Dave Phillips

Dave Phillips is a British ultrarunner who won the United Kingdom’s national race at the 2026 Backyard Ultra World Team Championship. Racing at Sherwood Pines Forest in Nottinghamshire, he completed 90 yards, about 603.5 km, and was the last runner standing after Matthew Blackburn stopped on 89. In the organizer’s live results at 09:04 UTC on October 21, it was the longest finished national race. The United States, Japan, Belgium and France were still running at 93 yards. The UK team finished with 939 yards.

Phillips came to the championship with very little backyard experience. The official results list him as “Phillips, Dave”, aged 47, and he was selected At-Large for 65 yards at the Suffolk Backyard Ultra Festival in June 2026. He won that race by one yard from Sam Mayhew. DUV and Yardlore, which list him as David Phillips, show no earlier backyard result. Both he and Blackburn went past the 87 yards Yardlore listed as the British men’s best, set by Blackburn at Suffolk in 2024. Sarah Perry’s 95 yards remains the UK record on Big’s official table.

DUV, the ultramarathon statistics database, files the Suffolk win in the same athlete record as a long career in British trail and multi-day racing, under the name David Phillips. No published report we found connects the two, so treat the link as DUV’s. That record includes an outright win at the 268-mile Summer Spine Race in 2023 in 76:59:33, more than 16 hours ahead of second place, and an outright win at the 300 km Northern Traverse in 2024. He was second to Kim Collison at the 2025 Winter Spine Race and set the men’s course record of 12:54:37 at the 82-mile Full Essex Way Ultra that summer. In January 2026 he won Portugal’s 303 km Terra de Gigantes in 40:51:33.