Barkley Marathons: What the race only 15 people have finished is like

In
Frozen Head State Park, runners from around the world line up
before the Barkley Marathons co­founder, Lazarus
Lake.
Courtesy: “The Barkley
Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young”

• The Barkley Marathons is a mysterious ultramarathon
  held every year in a state park in Eastern Tennessee.
• Runners have to complete five loops of a 20-mile course
  that most say is really 26 miles, making the race somewhere
  between 100 and 130 miles in total.
• The elevation and descent in the race mean that
  finishers do the equivalent of climbing and descending Everest
  twice.
• Since 1989, only 15 people have finished the
  race.

For a runner who tries to enter the Barkley Marathons, one thing
is certain: they have almost no chance of finishing.

The first Barkley race was held in 1986, but the course distance
was bumped up to at least 100 miles — probably 130 miles,
depending on who you ask — in 1989. Since then, there have only
been 15 finishers.

In 2018, a year with particularly miserable course conditions, no
one finished the race. A runner named Gary Robbins came closest,
completing three of the five loops of the course. In Barkley
parlance, that’s considered a “fun run.”

If ultramarathons are about testing human limits, a race like
Barkley is about confronting the point at which people fail while
facing those limits — or redefining success and failure
entirely. Each of the race’s five “20-mile” loops are really
more like 26 miles, according to most. And the elevation changes
throughout the course mean that finishers experience a total of
120,000 feet of elevation change — the equivalent of climbing and
descending Everest twice, according to a 2014 documentary called
“The Barkley Marathons: The
Race that Eats its Young“. 

Robbins got close to becoming the 16th finisher of the Barkley
race last year, but he arrived at the finish six seconds too
late — to be considered a finisher, runners must complete
the race in 60 hours or less. Upon arrival, Robbins realized he’d
skipped two miles of the course anyway.

Despite these hellish challenges, something draws runners to
Tennessee year after year to endure as much as they can and
almost certainly fail.

Hundreds apply ever year, including the winners of other races
that are considered to be among the most difficult in the world,
like the Hardrock 100.
About 40 people receive a “condolences” letter telling them
they’ve been accepted into the race.

Those letters usually tell racers
that a “bad thing” awaits or to
get ready for “extended period of unspeakable suffering, at
the end of which you will ultimately find only failure and
humiliation.”

A mysterious entry process

Amelia Boone, who works as an attorney for Apple, is a three-time
champion of the World’s Toughest Mudder competition and a Spartan
Race World Champion.

When Boone got her condolences to compete in the 2018 Barkley
Marathons, she was totally surprised — she thought acceptances
had already gone out.

Boone, who’d been getting back into racing after a broken femur
in 2016, wanted to become the first woman to complete the
Barkley. 

“Of the people that tend to run it, everyone is really smart —
there’s a lot of scientists and a lot of really big data geeks,”
Boone told Business Insider. “It’s all these people who really
haven’t failed that much if at all, and they come to this race
that has a 99% failure rate.”

Amelia
Boone in a different competition.
Reebok

No official information about the Barkley marathons is published
or publicly distributed. There’s no website, since nothing about
the race is supposed to be easy — including figuring out how to
enter, a process that’s kept secret.

The creators of the Barkley Marathons, Gary Cantrell (who goes by
the name Lazarus Lake or just Laz) and Karl Henn (who goes by Raw
Dog), intentionally designed it to be surrounded by
secrets. 

Most of the information prospective racers have comes from
accounts by previous runners, of which
there are

plenty online.

Ultrarunner Matt Mahoney, who has attempted the Barkley 15 times
but never finished, explains on his
website that if someone wants to enter, they must get a
person who has run the race before to reveal which day of the
year to send an application to Cantrell. First timers like Boone
need to submit some sort of essay explaining why they should be
allowed to run.

According to reports, once a Barkley “virgin” gets accepted,
the entry fee consists of $1.60 and a license plate from
their home state or country.

Lazarus
Lake, Co­Founder of The Barkley Marathons, hangs one of the
required entry items, a license plate from the runner’s home
state or country.
Courtesy: “The
Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its
Young”

Rumor has it that at least one entry spot each year is cruelly
reserved for a “sacrificial virgin” who has even less chance of
finishing than the rest.

