The Last Lap: Ello’s Extraordinary Run to Second at The Last Soul Backyard Ultra

Ninety-Three Hours, and Then a Cornfield

Ayyoub “Ello” El Osrouti didn’t win The Last Soul Backyard Ultra. He ran 623.7 kilometres to make sure nobody else could either.

On Tuesday, in a forest in Lower Saxony, Mark Dowdle ran his 94th lap in under fifty minutes, came back to the corral, and waited.

Somewhere behind him, Ayyoub “Ello” El Osrouti had stopped moving. He had been circling the same 6.706-kilometre loop since Friday afternoon — ninety-three hours, four days, no real sleep, on an Achilles tendon that had been failing him since the third night. He tried to walk it in. The hour ran out. He lay down in a cornfield at the edge of the course, and The Last Soul Backyard Ultra was over.

Nobody gave him a medal. In the official classification he appears, like every runner who wasn’t Dowdle, as a DNF. He had just covered 623.7 kilometres — about 387 miles, fifteen marathons back to back — and produced the second-best backyard performance by a German athlete in history.

The cruelty is arithmetic

For anyone new to the format: everyone starts the same loop on the hour, every hour. Finish inside sixty minutes and your reward is whatever minutes are left over — to eat, to tape your feet, to lie down — before the bell sends you out again. Miss the hour, or fail to answer the bell, and you’re out.

There is no distance to complete. There is no clock to beat. The race continues until one runner completes a lap nobody else can, which produces the format’s defining strangeness: the winner cannot finish until the runner in second place breaks.

Dowdle’s 94 laps exist only because Ello kept getting up 93 times.

The pace is never the problem. Under seven kilometres in an hour is a brisk walk for athletes at this level. The problem is that the reward for finishing is another one, at 3 a.m., on the fourth night, and the only thing that ends it is a body finally refusing.

The man who came back

Ello, 27, from Wuppertal, arrived with unfinished business. At the inaugural Last Soul in October 2025 he was the last man standing alongside race founder Kim Gottwald. After 67 laps and 448.9 kilometres, an inflamed Achilles forced him off.

He stopped voluntarily, handing Gottwald victory in the race Gottwald had built.

Ten months later, the same tendon. German coverage tracked it flaring again from the third day onward. He kept answering the bell anyway.

He was not short of expertise in his corner. German preview coverage identified his coach as Sam Harvey, the New Zealander who in June 2025 went to 118 laps at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland before Phil Gore edged him with the 119 that still stands as the world record. If anyone understands the specific arithmetic of being the second-last runner alive, it is Harvey.

Attrition

A field of 169 started. What happened to it is the best measure of what Ello endured.

Harvey Lewis — twice a Badwater winner, a former world-record holder at 108 laps — arrived less than three weeks after his fifteenth consecutive Badwater finish and stopped at 46, his legs never having left Death Valley.

Caroline Maria Bolte, in the first backyard ultra she had ever entered, reached 52 and broke the German women’s record as last woman standing.

Hendrik Boury, who holds the German national record at 100 laps, went out at 68 — one lap past the total that had won the entire race the previous year.

By lap 69 the front of the race was settled: Dowdle, Ello, and Norman Mascher-Aspensjö, the reigning German 24-hour champion, whose previous backyard best was 38 laps.

On Monday evening, 77 hours in, all three were still moving, 516.4 kilometres deep. During lap 79 Mascher-Aspensjö told a course camera he had tried and could no longer run — then finished the lap in about 56 minutes and went out for another. He made 80.

Then there were two, and close to a hundred thousand people watching a livestream of two men walking in circles through a German forest.

The fourth night

What the last two did next had never been done in the country. No backyard ultra held on German soil had passed 90 laps; the previous mark had stood since 2022.

Dowdle and Ello went through it together.

Ello covered lap 91 in 43:07. Ninety-one hours into the race, on a damaged tendon, he ran a sub-44-minute loop.

Dowdle, for his part, spent the closing laps roaring into the trees — at one point yelling “I want more, more, more, more!” into the dark, and aiming a piece of crude gamesmanship at Ello’s own crew.

Ello, by the account of reporters watching the stream, simply smiled and kept moving. Ninety hours in, that composure is arguably harder than the running.

The last morning

By the final hours he was walking long stretches, forcing himself back into a running rhythm, and still making the bell — lap after lap, always getting home, never with much to spare.

Lap 94 was the one that didn’t come. Dowdle ran it fast and clean. Ello went out, and this time the tendon was done negotiating.

He stopped on the path. The minutes went. He walked what he could, then he couldn’t do that either, and he lay down in a field at the edge of the course while the hour expired around him.

Afterwards Dowdle thanked him for pushing them both past their limits, which is the only honest reading of it.

Why second isn’t losing

The scoreboard says Dowdle 94, Ello 93, and the record books say DNF. That is the convention, and the convention is a poor description of what happened.

Ello ran 26 laps further than he ever had. He turned a 67-lap personal best into 93. He dragged the German-soil record for this format four laps beyond where it had sat for four years, and he did it while co-writing another man’s best-ever race — because a backyard ultra winner is, in a real sense, a joint production.

Dowdle needed someone willing to go to hour 93 with him. Almost nobody is.

Endurance isn’t one heroic effort. It’s ninety-three separate decisions to stand up and start again, each one made with worse information and less of yourself than the last.

Ello made all ninety-three.

The ninety-fourth was made for him, in a cornfield, by a tendon that had finally filed its objection — and there is no version of that story where he lost.