The trade.

On 22 May, Lenny Scheidhauer stands on the start line of the Greenloop Backyard Ultra. Backyard format is the cleanest punishment in the sport: a 6.706 km loop that has to be completed within one hour. Run it, eat in the gap, run again. The clock doesn't care whether the previous loop took you 50 minutes or 59. Whoever can keep doing this longest, wins. Everyone else doesn't finish. There is no podium. There is exactly one survivor, and a list of dropouts.

I'm not on that start line. I'm on the other side of it — the side with the stove, the bottles, the spreadsheet, and the spare socks.

The trade

Lenny and I trained together through the dark months of this year. We're on different arcs. He's chasing the count: how many loops can his body still produce when it has every reason to stop. I'm chasing a single line on a single day: Ironman 70.3 Kraichgau, 31 May. Nine days after Greenloop. Different problem, same currency.

So we made a trade. He crews me at Kraichgau. I crew him at Greenloop. Neither of us said it out loud — it just happened, the way these things do between two people who've shared enough morning runs in the rain. The reciprocity is the contract.

Why I'm not on the start line

I'm not ready for it. That's the honest answer. A backyard ultra isn't a marathon you survive on guts; it's a 24-hour-plus operation that demands you've already done it, in some form, in training. My base mileage isn't there. My gut hasn't been tested past about ten hours. My head has questions I haven't answered yet about hour 30.

The other reason: Kraichgau is nine days later. Even crewing for 24+ hours of someone else running is going to bend my legs and shred my sleep. Lining up with a fresh body for a 1.9 km swim, 90 km bike, 21.1 km run a week after that is already optimistic. Lining up with the residue of a backyard attempt would be self-sabotage.

So I crew. It's the right job for me on this weekend.

What crewing actually is

Outsiders think crewing is sympathetic standing-around. It isn't. Inside the gap between two loops you've got somewhere between forty seconds and ten minutes, depending on Lenny's pace. In that window the runner needs to: rehydrate, take in calories, change anything wet, address whatever's failing on his feet, sit briefly, stand up, and walk back to the corral. The crew runs the operation. The runner runs the loop.

What I'm tracking, on paper, in real time:

• Calories per loop. Target intake stays constant; the form it arrives in changes. Hour two is gels. Hour twelve is real food, ideally salty. Hour twenty is whatever he can keep down. I'm logging every gram so we know, at hour 24, whether we've fueled him to that point or starved him to that point.
• Fluid + electrolytes. Different bottle prep depending on temperature, sweat rate, current GI tolerance. The cooler is sorted by hour, not by drink type.
• Sleep / horizontal time. If a backyard attempt goes overnight, micro-sleeps in the gap become a tool. You don't really sleep — you give the eyes a few minutes shut and the legs a few minutes off. I'm tracking when, how long, and how he came out of each.
• Gear changes. Two pairs of shoes minimum, multiple sock rotations, a spare top in case it rains. Pre-staged so the gap doesn't become a packing problem.

None of this is heroic. All of it is engineering, run from a folding chair next to a cooler.

The mental side, from the outside

The runner is alone with their suffering. The crew is alone with the runner's suffering. That's a different job entirely.

By hour eighteen the conversation in the gap is no longer about strategy. It's about whether to start the next loop. The runner's brain at that point is a courtroom where the prosecution has all the good lines: your knee is louder, the temperature is dropping, the field is thinning, this is enough, you've already done well. The crew is the only voice for the defence.

The crew's job in those moments isn't motivation in any pep-talk sense. Telling someone at hour eighteen that they "got this" is an insult to what they're actually doing. The job is operational: Here's your bottle. Your last loop was 51 minutes. You've got nine to eat and three to walk back. Sit down for two of them. Frame the next hour as a loop, not as the rest of the race. Keep the timeline pinned to the next sixty minutes, not to a finish that doesn't exist by definition.

The mistake new crews make is over-talking. Lenny doesn't need a speech. He needs his bottle to be ready when his hand opens for it.

What I'm planning to take away

I'm crewing for him, but I'm also auditing him. He'll be doing for 24+ hours what I'm asking my body to do for ~5 hours nine days later: hold a steady output past the point at which everything in your head wants you to stop. The forms are different — distance versus time, multi-discipline versus monorhythmic — but the core problem of staying in the loop when you don't want to is the same.

By Sunday morning I'll have watched a friend make that decision twenty-four times in a row. I want to see what holds up under that. Which strategies survive hour twenty. What fueling actually works when the GI is tired. How he talks to himself in the gap. What he says yes to, what he says no to. That data — earned by his suffering, not mine — is going to be in my head when the wheels start to come off in the run leg at Kraichgau the following weekend.

Endurance is a team sport, badly disguised

The sport markets itself as solitary. The image is one runner, one finish line, one personal achievement. That image is a useful fiction. It sells well, it photographs well, and it's not how it actually works.

What actually works: a coach who lays out the season, training partners who show up at six in the morning so you do too, a partner who tolerates four-hour Saturday rides, a physio who keeps the chain together, a crew on the day. Endurance racing is a team performance whose score happens to be assigned to one person. Treating that as a problem is amateur. Treating it as the whole point is the move.

So: on the 22nd, I'll be standing behind a folding chair with a logbook and a thermos. On the 31st, Lenny will be standing at a fence somewhere on the Kraichgau bike course with a bottle and the same logbook. We're not really doing two separate races. We're doing one long thing, with two finish lines, in two different roles.

The trade is fair. The trade is the point.

Greenloop Backyard Ultra · 22 May 2026 · I'll write up the actual race after the fact. This was a note from the week before.