Australian firefighter Phil Gore won the 2025 Big’s Backyard Ultra World Championship title with patience, grit, and an uncanny ability to sleep on command. But the biggest ace up his sleeve, arguably, had actually very little to do with him.

A race where runners must fight the progressive onslaught of exhaustion, pain, and sleep deprivation to complete a 4.167-mile loop every hour until no one else remains, a backyard ultra is like Formula 1, minus the glitz and the glam. That is to say, every second matters. Like a race car driver, a backyard ultra competitor is only as good as the team around him. And Phil’s team may just be the best in this very niche, very eccentric biz.

“It’s the event where the crews have the biggest impact on the result of the race,” Jacob Zocherman, who documented the event for Outside Run, says. “It’s not just about giving them nutrition.”

To figure out what that means, we rang up Gemma Gore, Phil’s wife and, along with friend Mally, his crew team from October 18-22. There in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, Gemma and Mally spent nearly five days supporting Phil en route to running 114 “yards” (495 miles) until no one else was left.

From meticulous organization to heating up water for food and a shower (yes a shower, more on that later), the list of crewing responsibilities are endless. But a crew’s most important role is hard to classify. It came to the forefront on night four.

That’s when Phil started getting confused. It was just before nightfall, when Phil planned on getting some sleep between laps. Gemma recalls him coming up to her and saying, “I need you to tell me everything that’s happened in the last couple of days. I need you to recap what’s happened, because my memory’s not working very well.”

“That was a bit of a worry,” Gemma tells Outside Run. But she kept her cool.

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