Medicine Hat's Keith Harder runs personal-best 44 hours as Canada places 9th worldwide
Canada's 15-member team logged a record 830 combined hours at the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship in Sicamous, B.C., beating its own projected finish.
Keith Harder, a Medicine Hat runner who grew up near Maple Creek, set a personal best of 44 hours and 295 kilometres at the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship in Sicamous, B.C. The 41-year-old topped his previous best of 42 hours, achieved while winning the Old Man Backyard Ultra in Lethbridge in 2025, despite dealing with injuries that limited his training in the lead-up to the event.
Canada finished ninth among 67 competing countries, exceeding its 12th-place seeding and posting the country's best-ever result in the team format. The 15-member national squad accumulated 830 total hours of running, 157 hours more than Canada's previous best. The United States won with 1,120 hours, followed by Poland and New Zealand just ahead of Canada.
The Backyard Ultra format requires athletes to complete a 6.7-kilometre loop every hour until only one runner remains able to continue, with national totals determined by combined completed loops. Canada's Michael Serani of Kelowna was the team's last runner standing at 82 hours, while Michael Rouleau of Sudbury, Ont., finished at 81 hours. Harder ended his race at 1 a.m. Pacific time.
Harder said the camaraderie among Canadian teammates, who hailed from across the country, stood out as much as the individual results, recalling how runners adjusted their own pacing to help a teammate struggling with knee pain keep going.
Compiled by the Alberta Daily Desk — an AI-written summary of reporting from the credited sources below, produced and reviewed under our editorial policy.