Perth ultra-marathon champion Phil Gore almost killed himself for the kids of Telethon after pushing his body through an agonising six days of continuous running that left him in hospital needing emergency surgery.

Determined to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for sick children across WA through his Project 168 challenge — an attempt to run a 6.7km lap every single hour for 168 consecutive hours — Gore refused to stop even as his body began to break down.

By the time he reached his 152nd hour, the sheer physical toll caught up with him on the course, forcing him to scramble against the clock in absolute agony.

“To be honest, it’s a bit of a blur. I don’t remember anything being wrong until lap 152,” Gore said.

He remembered reaching the halfway mark in just over 30 minutes, but the second half of the course proved brutal.

“The first half of the course was a lot easier than the second half, so the second half had hills and trail and I was already fatigued from the first half anyway,” he said.

“So I kind of thought that I wasn’t going to finish that lap. But I didn’t just stop there and then. I’m like, I’ve got to keep pushing. I got to keep trying.”

Messaging ahead to his crew saying “just be prepared just in case,” Gore refused to throw in the towel, somehow finishing the lap with just two minutes to spare.

With only 120 seconds to rest, he stood back up for lap 153.

“I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was going to finish lap 153, but I just thought I’ve got to try. I’ve got to start and see how far I can get,” Gore said.

“Which ultimately wasn’t very far. It was about just over a kilometre when mathematically there was no way I was going to finish the lap in time and the pain in my leg had just got too great that I couldn’t really take too many more steps.

“I just collapsed on the side of the road and got scooped up and put back in the car.”

What Gore initially dismissed as a sore muscle quickly spiralled into a medical nightmare once he got home.

“That night, sleep was shocking, like I was in a lot of pain, you know, waking up in sweats, and I just thought, ‘oh, that’s normal’,” Gore said.

But after five straight nights of waking up in cold sweats, the pain escalated to a breaking point nearly a week after the event.

“The pain in my leg had gotten significantly worse. I’ve called the physio and he recommended that I go to the emergency . . . in triage, the nurse asked me like, what level of pain am I in? And I normally have a very high pain tolerance. But I was like, ‘yes, this is a 10’,” he said.

After a frustrating ordeal being transferred between hospitals — where he was sent home after the injury was misdiagnosed as a simple haematoma — Gore trusted his gut and sought out a sports doctor for a second opinion.

“I didn’t have a good gut feeling about it,” he said.

When the specialist attempted to drain the swelling, expecting blood, he instead found pus from a dangerous, hidden infection.

“He’s going, ‘OK, this isn’t good, we’ve got to send you to ER’,” Gore said.

Rushed straight to Fiona Stanley Hospital, surgeons cut his leg open in emergency surgery to drain 500 millilitres of fluid, inserting a drainage tube to collect another 70 millilitres over the following days to save his leg.

Despite suffering through severe fever, multiple hospital admissions and emergency surgery to pull off the feat, Gore has absolutely zero regrets about putting his body on the line for Telethon.

“I don’t have any regrets about the event,” Gore said.

“I wanted to push myself to my limit. If I’d got to 168 and stopped, I wouldn’t have found what that limit is. So, yeah, I found my limit.”

His incredible sacrifice paid off in a massive way for WA families, with Project 168 raising more than $291,000 — a total expected to top $300,000 before the Telethon weekend ends.

“That 300,000 has just been made up of people putting in $5 or $10,” Gore said, noting that donations flooded in from every continent on Earth as people watched his live stream.

For Gore, the ultimate reward came on the track when he got to run alongside the children directly benefiting from the fundraising.

“Telethon actually got involved in coming down to the event and bringing kids down who have directly benefited from Telethon, so to be able to run with these kids . . . you can see it right there, like who it’s helping,” he said.

Now facing a slow and cautious recovery that has forced him to pull out of upcoming major races like the Backyard Satellite Championship, Gore is taking the enforced rest in stride by catching up on movies.

Though he will need to consult with sports doctors before attempting such extreme distances again, his spirit remains completely unbroken, and he is already eyeing a return to official backyard ultras next year to see if he can push past his 152-lap benchmark once his leg fully heals.