under-represented, and systematically underperform compared to men. Just because women have competed in the same category as men since the beginning of BYU, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
We’re here for the women’s race!