Helping a mate move house, buying them lunch or offering to look after their kids (fur babies included) are all good and admirable things to do, but would you run an extra 127.3 kilometres to lend someone a hand? 

If you’re John Pearson, the answer is yes. 

The inaugural Dead Cow Gully Backyard Ultramarathon last weekend saw Pearson run his own 160 kilometres (that’s 100 miles if you’re a Proclaimer) before almost doing that all over again to help lead runner Ryan Crawford keep going for the Australian Backyard Ultra record. 

Because if no one else is out on the trail in a Last One Standing event, it’s game over.

So what exactly is a Backyard Ultra and why are people running around dead cows?

If the traditional blue and white paper face masks are cramping your style, here's an easy way to make your very own nose and mouth cover without the need for a sewing machine. 

This pattern takes about an hour to make from start to finish, so can be smashed out in just one sitting of Married at First Sight, or with six Bluey episodes playing in the background. 

I am notorious for not exactly having an eye for detail (I am a strong advocate of the 'good enough' movement). If you're anything like me, this mask pattern can be done without any precision whatsoever- it is very forgiving. 

If you're ready to dazzle with your muzzle, head out to your local fabric store, grab 1/2 metre of a fun pattern, and prepare to turn heads. 

Fresh out of lockdown, I had another very fun chat with Kyrin from the Mere Mortals Podcast before we took to the trails on a run together. In this episode we talk about pot noodle, how to dig a hole, and other - deep - topics.

​And Kyrin wears a fan.

Timeline:
​0:00​ - Eating, drinking & running
1:46​ - 'Born to Run' book and barefoot running
6:20​ - Road running vs trail running
13:14​ - Zone 2 training
16:18​ - Fasting and free time
19:51​ - Run-walking 21:38​ - Powerwalking (also known as racewalking)
24:43​ - Eating during an ultramarathon
27:00​ - Rural living on a farm
32:26​ - Psychological benefits of living rural
35:16​ - Screen time for kids
​39:30​ - Climbing trees and digging holes

Three years ago I signed up to my first running event since cross country at high school (which I totally didn't sign up for but was pretty happy about getting out of biology that week). That event was 4.2km long. 

In the lead up to that particular run, I'd recently had a baby, was floundering in feeling good about myself and knew I needed to change things up so that I wasn't just existing through life, but actually enjoying it again. Ironically, an activity that (let's face it) feels hard and crap a lot of the time you're in the middle of it, was key for this to happen. 

Fast forward to this year, and I've just completed a 100km Guzzler Ultramarathon. While there were many, many challenging moments in the 23 hours it took me to complete the course which included 4,270km of elevation (that's half of Mt Everest witout a Sherpa), at no point in this run can I honestly say that I felt sad, angry, or resentful. I felt tired, I felt my blisters pop in my shoes, I couldn't actually feel half of my toes and I didn't feel excruciatingly joyous at all times, but I never once felt down in the dumps. 

The runner's high is real, and even more so after traversing river crossings, stopping for ice blocks, and making friends with equally crazy people looking to go the distance on their own two feet- cars be dammed. 

To give you an idea of what you can also have a crack at if you want an excuse to eat family-sized chocolate slabs while running and finish off with triple cheeseburgers five days in a row for breakfast, take a look at the journey below, condensed into just over a minute.

And one more thing I learned through this whole experience- 100km events aren't ever 100km. I actually had to complete a bonus 7km to reach the finish line, but that was just fine. Otherwise I would have only justified double-cheeseburgers.

For those that haven't listened to the Mere Mortals Podcast before, it's great banter from a couple of local Brisbanites chatting about a whole range of life-enhancing topics such as mindset, book reviews, and fitness. 

I was lucky enough to natter away with Kyrin in a recent conversations episode where we talked about a lot of the above actually.

If my golden nuggets on life aren't enough for you to tune in to the Mere Mortals Podcast or YouTube channel, there are some other really interesting locals doing great things that the guys have spoken to in recent months. But if you do want to know about eating cake while running, watch on below.  

Timeline:
0:00​ - Introduction
1:53​ - Tanya's MMM
4:09​ - Going from no running to ultra marathons
14:51​ - The mental process while running
20:08​ - Barefoot running & the run-walk method
25:53​ - Australian Foodie
30:02​ - Separating the creative and financial
36:16​ - The Broccoli Volcano
42:21​ - Optimism and struggling with postpartum depression
46:33​ - Getting out the demons vs reinforcing positivity
50:21​ - Anti-goal setting: living in the moment
53:54​ - Impactful & influential books
​1:00:50​ - Going within and accepting contradictions

​Some people say they’re such bad cooks they burn water.

I firmly believe anyone can cook from scratch if they just get a little bit excited about what they’re going to make and they find an easy recipe.  

Beer damper had three ingredients, and one of them is beer. 

Now that’s freakin’ exciting! 

Forget Nigella, let’s all turn Nigel for a few minutes and make breakfast together. With a drink in hand. 

Fun fact for your next trivia night: Banana Bread is one of the most searched-for recipes according to Google.

Recently, I (like everyone else apparently) had an oversupply of bananas that were going brown faster than I could sell them as a snack to a four-year-old.

Looking at my squshy, brown fruit, I decided that if bananas can be a bread, they can also have an Aussie spin to them and become damper.

​And they can be caramelised too. 

This caramelised banana damper was legit one of the best things to come out of my oven.

​Let's put it into yours. 

​While Vegemite on toast is uncontroversially part of my morning routine, Vegemite spaghetti has become a bit of a weeknight staple at the dinner table.  

This is controversial. 

But when a mate said he had a crack at making this for his kids and that it was actually good, I couldn’t resist the lure of a quick, easy dinner recipe with the added benefits of a vitamin-enriched ingredient that had only ever known bread as its carb-friend. 

Dinner now puts the rose in every cheek. 

My knowledge of native fruits is rudimentary at best. So much so that I initially thought a native gardenia tree that was sprouting fruit was some form of strange variant of the citrus family.

It's not. 

Native gardenias (sometimes under the alias of a Yellow Mangosteen) are currently abundant at Bunnings and other garden nurseries in the lead up to Spring, but what should you do with the round fruit once it blossoms and blooms?

Make chocolate truffles, that's what. 

​Recently a group of us got to talking to the groundskeeper at work and unearthed a plethora of information on native fruits and veggies including some key intel on what we could and couldn’t eat. 

Hint: we can actually eat quite a few things we walk past everyday without usually batting an eyelid at. But not Nightshade. Don't try that. 

Bruce the groundskeeper is the first to admit he’s not book-smart, which not many other people working at a University are keen to put their hand up to. What Bruce does know about the environment and horticulture though from his lived experience could fill at least five PhD theses. 

One overgrown shrub of particular interest was the native raspberry bush (or Rubus Probus for the learned groundspeople among us). Loads of thorns protect the little bundles of berry bursts from hungry animals, but we were able to pick the fruit quite easily with only a few surface scratches as payment for our haul. 

What should we do with a whole heap of native raspberries? Apart from stand there and gorge ourselves silly?

Let's try topping a choc-peanut butter smoothie bowl with them.