People who have attempted the run the race before reportedly
return for subsequent attempts with a shirt or some socks for
Cantrell as their entry fee.

A course designed to break people

Because of this intentional lack of information, Boone said, “you
really don’t know what it is unless you’re out there.”

“Out there” is how many runners describe it. Ed Furtaw, who goes
by the moniker “Frozen Ed,” was the first runner to finish a
three-loop race in 1988, before Cantrell decided the race should
be five loops. Furtaw wrote a book about the race titled
“Tales
From Out There.”

“Unlike other ultras in which race management and volunteers do
their best to help as many runners as possible finish, Barkley is
intentionally set up to minimize the number of finishers, while
still trying to keep it within the
limits of possibility,” Furtaw wrote in
1996. “Gary keeps making the course tougher when he thinks
too many runners are finishing.”

The hills of Frozen Head have long been renowned for their
difficulty.

In 1977, James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther
King Jr., broke out of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Unlike
the prison walls that hadn’t contained him, the surrounding
terrain did: bloodhounds
found Ray hidden under leaves 54 hours later, just eight
miles from the prison.

Cantrell, who was an ultrarunner in Tennessee before the sport
became as popular as it is now, explained in the “The Barkley
Marathons” documentary that he heard about Ray’s story, and
thought he could cover 100 miles in the time Ray traveled eight.

So Cantrell decided to create a race through Frozen Head State
Park.

Courtesy:
“The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its
Young”

The theoretically 20-mile course loop runs through terrain
features that Cantrell and others have given nicknames like
Rat Jaw, Testicle Spectacle, and Checkmate Hill. The course
changes every year. While there are some trails through the
park, at least two thirds of the course is off trail, so it
requires serious scrambles and occasional climbing. 

“Only at the Barkley are you as likely to experience an upper
body injury as you are a lower body injury,”
Robbins wrote in a race report.

In the mountainous area, weather can also be capricious, with
intense winds, hail, snow, ice, and more. 

“If you’re going to face a real challenge, it has to be a real
challenge — you can’t accomplish anything without the possibility
of failure,” Cantrell said the documentary.

No rule book

Boone said there was a kind of unwritten rule that nobody talked
about the Barkley Marathons in the lead-up to the race.

“It’s kind of like I have this cool secret and I’m training for
this cool thing, but I can’t tell anybody about it,” she said.
“But in some ways that made it even better, because for the first
time in a long time, I was doing something solely for myself.”

She did know, however, that she’d need to practice using a
compass and a map and going up and down a lot of hills.

Ultrarunner
Jared Campbell clings to a tree while scaling “Danger Dave’s
Climbing Wall,” one of the many challenging ascents in the course
of the 2012 Barkley Marathons.
Courtesy: “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its
Young”

No GPS devices of any kind are allowed on the race, nor are
altimeters — just a map, compass, and a cheap Timex watch ticking
towards the 60-hour time limit. Runners have to carry their
own food, water, lights, and other necessities with them on the
course. Depending on how much water they bring, they may wind up
drinking from streams.

Since there’s no official rule book, nothing tells runners what
they should or shouldn’t do leading up to the race. But they’re
informed that within Frozen Head State Park, racers are only
allowed to train on the trails. That means participants can’t
prepare for how rough the full experience will be. 

Starting with a cigarette

The day before the race, after runners have arrive at the camp in
Frozen Head, they get to see the one official course map that
denotes the route for the year.

Racers have to copy the information from that map onto their own
maps, marking elevation points and writing down the off-trail
twists, turns, and climbs. Navigating the route depends on the
racers’ ability to follow whatever directions they’ve marked on
their maps. 

Then the runners wait to hear the sound of a conch being blown,
which could come anytime between midnight and noon on race
day. Once runners hear the conch, they have an hour to get
ready to run.

The Barkley Marathons officially begins when Cantrell lights up a
cigarette.

Once he lights the smoke (returning runners who have finished the
race before bring Cantrell a pack of Camels as their entry fee),
the runners are off.

