Bob’s Big Timber Backyard Ultra - 2025

Bob’s Big Timber Backyard Ultra was something I had been dreaming about running since I first heard of it back in early 2023. I knew I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go there until the timing was right and I could put up a performance I could be proud of. Since I didn’t reach the mileage I wanted at BSBU this year, I felt that I wanted another shot at a backyard ultra to really test myself. It seemed like maybe 2025 would be the right year to go throw down at a new backyard, get some experience, and hopefully leave a better “backyarder”.

To fully understand this race report and the context of why this outcome (though not the real mileage goal I had) was the best race outcome I ever had, it’s important to start from the core of why I run ultras. I’m a person who suffers from OCD. My OCD doesn’t take the form of compulsions like switching lights on and off and touching doorknobs multiple times (although there are elements of that present). Instead, I get attacked (violently) by intrusive thoughts of safety, health, and the most dreadful part for me, existential OCD.

In a separate part of this blog I plan to go into more detail about what life with all of that is like, but for now, I’m going to allow everybody to do their own research. For this specific race report, I’m focusing on the part of my OCD that makes me not just concerned, but constantly panicked, about the status of my health. It hit its peak in early 2021 when I was pregnant with my youngest. To ensure that I had the longest life possible for my children, I became very risk averse. But we mostly all know that being risk-averse doesn’t guarantee a long life. Complications arise in unlucky situations, and one of those random complications can be a TIA, or a ministroke. I encountered this on March 21, 2021. I was cooking in the kitchen when I suddenly could no longer read the recipe in front of me, didn’t know what garlic was, and lost my ability to speak and see. I was rushed to the hospital by my husband where, as the symptoms passed, they didn’t treat me. I was told to “go home and drink water” so that it didn’t happen again.

Months of testing and multiple trips to the doctor, imaging, specialist visits, and things like bubble tests had to be done to find out what happened to me. They found markers that put me at risk for stroke and evidence that something had happened in my brain that wasn’t normal. I also found out I had a PFO in my heart and that my risk for stroke was slightly elevated.

Upon learning this, I finally realized what quality over quantity meant. Living in a bubble wouldn’t prevent me from facing death at a young age, so I wanted to truly start living and not be afraid to use the body I was given. I didn’t want to reach the pearly gates with a body slathered in sunscreen that had never stood on the edge of the universe. My adventures of choice became ultramarathons.

Fast forward 4 years.

In early July, I had a spell where I got dizzy and nearly passed out following a run. I went to urgent care where they found nothing, and later that week went to the hospital for a 5-day long migraine where they conducted a CT scan and found nothing. This was followed by multiple visits to most of my doctors, extra tests, and no problem to be found.

Here, my OCD decided to rear its ugly head and contribute to the confusion and pain I faced in July. Psychosomatic symptoms bombarded me starting about one week out from the race. Parts of my body started to go numb, I had phantom pains in my head, and my heart was beating so hard in my chest that I thought it would burst right out…not the type of feelings you want to walk into an ultra-endurance event with.

My OCD had convinced me that I was going to die at Bob’s if I ran. The paradoxical cure to this feeling was to run anyway and ignore these symptoms. If you feed your OCD and let it control you once, it will continue to control you until you break that cycle. I wasn’t willing to let what had swept me up in 2021 do it again in 2025 and take away the sport I’m most passionate about which had helped me fight off my most severe symptoms in the past. Ultrarunning has been my escape from my OCD, and it was now being attacked by it.

What a bummer.

So, I got up on the starting line, heart beating out of my chest, and began the first yard.

I had a close eye on my heart rate for each of the first three yards, monitoring what it was doing on hills and when I was resting back at camp. I find that my best medicine is always humor, so I joked with Matt Pfahl and Josh Janish, two of my friends who came to run with me, about my heart rate and expressed the concerns I had to them. I was lucky to have them because they talked me down and helped me remain calm about the fact that, yes, I am running, and yes, your heart rate does increase when you run.

