By Nate Weitzer
After 64 hours of running 3.5-mile loops in the woods outside Conway, New Hampshire, none of the five remaining participants at Bubba’s Backyard Ultra had any intentions of quitting.
A pair of participants had stopped after 40 laps, leaving Conor Brown, Mike Conley, Ryan Hunter, Katie Melsky, and Corin Kwasnik to endure pain, discomfort, and sleep deprivation while pushing past the 53-hour course record and grinding into uncharted territory during a third night at the rugged event. For 24 hours, the final five ran laps on Jim “Bubba” Drummond’s property in Center Conway, wondering who would be the first to throw in the towel.
Backyard ultras require runners to complete a lap every hour, on the hour, until only one participant is willing to complete one more lap to become the sole finisher. Everyone else receives a DNF (did not finish) for their efforts. The official course length for backyard ultras is 4.167 miles, so that every 24 laps equates to 100 miles. The Bubba’s course is shorter, but the terrain is technical, challenging, and often muddy.
With a stacked field and perfect running conditions, the eighth year of Bubba’s was bound to raise the bar, but the commitment of the final five runners surprised just about everyone, including themselves.
“We were in uncharted waters and I think at that point nobody wanted to quit,” said Conley, who timed out after running 252 miles over 72 laps. “It didn’t really feel like a competition against each other. We’d all talk about how far we could go, and it was fun talking about it [on course].”
The previous October at Bubba’s, Conley (who won Riverlands 100 this May and Firebird 50K this August) decided to stop after 43 laps, finishing tied for fourth with Brown and Erica Notini, who ran 40 laps this year. Regret gnawed at him, Conley explained, because he “quit in a chair” rather than giving everything he had until he failed to run a lap within the hour and the “course took him out.”
Sharing that sentiment, Brown (who set a course record at Jigger Johnson 100 this August and completed 90 laps at the inaugural Ascutney Vertical Ultra last November) collapsed on lap 65 and timed out. After changing his gait and hobbling through pain for about 30 laps, Hunter failed to make it back on lap 75, placing third with a whopping 259 miles.
That left Kwasnik and Melsky, who set the women’s record with 49 laps last year, to push the envelope.
“I don’t know what else is out there that can push me to this level,” said Kwasnik, a dentist from Waterbury, Vermont, who finished climbing the tallest mountain in all 50 states this past July. “To get that far you need a good assist [the second place finisher in an ultra]. You need a good crew. If there weren’t five of us, I’m pretty confident it wouldn’t have gone that far.”
After setting a new bar last year, and watching Brianna Karboski smash the women’s record at Last Skier Standing in February, Melsky felt plenty of pressure coming into the event, which became amplified when she was handed bib Number 1, designating the returner who did the most laps the previous year.
Melsky dealt with flu-like symptoms at Bubba’s in 2025 and ate almost nothing besides popsicles and cough drops, so after blazing through the Pacific Crest Trail in four months this summer, she knew she was capable of big things.
“The added pressure of trying to break some sort of gender ceiling added a lot, so I was pretty stressed,” Melsky said. “I naturally put some pressure on myself, but I think there was also pressure from other people having seen what I did last year. In a way it’s a privilege to have that pressure. It’s cool to be good at something, but it also adds a lot of stress.”
As they pushed through Tuesday afternoon towards a fourth night, Melsky and Kwasnik grappled with foot and joint pain, but sleep deprivation became the bigger impediment. At other events, participants might be able to catch five to 10 minutes of shuteye between laps, but the final five were coming in with about eight minutes to spare, so they were quite disoriented after multiple sleepless nights.
When event directors Andrew Drummond and Monte McIndoe made the decision Tuesday to disallow pacers (friends could join on laps for most of the event), it left the finalists alone in the woods trying to navigate a course that felt familiar yet disconnected. Volunteers came behind the finalists to ensure their safety, and they reported that Melsky was wandering off course and getting dangerously cold as she pushed through lap 80.
Recounting her hallucinations later, Melsky said every rock looked like a tent, and she wondered if she could use tree branches as blankets to take a nap. She was frequently confused and thought she had to gather items to bring to the finish line for some sort of Adidas scavenger hunt.
The event ended on lap 81 when Melsky became borderline hypothermic and delirious, and Kwasnik finished his loop. While his official tally was 283.5 miles, his watch picked up 299 miles due to additional steps near the start/finish line, and Kwasnik walked an extra 0.7 to round up to 300 miles and help Melsky get back to camp.
“You need everything to go well to push the event further,” said Drummond, owner of White Mountain Ski Co. and co-director of several Run The Whites events. “We always thought this was gonna happen. It was just a matter of when.”
The inaugural Bubba’s in 2019 only had 19 participants and lasted 24 hours. Of the 105 participants this year, over half ran 50 miles, and 30 made it through 24 hours.
“The event just keeps evolving,” Drummond continued. “With each year, it brings more people with ties to different communities. It’s now a staple in this endurance culture. It’s like a reunion of sorts. It’s a way to strengthen the running community across all the states in the Northeast.”
Bubba’s has become popular enough that Kwasnik couldn’t get into the event the past three years. When he got his ticket this year, he decided to warm up with Run Ragged Last One Standing in Connecticut this May, and split the final DNF at 11 p.m. Sunday with the last remaining runner because they both had to work Monday.
Arriving at Bubba’s October 3 with little more than a chair and a cooler, Kwasnik cleared his schedule through Monday. Yet when the event kept going, he had to reschedule his dental patients and arrange for a babysitter for his 15-month-old daughter because his wife, Cassidy, was working an overnight shift at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Thanks to a robust community and the commitment of many star alumni, he adopted support crew for the latter days of the event. Last year’s finisher, Lukas Janulaitis, provided help for Kwasnik, and others who were without crew, from Sunday night through Tuesday.
Along with Janulaitis, nearly every finisher and assist (Ed Clifford, Brian Burke, Danny Mejia, Aaron Copeland, Nathan Lamarre) from past Bubbas’ showed up to help participants.
Clifford finished five times from 2019 to 2023 before hanging it up, and Burke assisted twice in that span. Most finishers have declined to come back, yet almost everyone who comes close to the end of this event is left wondering what they could have done to last just a bit longer.
When her dedicated crew members helped her limp from the finish to a car that would take her home, Melsky briefly crumpled to the ground and took a quick nap. “That was awesome,” she said three days later. “Because then I knew I had nothing more to give. But now a few days later I’m already thinking about the ‘What Ifs.’”
Nate Weitzer is an avid trail runner, backcountry skier, and mountain climber living in North Woodstock, New Hampshire, where he writes for multiple publications. Over the past 20 years he’s thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, climbed Mt. Rainier, Adams, Baker, Hood, and skied off multiple volcanoes. Weitzer has summitted the NH 48 in all four seasons, finished the ADK 46er list while working trail maintenance in the Keene Valley area, and completed the Colorado 14ers over the course of four summers. He’s written about the inaugural White Mountains 100 and ultrarunner Lexi Jackson for Northeast Explorer.
