Born from the Wild: Inside the Tarkine Wild Pack Elite Team
There is a moment, somewhere deep in the Australian night, when the body has long since stopped cooperating and the mind takes over entirely. The trail beneath your feet might be the Bibbulmun Track threading through jarrah forest, or the Larapinta reaching across central Australia's red rock silence, or a 6.706-kilometre loop in rural Queensland that you have run — by the time you stop — one hundred and nineteen times. In that moment, the shoe on your foot is not just equipment. It is a covenant.
Tarkine, Australia's only running shoe company, was built for exactly that moment. Founded in South Fremantle, Western Australia, by Ross Johnson and Sam Burke — both runners, both fed up with an industry that treated shoes as disposable fashion and athletes as marketing vehicles — Tarkine set out to make something different. Something that meant something. The company took its name from the takayna / Tarkine wilderness in northwest Tasmania: Australia's largest temperate Gondwanan rainforest, a place of staggering ecological and archaeological significance, and a place under constant, grinding threat from mining and logging interests. This was not a branding decision. It was a declaration of intent.
That intention extended, in time, to the athletes who would wear the shoes. When Tarkine began assembling what it called the Wild Pack — its elite athlete program — the criteria were never simply about podiums. The team it has built is now among the most remarkable collections of endurance athletes in the Southern Hemisphere: mountaineers and marathon runners, 24-hour specialists and backyard ultra obsessives, iron-distance triathletes and track-turned-trail converts. From Perth to Queensland, from central Australia to the peaks of Italy, from the canyon country of Utah to the alpine ridgelines above Melbourne, the Wild Pack stretches across every terrain and every discipline that honest, purposeful movement can inhabit.
What binds them is not a shoe size or a sponsorship clause. It is something harder to manufacture.
A Name That Carries Weight
The takayna / Tarkine covers roughly 477,000 hectares of northwest Tasmania. It is one of the largest areas of Gondwanan rainforest remaining on Earth, a landscape shaped by forces that predate the Australian continent as we know it, home to species found nowhere else on the planet. Its rivers run dark with tannins. Its tree ferns grow taller than houses. Its Aboriginal heritage reaches back more than 35,000 years, making it one of the most significant archaeological landscapes in the world.
It is also, persistently, under threat. Mining exploration licences have been sought across its boundaries. Logging has carved at its edges. The fights to protect it have been ongoing for decades, waged by conservationists, scientists, traditional owners, and ordinary Australians who understand, at some visceral level, that some places are irreplaceable.
When Ross Johnson and Sam Burke named their company after this wilderness, they were not reaching for romance. They were making a promise — that every shoe sold, every athlete supported, every race run in Tarkine gear would be, in some small way, an argument for the value of wild places. The company built its shoes with eco-friendly materials, rejected the planned obsolescence that drives fast-fashion footwear, and sought partners who understood that performance and purpose are not opposites. They had spent more than a decade building Runner's Tribe, one of Australia's most respected running media publications. They understood the sport from the inside. And what they saw in the shoe industry troubled them: a multinational-dominated, trend-chasing market that treated athletes as consumers and the environment as an afterthought.
Tarkine was the answer they chose to give. The Wild Pack is the human expression of that answer.
The Last One Standing
To understand Phil Gore, you first need to understand the backyard ultra — a format so philosophically strange, so deliberately cruel, that it seems almost designed to reveal character rather than simply test fitness.
The backyard ultra was invented by Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, the Tennessee eccentric also responsible for the Barkley Marathons, a race so deliberately brutal that finishing it — not winning, simply finishing — is considered one of endurance sport's great achievements. In the backyard ultra, every hour on the hour, competitors must complete a loop of exactly 6.706 kilometres. Twenty-four loops equals exactly 100 miles. The race has no predetermined distance. It ends when only one competitor remains. Everyone else, by definition, does not finish. There are no silver medals. There is one winner and there are quitters — and “quitter” includes anyone who simply runs out of body before they run out of will.
Phil Gore, a Western Australian and a Tarkine athlete, won the 2025 Backyard Ultra World Championship in Tennessee, running 114 laps across nearly five days. Then, on 26 June 2025 at Dead Cow Gully, Queensland, he went further. With assistance from Sam Harvey of New Zealand, Gore completed 119 consecutive loops — 795.9 kilometres in total — setting the men's world record, now confirmed on the Wikipedia page for the backyard ultra format. The mathematics are almost incomprehensible: 119 hours of running, roughly five days, a distance that covers the length of Tasmania twice. Gore did not simply win those events. He redefined what the format could ask of a human body.
