The ‘crazy’ running challenge pushing people to their limits

Source : ABC NEWS

Tim Kacprzak started 2026 with a painfully simple challenge.

Run each day, starting with 1 kilometre, and add another kilometre every 24 hours.

Today is day 80, meaning almost back-to-back marathons for the Geelong ultra runner and sparky — who has taken leave from work to keep up with the monumental runs.

While the daily distance is getting out of hand, the cumulative total is already absurd. 

As of last night, Kacprzak had covered 3,160km — about the same distance as Sydney to Perth — but he’s done it in 10km loops.

“I am a little bit crazy,” he says with a laugh, sitting in the yard of his Bannockburn home near Victoria’s Geelong. 

“I do enjoy these challenges a little bit too much I think.”

Kacprzak, 43, is one of just two athletes still going in the Last One Standing Challenge, from a starting field of 314.

The other is Merlin Gammon, also known as the “Wizard of Run”. 

Gammon, 25, was in the final days of a run from Cape York to Tasmania when he started this fresh challenge. He’s currently running across the Nullarbor alone, towing a cart of his food, water and belongings.

For ultra runners like these, competitiveness tends to be with oneself, rather than the other athletes racing to the finish line.

“I think for me it’s about finding my own limit, and I’m finding that there’s new limits every day,” Kacprzak says.

“It’s got to a point where you’re just holding on because you’re just enjoying it too much … I think I can be the last one standing.”

People looking to push their limits

This is the second year of The Last One Standing challenge.

It’s run by the group Hardcore Harry’s, which formed in 2024 and has since established itself as a platform for fitness challenges “that celebrate effort, grit and growth”.

“You have some challenges which are arguably easy — 10km a day, 5km a day — and then you have challenges that are designed to push people to their limits,” co-founder Ethan Fleming says.

There has been a noticeable increase in the amount of people wanting to take on fitness challenge in recent years, particularly those at the more extreme end.

“In the last few years especially we’ve seen a three-to-four-times growth in the amount of people that take on these challenges, and the level of extreme that they go to the achieve these goals,” Mr Fleming says.

“I think one of the reasons is we do live in a world where there’s so many creature comforts … and I think for people like these people, all these people that want to push themselves, they just want to have an arena where they can find their limits.

‘Why not see how far you can go?’

Perth’s Margie Hadley, 45, is one of Australia’s best ultramarathon runners.

She took up the sport after recovering from cervical cancer a little over a decade ago.

“After cancer I think that just sort of, I decided just to do hard things, and ultra running is one of those hard things that I decided to do,” Hadley says.

Like most who find themselves hooked by ultra running, Hadley is in it for the love of the pain.

Day 76 proved to be Hadley’s limit for The Last One Standing Challenge, when her body simply couldn’t keep it up. Her 2,869km effort was the third longest run of the competitors. 

Her response to why she repeatedly pushes herself to her physical and mental limits is simple.

The “why?” of ultra running is a common question.

For Kacprzak, it’s “the most extreme way to explore the limits of what you can do”.

“I think there’s different levels to pushing beyond your limits, and when you stop at one point you don’t start at the bottom again, you start at that same point that you got to, and then you want to know what’s further, what else can I do?” he says.

“I think a lot of people can learn that they’re capable of a hell of a lot more than what they think they are.”