✳️ The Hyped Race No One Covered

What the G1M Ultra Tells Us About the Fragmentation of Ultrarunning

Hey pals,

A few weeks ago a race was all over my Instagram and TikTok feed. It was a backyard race, but the usual trail running personalities and outlets didn’t cover it. Like, at all. Not even a story post.

It’s a sign of a cultural rift in ultrarunning, one that I’ll touch on today.

Hope you all have great week :)

Matt

In April 2025, 132 runners gathered on a Texas ranch to run a looped course measuring exactly 4.167 miles—on the hour, every hour, until only one remained. After 57 hours and 235 miles, lightning and torrential rain stopped the final two competitors before they could stop each other.

It was brutal, intimate, and strange. It was also one of the most watched ultramarathon events of the year with reportedly 17K concurrent viewers of it’s livestream and over 19.6M searches on TikTok.

But if you were reading iRunFar, listening to Freetrail, or following ultrarunning Instagram, you wouldn’t have known it happened.

The race, the G1M Ultra hosted by supplement brand Bare Performance Nutrition (BPN) and its founder Nick Bare, wasn’t openly dismissed or critiqued by the traditional ultrarunning world. It was simply ignored. Not a race report. Not a social post. Not a mention.

That silence is telling. It’s not just about this one event, it’s about what the sport is becoming. Or more precisely, how many different things it’s becoming at once.

The Backyard Ultra (BYU) format (run a loop every hour, or you’re out) has been quietly growing for years. Invented by Lazarus Lake (of Barkley Marathons fame), it’s part endurance test, part psychological warfare, part community ritual. Everyone runs the same loop. There’s no time cutoff. No set finish line. Only the nagging thought of “Can I keep going?”

It’s simple and sadistic. And it’s having a moment.

Nick Bare and BPN understood that intuitively. Compelled by his recent foray into ultrarunning after the sheen of ‘hybrid athlete’ wore off when everyone with a six-pack became ‘hybrid’, the event was Nick’s way to bring BPN’s ‘Go one more’ motto to life. The race wasn’t strictly a BYU – they made no allusions to it in their marketing and didn’t register it as a BYU, the format seemed to be chosen simply for its brutality and vibes. Yet, it wasn’t simply a brand activation, Nick built it into a fully realised media event. The race was shot beautifully, cut into a documentary, and blanketed across Instagram, and TikTok. Every hour offered a new storyline. Every runner had a personal arc. It was the kind of format that fed the internet’s insatiable appetite for content. Sure the race was largely filled with running influencers, but it was a real test, with real stakes, and tens of thousands of people watched.

And yet the institutions that typically define what “matters” in ultrarunning said nothing. No major outlets covered it. No elite athletes weighed in. It existed entirely outside the sanctioned conversation. That’s both an oversight and a cultural signal, because if this had been a UTMB event, or a golden ticket race, or a breakout win by a rising pro it would have dominated the discourse.

So what happens when something does dominate a discourse, but not through traditional voices? You get what we have now: a visible split in the soul of the sport.

This silence doesn’t mean ultrarunning is broken. But it does reveal a sport that’s quietly, undeniably fragmenting. Not in terms of popularity (ultras are more popular than ever) but in terms of culture. There isn’t one dominant ultrarunning culture anymore, there are several. These streams overlap, but increasingly, they don’t speak to, or even acknowledge, each other.

The G1M Ultra didn’t register in the traditional world because it wasn’t built for it. It wasn’t a legacy race. It didn’t feature elites. It didn’t happen on a course with prestige. It wasn’t “about” performance in the way the sport often defines it.

But for a massive audience, it felt truer to the spirit of endurance than a polished, sponsored finish-line parade in Chamonix ever could. That’s not a knock on UTMB. It’s a signal that the sport is no longer held together by a single definition of legitimacy.

For most of its history, ultrarunning was stewarded by a small group of race directors, journalists, and community leaders. They defined the terms: what counted, what was respected, what got attention. That structure served the sport well for decades. It built a culture that valued humility, suffering, and earned community respect over flash or fame.

But the internet is eroding that centre. Platforms, not publications, now shape who gets seen. Brands can go direct. Athletes can bypass media. And events like G1M Ultra can explode in relevance for some without being seen by others. When a brand outside the scene creates one of the most visible ultra events of the year, and the sport’s institutions say nothing, it’s not just a missed opportunity. It’s a moment of cultural lag. The people defining what matters can no longer keep up with where attention is flowing.

If the G1M Ultra struck a chord with a huge new audience, it also touched a nerve with traditionalists. In forums like r/Ultramarathon, the reaction was sceptical with some commenters dismissing the event as a slick brand campaign masquerading as a legitimate race. Others questioned the calibre of runners or bristled at the influencer-forward presentation.

Whilst this kind of backlash is taste-driven, it reflects a deeper anxiety about what happens when new players rewrite the rules of the sport. To some, BPN’s polish and popularity feel less like innovation and more like invasion. And that tension is exactly the point; the G1M Ultra exposed how fragile the consensus around “real” ultrarunning has become.

The rise of content-driven ultras doesn’t have to mean the fall of traditional ones. There’s space for both. But the refusal to acknowledge this evolution comes at a cost. Silence becomes a form of gatekeeping. And in that silence, a growing segment of runners, especially newer ones, will start asking: Is this sport actually for me? Or do I need to fit a certain mould to belong?

Backyard Ultras offer something powerful in return: a chance to redefine what endurance means. Not in terms of pace or terrain, but in staying power. In resilience. In refusal. For many, that resonates.

Ultrarunning culture is fragmenting in the same way as others are. From an unspoken hierarchy to fluid multiplicity. There are many ways to run long distances. And many ways to tell the sport’s story.

If we had a group chat..

• A keen eyed subscriber spotted that Ford have sponsored a race in Pennsylvania, the Ironstone 100K, through their ‘Bronco Wild Fund’. This is through a dealership, and a quick google shows other trail running events sponsored by Ford dealerships, so I imagine Ford HQ likely have little idea that they’re sponsoring this event, but it wouldn’t be their first foray into ultrarunning as sponsors of Tor De Geants and the Dolomiti Extreme Trail.

• Atreyu, the one-man brand that launched with a subscription model for shoes, has decided to shut up shop, catalysed by the effects of Trump’s Tariffs.

• I didn’t wade into the Black Canyon’s cheating story because it was obvious that Aravaipa made a mistake and they corrected it before it blew out of proportion. But I wholeheartedly agree with most of Canyon Woodward’s stance in this rare in-depth article in Outside Run: “…as elite fields swell, media attention balloons, and sponsorships and prize money grow, the professionalization of these races must be commensurate with the professionalization of the sport itself”. Individual race series’ play a significant role in tightening up their rules, but the intricate politics of trail running (and ITRA’s weakness) makes a standardised understanding of what is right and wrong in professional trail running currently unattainable.