I seriously considered pulling the plug ten miles in. My heart rate wouldn’t go down, and I asked my husband, Erik, to text my coach, Adam Ferdinandson, about the situation. He quickly responded that it was indeed race anxiety.

By the third yard though, I was on the verge of a panic attack and began to feel part of my face and hands going numb. Knowing that it was likely my OCD and nothing was wrong, I decided that I would do my best to continue to run and if I panicked, try my damn best to get to the end of the yard anyway. I was preparing to have to battle some serious symptoms, but to my surprise, by the end of the yard I felt way better, again, being talked through it by my friends.

Erik had the kids make cute little bead counters so that I could keep track of the yard I was on. Each of the kids took a string and put six colored beads on it along with their names, and it was tied like a keychain around a cord on my vest. Each time I completed a yard, I would slide a little bead down. This put the day into bite-sized pieces and made the overall distance that I was running much more manageable. By the time I had slid the sixth bead down on Evelyn’s counter, all my fear and panic had gone away.

Six yards in, I could finally relax and begin to truly enjoy the run. I started to take in the scenery of the massive pine trees that surrounded me, listen more carefully to the sounds of all the crew and the children around camp. This race had MANY kids present, who would follow runners along the course, line up for high-fives, and run a little further down to do it again. I high fived as many as I could, paying careful attention not to miss any, not even once.

I was able to chat with Katelynn Ledford-McCoy for an entire loop, starting with small talk about shorts and running gear and eventually getting into some meat and potatoes about who she was and what she was all about. I won’t tell her story for her, but would encourage you to look up both Katelynn and her husband. Her Instagram handle has “lioness” in it, and I concur, she certainly is. What struck me most about her was her openness and her willingness to share some of her story with me, and the kind tone of her voice. Being a woman in the ultra-running community can be tough with how male-dominated the sport is, but being able to converse with other women in races and getting to know and support each other is an absolute source of joy for me, and I left the yard that I ran with her feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the rest of the day.

The high I was riding since noon began to skyrocket further. For those who understand the ups and downs of running an ultra, you can say that this was a massive up that seemed to keep rising with no end in sight. I felt like singing, laughing, and throwing my hands in the air for the remainder of the day loops. On the final yard of the day, I put “Untouched” by The Veronicas in my Shockz and sent it. I was running significantly faster than the previous yards, attempting to slow myself down, but hey, you can’t stop the beat.

One massive low, one massive high, twelve hours of running. Onto the night loops.

The night loops were entirely back country roads and flat except for two little hills, so deciding where to walk and run became a huge guessing game for me. I went with the general flow of whoever I was around at that specific moment in time, playing games in my head, counting, and doing any other mental gymnastics I had to do to make the flat night loop more interesting. One thing I really liked about the night loops was how the out and backs let me see so many faces, some of which I hadn’t seen during the day, until the headlamps got too bright to see past.

There was a group of older kids at one down and back with glow sticks that would jump up and down and scream and cheer us on every time a runner went past them. In the quiet of the night, hearing those cheers and chants was one of the things that kept me going and helped me jog a few more steps when I began to get tired.

Over 60 runners started the night loop, and one by one that number dwindled down. Still using the bead counters that my children had made, I slid the beads one by one as the monotony of the night began to take over. I counted how many beads I had left until sunrise, a sight that I was very much wanting to see at this backyard. I was feeling fantastic, and getting ready to take on day 2 of the event.

But as mile 80 approached, I started to feel a nag in my knee. I had taken a huge spill three weeks earlier that left my knee bloodied, bruised, and swollen for a few weeks, “healing” just before we had gotten into town (or so I had thought). I’ve never had knee issues before, so I wasn’t expecting to feel this, let alone how long it stuck around. After it had started to hurt, I let Erik know, ran another yard, and realized that the pain wasn’t going away. It was going to stay with me for the foreseeable future.

When I turn to Kinesio Tape, it’s usually my Hail Mary. We tried taping it up a few times, but the humidity kept it from sticking appropriately. It did help a little bit, but not enough to solve the issue entirely.