To ensure racers hit each point on the course, the organizers
stash books throughout the route. Cantrell gives every runner a
number before they start each loop, and when they find a book,
the racers have to tear out the page that matches their number.

But finding the books is no easy task, especially as foggy days
turn into dark nights. When Boone arrived at the third book
location on her second lap, she was with a group of four people.
Another runner was already there, they found, and had been
searching for the book for hours. 

“The five of us combed the location, and, getting frustrated, I
turned to find a bit of shelter to pee,” Boone wrote in
her race report. “And in front of me, there was the book,
shoved in the crevice.”

Running together, then alone

Barkley
“virgin” John Fegyveresi runs past the decommissioned Brushy
Mountain State Prison during the 2012 Barkley
Marathons.
Courtesy: “The Barkley
Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young”

For the first four loops, runners mostly work together, helping
each other fight the course.

The loops start and end at camp, which is the only place runners
can receive aid, tape up blisters, replenish food supplies, and
take a nap — if they have time. Each loop has to be finished
within 13 hours and 20 minutes.

Racers are supposed to do the route clockwise for the first two
laps, then counterclockwise for the second two. When loop five
comes around — if anyone makes it that far — the runner that’s in
first place gets to choose which direction to run that loop.
Subsequent runners (if there are any) then have to alternate,
each going the opposite way of whoever came before.

On that last lap, racers are trying to beat their competitors,
the course, the clock, and their own exhaustion.

In the documentary, two runners  — Brett Maune, a physicist
who holds the Barkley speed record, and Jared Campbell, an
engineer who has also won Hardrock — finished their fourth loop
within a minute of each other. They both completed the race, but
almost four hours apart. They’re the only two people who’ve
finished the Barkley multiple times.

That record-setting year — 2012 — was the first time the race had
three finishers. Barkley virgin John Fegyveresi also made it
to the end, with less than 20 minutes before the cut-off.

Most runners, of course, don’t make it that far, often battling
course conditions that are nearly impossible to outlast.

The course record for slowest distance covered is held by retired
computer scientist Dan Baglione, who got lost for 32 hours after
covering just two miles of the course in 2006.

Finding something out about yourself

In the middle of her second loop, Boone realized her group
wouldn’t make it back to camp in time to start a third. She’d
finished her first loop in 10 hours and 57 minutes, and bonus
time gets rolled over according to race rules, but the 26:40 mark
was inevitably going to pass before they made it back.

Boone and her crew still finished the loop, even if it wouldn’t
count. Out of 44 starters this year, Boone was one of
just 21 people who even began the course’s second loop.

The
tune Taps is played on a bugle every time a runner quits. In this
nighttime image, Barkley co-founderLazarus Lake bows his head as
crew member Dave Henn plays Taps.
Courtesy: “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its
Young”

Contrary to the way it might seem, Cantrell has said he wants
people to finish the race.

“Pretty much everybody we see go out there, you really want ’em
to succeed,” he says in the documentary. “You know that most of
them won’t, and there is kind of maybe a dark humor to all the
things that go on. Some of the failures are spectacular and
really funny. But you like to see people have the opportunity to
really find out that something about themselves.”

For Boone, attempting Barkley was about remembering what got
her into the racing in the first place — the fun of it.

Before her broken femur (and a follow-up stress fracture), Boone
said racing had started to become exclusively what adventure
athletes call “type-two fun”: something that seems fun only when
you look back at it, but not while you’re doing it.

“I was only happy afterwards if I won,” she said of that time.
“The process of getting through it was miserable.”

But Boone said Barkley was a “culmination of a year of racing
again and learning to actually enjoy myself during the race.”

It was about running without being afraid to fail and having
“type-one fun” — the kind you enjoy throughout an activity, not
just in retrospect.

Boone and every one of her fellow 2018 racers got a “DNF”: did
not finish.

“It didn’t feel like a DNF – it felt like a victory. A
hard-fought victory, defeating the self-doubt demons I wrestled
with leading up to the race,” she wrote in her report.

Boone said she’d consider trying again.

Those who do manage to finish get quite a prize: They don’t have
to go out for another loop.