Joel Sexton offers a different perspective on the same obsession. Sexton won his first backyard ultra at only his second attempt, recording a 59-yard personal best and earning selection for the Australian national team at the 2024 Backyard Ultra World Satellite Championships. Where Gore is the established master, Sexton represents the format's next generation — a runner who arrived almost fully formed, as if the backyard ultra had been waiting specifically for him.
The Wild Pack's reach in this format extends beyond Australian borders. Daniele Lissoni, an Italian member of the team, won the 2025 Backyard Ultra of Livata after 60 hours of competition and claimed the 2024 Italian Backyard Ultra after 73 hours. He races under the Italian national flag. His presence in the Wild Pack is a statement: the patience, the stubbornness, the refusal to stop that defines Tarkine's spirit translates across hemispheres and languages.
Running for More Than the Finish Line
In 2023, Erchana Murray-Bartlett ran 155 consecutive marathons. From Cape York — the northernmost tip of Queensland — to Melbourne. Through heat and rain, through injury and exhaustion, through the internal negotiations that define any truly long endeavour. She ran to raise money for the Wilderness Society and to draw attention to Australia's extinction crisis, a crisis that is quieter than a bushfire and more devastating than any single disaster. Tarkine supported her.
Murray-Bartlett had narrowly missed selection for the Tokyo Olympics — an experience that would have broken lesser athletes. Instead, she redirected the same engine that drives marathon performance toward something that felt, to her, more urgent. Her message was straightforward: extinction is a choice. The species disappearing from Australia's landscapes are not vanishing because of inevitability. They are vanishing because of decisions — about land use, about conservation funding, about what we choose to protect. Running 155 marathons was, among other things, an argument that those decisions can be made differently. It was also the kind of physical undertaking that forces bystanders to reckon with the question: what would you do 155 times for something you believed in?
It is not coincidental that Tarkine — a brand named after one of Australia's most endangered wilderness areas — chose to stand beside her.
Kieron Douglass carries the same philosophy in his DNA. Douglass ran for four years in Asics shoes and two years in Hoka shoes before making a deliberate switch to Tarkine — not because someone offered him a deal he could not refuse, but because he looked at what the company stood for and decided it matched who he was. Douglass is a conservationist. He has received an Australia Day Award for his environmental work. He races distances between 100 and 350 kilometres across Queensland, including a 10:52 finish at the Sunshine Coast 100km. His relationship with Tarkine is not transactional. It is ideological. In a world where athlete-sponsor relationships are often reduced to logo placement and social media obligations, Douglass represents something rarer: genuine alignment between a person and a brand, built on shared values rather than shared interests.
The Science of Suffering
Shane Johnstone came to ultra running with credentials that most athletes do not carry onto the trail. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Sport Science and a Masters degree in Occupational Rehabilitation. He is an Exercise Physiologist. He also co-created Transcend Trails, one of Australia's premier trail running events — meaning he has built the very courses he competes on and understands the physiological demands of ultra distance with a precision that borders on clinical.
As a UTMB competitor with multiple Australian national ultra-distance records, Johnstone represents the Wild Pack's intellectual dimension: the understanding that endurance performance is not merely about willpower, but about the complex interplay of biomechanics, nutrition, recovery, psychology, and terrain management. In a sport where intuition and science intersect, he lives at that intersection. He is, in a very real sense, both the experiment and the researcher.
Mikaela Kelsall brings a different kind of scientific credential: the iron distance. In 2025, Kelsall went sub-10 hours at IRONMAN Western Australia, having finished 4th female at the same event the previous year. She also finished 13th female at Transcend Ultra 65km in 2024. The crossover from iron-distance triathlon to trail ultra running is not as clean as it might appear. The two sports demand different muscular patterns, different mental models, different relationships with terrain and pacing. Kelsall is navigating that transition at the elite level, bringing an aerobic engine built across open water, tarmac, and saddle to the dirt trails and rocky switchbacks of Western Australia's wilderness.
Wild Terrain, Wild Hearts
Joel Gray knows the Bibbulmun Track the way some people know a home street. He finished first at the Run Bibbulmun Track Stage Race — 107 kilometres across some of southwest Western Australia's most beautiful and demanding terrain. He then translated that strength to the desert, winning the 2025 Delirious WEST 100 Mile, one of Australia's most respected ultra events. Gray is a 100-mile specialist in the truest sense: he does not simply survive the distance, he owns it.
Brendan Verrier's story runs through darker territory before it arrives at victory. In 2017, Verrier suffered a serious concussion that sidelined him for two years. The rebuilding process — neurological, physical, psychological — is the kind of thing that ends running careers. Instead, it preceded back-to-back victories at the West Mac Monster 65km in 2023 and 2024, a race that traverses the Larapinta Trail in central Australia, a landscape so ancient and so severe that it seems to be testing runners on behalf of the continent itself. Verrier won it twice in succession. The story of how he got there matters as much as the wins themselves.