The thought went through my mind that my race may be over just before we hit 90 miles…but it was quickly squashed with thinking, “If we just ran 20+ yards, I’ll be damned if I let the next 8-10 miles slip away from me.”

This was going to be my last chance to get 100 miles in for the 2025 season, and I wasn’t going to leave another backyard empty-handed in the 24-hour department. I sucked it up and decided that no matter how bad it was going to hurt, unless I could feel permanent damage being done, my body was going to reach 100.

Somewhere between my knee blowing out and hitting 100, I felt a sudden twinge in my arm and pain ripped through my shoulder and armpit. I felt my hand start to tingle and swell. Immediately, I thought I was having a heart attack. The thoughts I had in the morning became warnings and I had ignored them, continuing to run an unbelievable number of miles. I tried my best to shrug (ha) the feeling off because it felt localized. I could no longer swing my arm without pain under the armpit. For the remainder of whatever yard this was (I’m assuming 22), I had to keep my arm pinned to my side.

I walked towards the corral, a section of the course where we see the crew members and families, at the end of the yard and Bob met me and stated, “Whatever you’re doing over there, keep doing it.”

I grinned and pretended my arm was fine, then walked back to my crew. I told Erik and Josh about it and they began to make a makeshift sling out of a bandage. I didn’t want to attract attention looking injured, so I told them that I would be fine and headed to the corral without it, keeping my arm pinned to my side still.

I started the 23rd yard, brought my arm in and out of my vest that would serve as a sling when the pain got bad, and ran. I decided I would keep a steady pace and did a few of the out and backs that were on the course, rounded up a driveway onto a road section from loose stone, looked down at my watch to check my pace and saw…nothing. I hit the button two, three, four times and still saw absolutely nothing from my watch. Not a time, not a mile count, not a pace. My stomach dropped. Pacing was everything, and I had decided to run in the back of the pack, casually keeping myself at a “just passing” pace to save my energy. “Just passing” was an okay pace to keep except for when you no longer know what mile you’re at, what the time is, or if you’re going to make it back from the loop in time. I started to pick up my pace and luckily made it back in time, and a little faster than I was supposed to. Note to self though: don’t let your watch die at a backyard ultra.

“This one is for 100,” Bob said as he rang the dinner bell.

The 24th yard started, and I felt more pride in that moment than at any other race previously. The harder you must work for something, the more times you fail before you get there, the sweeter it is when you finally make that cut. This was my third attempt to break 100 miles in the backyard, and I didn’t realize just how difficult of a task this was until multiple people told me that they had never seen a woman run 100 miles in a backyard. I have always set lofty goals for myself and been very hard on myself when I didn’t hit them. I’m willing to accept that there’s a reason it took me three attempts: It’s hard as hell to run 100 miles in a backyard unless your mindset is in the exact spot that it needs to be. If there are any factors, such as competition or impatience, that don’t align with what it takes to run a backyard, you aren’t going to do as well as you want. This was the first time that I had decided I was just going to go out and run some yards with my friends, hopefully hit 100 miles, but be willing to accept any result. Because of this mindset, I was able to relax into the format, and my body began to float through these miles as if I were floating down a river or a stream, the backyard being in control of the outcome, not me.

The final few turns were around a field. I passed a woman who had cheered me on all day and night, making a huge difference in my overall mood throughout the race and getting me to smile when things had gotten rough. One of the reasons I pushed through the many yards that I did was because I didn’t want to let her down. To me, she represented all my friends that were watching me run and believing I could keep going.

I got emotional once I hit the final turn and began to cry. I attempted and failed to achieve this goal twice. I remembered the devastated version of myself in a hayfield at the BSBU earlier this March. I remembered the feeling of waking up the next morning in the hotel, wishing I was still running. I remembered thinking that maybe I wasn’t good enough for the backyard format, wondering how many times I would let myself try before giving up and accepting the fact that I was perhaps built for something else.

