Going loopy in Big's Backyard

Is Lazarus Lake an evil madman, or a master storyteller? I can't quite decide

It’s funny how some ultra marathons manage to somehow wheedle their way into your consciousness, and then bam, suddenly you’re hooked on live updates, tweets, watching dots moving across a map. It tends to happen with the longest races, such as The Spine, or the Barkley Marathons. Someone on WhatsApp will say, “hey, have you seen …” or you’ll see something on Instagram, and you check it out, and before you know it, you’re invested. A long ultra marathon has a powerful narrative, a slow-burn plot with multiple twists and turns; a story of survival and perseverance. And the master storyteller is of course Lazarus Lake.

And so it was, last week, that I found myself logging in to the live stream of another of his creations: Big’s Backyard Ultra.

Most of the time the stream was incredibly dull: a shot of some trees with an occasional sighting of a runner passing by, like a bear caught passing on a night vision camera left out in the woods.