James Bland has accumulated a record that stretches from Australia to New Zealand and onto the world stage. First at You Yangs 100km in 2025. Third at Wilsons Prom 100km. Fourth at The Spectacle 100 mile. A UTMB 100 Miler finisher. A Western States silver buckle. First male South Island 100km. Top ten at Tarawera 100 mile, one of the most prestigious ultra events in the Asia-Pacific. Bland is the kind of athlete who appears on start lists across multiple countries and is always, somehow, near the front. He races with the efficiency of someone who has made peace with discomfort.
Jordan Nukz finished 6th at Harry's King of the Hill — an event that involved 51 hours of racing and 15,300 metres of vertical gain — which alone would qualify as a career highlight for most runners. He also won The Guzzler Ultra 100km, finished 14th at Tarawera 163km in the UTMB series, and claimed first place at the 2023 Brisbane Trail Ultra 110km. Nukz operates at the intersection of climbing and distance, equally at home in vertical metres as in flat kilometres.
Ben Leeson's 2025 season was the kind that announces a shift from promising to established. He won the Feral Pig Ultra 100km, dominated the Margaret River Ultra Marathon 42km trail, finished runner-up at Transcend Ultra 65km, and placed 7th at the XTERRA Snowdonia Trail Marathon World Championships in Wales. That final result — competing against the international elite on a mountain in northern Wales — confirmed what the domestic results had been suggesting all year. Leeson has range, and he is only beginning to find its edges.
The Women Rewriting the Record Books
Christie Lori had one of the most complete single-year performances in Australian trail running in 2024. She set the Cape to Cape Track Female Supported FKT. She finished first at The Guzzler Ultra 105km and first at Transcend Ultra 65km. She finished second female at Ultra Trail Kosciuszko 161km, one of the crown jewels of Australian trail running and part of the global UTMB series. Four elite results across four completely different events, covering everything from coastal track terrain to alpine exposure. There is no terrain template for Lori. She adapts, and she adapts fast.
Dannielle Vanderheul holds course records on the Heysen 105 Trail Ultra: 5:29:36 for the 50km segment and 2:30:48 for the 28km. She won the Tower Trail Run 56km and finished 4th at the 2025 Australian Mountain Running Championships. Vanderheul is a trail runner in the classical sense — someone who has spent enough time in the mountains to understand them as an element to work with rather than resist, whose relationship with difficult terrain is built on respect rather than aggression.
Ahnika Lennie is remaking the WA ultra landscape. She finished first female at the Cape2Cape Ultra 50 Mile in 2025, second female at West Macs Monster 65km, and placed in the top 15 at Ultra Trail Kosciuszko 50km in the UTMB series. Her range — from WA coastal trail to alpine technical terrain at Kosciuszko — speaks to a runner who is still expanding her ceiling, and expanding it quickly.
Amy Stockwell trains on the Larapinta Trail in central Australia, which means she trains in one of the most remote and unforgiving environments available to any Australian runner. Her UTMB World Index of 517 reflects consistent high-level performance on the international circuit. Annika Keall, meanwhile, comes from a track background and has found a second running life on WA's trails — a transition that demands patience, a willingness to unlearn pace assumptions, and an entirely different relationship with the ground beneath your feet.
Emma Phillipe is, perhaps, the Wild Pack's most unconventional member. She represented Australia in pole vault at World Youth and Junior Championships between 2013 and 2016, trained alongside Nina Kennedy on a WAIS scholarship, then pivoted to 800 metres, winning multiple WA state titles and recording a personal best of 2:04.35. Now she is a Hyrox Pro, finishing in 1:11:23 at Melbourne solo. Phillipe's athletic career is a study in purposeful reinvention — not abandonment of what she was, but a continuous expansion of what she could become. That restlessness, that refusal to be confined to a single event or identity, is quintessentially Wild Pack.
The Art of the Long Game
Twenty-four hours. For most people, that is simply a day — sleep, wake, eat, work, repeat. For Blaine Bourke and Joe Ward, it is a race distance.
Bourke is the 2024 Australian Men's 24 Hour Ultra Running Champion and a national record holder. He is also the back-to-back champion of the Cut Ultra — a race demanding not merely endurance but the specific kind of mental architecture required to keep moving when the body has been insisting, for hours, that it is finished. The 24-hour format strips running down to its most essential question: not how fast you can go, but how long you can keep going at all. Bourke's answer, backed by a national record, is unambiguous.