I thought about the people who inspired me over the past 6 months—Heidi Baker and Annie Hawthorne. I don’t think either of them know how highly I think of them, or about the fact that I think about them as often as I think about runners like Jasmin Paris. Both have courage to do things that I struggle with, and at its core, it’s the courage to not give up. At Bloodroot in 2023, I decided not to go out on a loop because I didn’t want to run in the dark without being able to be an official finisher. I watched Annie this year make the opposite decision and push herself to the end knowing that she wouldn’t finish, starting her loop with no hesitation and coming in after cutoff with a smile. Heidi had attempted the 100-miler many times to no avail, and continued to pick herself up and try again, no matter how bad her previous DNFs had hurt her, and she never shied away from announcing her attempts publicly, holding space for people that struggle to meet their goals and setting the example that you should never give up.

I ran up to the corral, approaching 100 miles, smiled at Josh and Erik, passed the “finish line” and turned to a spectator who said, “Now to do it again.”

I knew my yards were numbered at this point. I’ve known it for hours. Erik and Josh helped me switch shoes and get everything I needed, and I walked up to the corral for what I thought was the final time. The dinner bell rang and we went off. I was walking at first, nursing my knee, trying to run down some of the descents. My pace was far too slow to be able to make the cutoff, but I decided I was going to walk it out.

As I came upon the first incline on the course, I saw Josh waiting for me at the top, telling me to keep moving and that I was doing a good job. I started to shuffle a little faster, rounded one of the wider turns and went back up towards the corral.

“It’s the girl!” I heard one little girl say as she began clapping. I smiled and shuffled along faster. Honestly, when I’m on course, nothing is more important to me than ensuring that young girls see me trying my best. I hope one day that they’ll all believe they can compete in this capacity too.

I saw Josh on the course twice more (he obviously wasn’t going to let me quit) and realized that although I was too slow to make the cutoff, I probably had enough time to make it in if I ran my hardest. I began to makeup time by running as much of the course as I could. I was winded, but able to bring it in with 3 minutes to spare.

I told Josh and Erik that I was done, but they had me head back to the corral and sit down so that I would at least start the next yard. That’s when Kevin Beachy sat next to me and asked me what the plan was. I told him that I was going to start the yard, take a few steps forward, and turn right around. I saw him think for a minute and he responded with, “Well I think you could at least walk around the field.”

I chuckled and agreed.

I walked around the field, and normally I would continue if I started a loop, but my knee was so bad that it had begun to affect my ankle. If I had to make another descent, I think I would have fallen and caused some serious injury. Even if I didn’t fall, I knew had pushed my knee about as far as it could go.

I walked over to Erik, my kids, Josh, and the woman who had cheered me on all day. We had our mini post-race reunion, took a few photos, and Josh helped me hobble up to the corral, as I was quickly losing the ability to walk. My knee was getting stiffer by the minute.

Post-race, I lost the ability to even stand up. Although I knew my body could go further, my knee had done all it could. I got my medal and belt buckle from Bob, and pretty much immediately fell asleep in the grass. We hung out for a little while and I got to talk to some of the organizers, racers, and families. Everybody was so nice.

In total, I ran 25 yards, equaling 104 miles. I know there is a lot of “doom and gloom” and injury in the report, but emotionally and mentally, this was one of the best races of my life. Getting to 100 miles in the backyard is something that I’ve wanted to do for years and I was finally able to accomplish that goal. Over everything else though, I was able to fight back against my OCD and preserve the core of who I am and my passion for ultra running. Obstacles come in so many forms and the most difficult of them are rarely physical.

I’m thrilled to continue my journey in ultra running and tackle the next challenges I have lined up. I’ll be revisiting the backyard with even loftier goals in the future.

The people I have to thank include my husband and my children for supporting me in what I call a “fun hobby”, Josh Janish for running with and then crewing me, Matt Pfahl for agreeing to head out there with me, Heidi Baker and Annie Hawthorne for the much-needed inspiration, Adam Ferdinandson for being the best coach I could ask for, the Hunter family for putting on such an amazing race, my angel that cheered me on, and my grandmother for helping me train all summer while Erik was away. I’m the one who runs the race, but I couldn’t even make it to the starting line without all these people out there supporting me along the way.