Joe Ward answered that same question with 246.5 kilometres at the 2025 Sri Chinmoy 24 Hour event, winning outright. At the 2023 Coburg 24 Hour, he covered 230 kilometres. He holds the C2K 240km course record and has represented Australia at multiple World Championships. In 2026, he is targeting the 24-hour treadmill world record — a challenge that sounds almost absurd until you consider what 246 kilometres in a single day already implies about what he is capable of. Ward is a runner who measures ambition in kilometres rather than podiums.
Matt Gore — brother of Phil, which makes the family's combined record an extraordinary piece of Australian ultra running history — has his own formidable ledger: second at Sydney Ultra Marathons 30km, second at West Macs Monster 128km, second at Ultra Trail Kosciuszko 100km, and first at Hume and Hovell Ultra 100km. Oakie Diggins won his debut 100-mile at Feral Pig 100 Mile in 2024, finished second at Delirious West 100 Mile in 2025, and placed in the top ten at the Grampians Peaks Trail 100 Mile, which serves as the AUTRA 100 Mile National Championships. Brian Lyons, a Tasmanian, brings something that training plans cannot replicate: he won the 2024 Australia Day 100km Ultra and the 2022 Bruny Island 64km on the island that forms the southern boundary of his running world, armed with the kind of local knowledge and grinding patience that defines the best regional ultra runners.
Global Ambition, Australian Roots
Fraser Darcy won the 2025 Australian Mountain Running Championship and then finished 63rd at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships — not a result that generates domestic headlines, but one that represents genuine engagement with the international elite on their own terrain. He also finished third at the Melbourne Marathon in 2:17:38 and placed in the top ten at the Brisbane Trail Ultra 20km Golden Trail Series Final. Darcy is a runner without a fixed identity: mountain runner, road marathoner, trail racer. He moves between disciplines the way the best athletes always have — with curiosity rather than anxiety.
Timberlin Henderson — known widely as Timbo Slice — comes from America. He won the 2023 Canyonlands 100 Mile, the Monument Valley Ultra 50 Mile, and the Arches Ultra 50 Mile, dominating the desert Southwest ultra circuit with results that made international observers pay attention. He finished third at the 2022 Silverton Alpine Ultra. Henderson's presence in the Wild Pack speaks to something Tarkine has understood from its earliest days: that the values this brand represents — environmental respect, authentic performance, genuine connection to wild places — are not specifically Australian. They resonate wherever people run in wild country, regardless of passport.
Petra Fialova is the 2025 XTERRA Asia-Pacific Trail Run Champion. She has three podium finishes at Margaret River Ultra 78.5km and won the Transcend 2025 28km in 2:43:22. Fialova races across the Asia-Pacific region with consistent elite results, adding another international dimension to a team that already stretches across three continents.
Sota Maehara was born in Tokyo, grew up in Phuket, and trains in Perth. He is completing a Masters of Physiotherapy at Notre Dame Fremantle and documents his running life in full on YouTube — the training, the racing, the recovery, the thinking. He won the 2025 Perth Trail Series Collie River Ultra. In a sport that still, too often, fetishises suffering while hiding the work that makes it possible, Maehara makes the work visible. His transparency is not a content strategy. It is a philosophy.
What the Wild Pack Actually Is
It would be easy to read an assembly of results like this and see only numbers: lap counts, finish times, championship titles, course records. But that reading misses the point of what Tarkine has built, and the reason it matters.
Every one of these athletes chose Tarkine. Some, like Kieron Douglass, left larger sponsors to join. Some were drawn by the conservation mission. Some by the quality of the product. Some by the sense that here was a company run by people who actually run — people who understand what a shoe needs to do at 3 a.m. on a mountain trail, who care about what running costs the environment and what it gives back to the soul. None of them were recruited by the conventional machinery of professional athletics sponsorship. They arrived because something resonated.
The takayna / Tarkine wilderness is still under threat. Mining interests still circle its edges. The decisions that will determine its fate are still being made, slowly, in offices and government chambers far from its rivers and its tree ferns and its 35,000 years of human history. Tarkine — the company — cannot protect it alone. But it can ensure that every shoe that leaves South Fremantle carries an argument: that wild places matter, that the people who run in them matter, and that performance and purpose are not, and have never been, in opposition.
The Wild Pack runs in that spirit. Phil Gore completing his 119th loop through the Queensland dark. Erchana Murray-Bartlett running her 155th consecutive marathon into Melbourne. Joel Gray moving through the jarrah and marri of the Bibbulmun. Brendan Verrier returning to the Larapinta after two years rebuilding a damaged brain. Daniele Lissoni still moving through hour 60 in Italy. Timbo Slice crossing the Utah desert. Sota Maehara documenting what it costs and what it gives. All of them, across all their different terrains and disciplines and continents, making the same argument with their feet.
Born from the wild. Proven in the wild.
They are not just athletes. They are evidence.
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