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The notoriously challenging and always
obscure Barkley Marathons trail running race came and
went with just a whimper this year. But the 40 runners
who started this peculiar event near Wartburg, Tennessee,
all left in anguish.
On Saturday morning February 14 at 6 a.m.,
Barkley creator and race director Gary Cantrell, also
commonly known as Lazarus Lake in the trail running world,
lit a cigarette in a parking lot of Tennessee’s
Frozen Head State Park, thus signaling the official start
of this year’s race. About 40 hopeful and courageous
trail runners from 15 states and 15 countries set off
into the park’s treacherous terrain to achieve the
near-impossible amid cold, wet, muddy, foggy, and very
slippery conditions. As with every
other Barkley in recent years, this year’s field
of runners was chock full of highly accomplished competitors
with high-profile results, including what is believed
to be a record 10 women.
None succeeded. After
a little more than 38 hours, this year’s Barkley
Marathons ended the way it has on 26 previous occasions—with
zero finishers.
This was by far the earliest start of
the Barkley Marathons in the 40-year history of the race,
as it has typically started between mid-March and mid-April.
Since its inception in 1986, the Barkley Marathons has
been considered one of the hardest running events in the
world, partly because it is designed for runners to fail.
It’s usually about 100 miles in
length, consisting of five 20-mile loops with 12,000 feet
of elevation gain through the landscape of the Cumberland
Mountains. The course isn’t marked, but the terrain
includes steep slopes covered in wet, slippery leaves,
icy creek crossings, and infuriating brambles. (This year’s
Barkley reportedly had a longer course, roughly five laps
of about 26 miles for a total of 130 miles.) Furthermore,
there are no aid stations, and GPS devices and smartphones
cannot be used for navigation, only paper maps and hand-held
compasses.
To finish the race, runners must complete
all five loops under the 60-hour cutoff, but they must
also collect specific pages from old books hidden out
on the course to prove they correctly completed each loop.
The Barkley Marathons has only been completed
a total of 26 times by 20 runners. In 2024, British trail
runner Jasmin Paris made history by becoming the first
woman to ever complete the Barkley Marathons, finishing
all five loops with just 99 seconds to spare in an agonizing
final stretch that invigorated the running world and mainstream
media.
Sébastien Raichon was the only runner to complete
a third loop and get credited with a "fun
run."
Cantrell, 71, devised the Barkley Marathons with the odd
inspiration from the 1977 escape of James Earl Ray from
nearby Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Ray, the convicted
assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and six other
inmates only traveled about 8-10 miles before being re-captured.
Cantrell has said he figured he could have made it 100
miles, thus the theoretical basis of the race. He
doesn’t give out any details publicly about the
race, so only the runners he accepts from the event’s
application requirements—an essay addressing “Why
I Should be Allowed to Run in the Barkley” and a
$1.60 entry fee—know approximately when to assemble
in Frozen Head State Park and roughly a 12-hour window
when it will begin. On the day of the race, Cantrell blows
into a conch shell to give a one-hour warning before the
start, but otherwise little is known and nothing is revealed
to participants until they are allowed to see the master
map just before the start of the race.
Any individuals on site for the race are
held to secrecy, and participant identities aren’t
initially revealed by the “official” Barkley
Marathons news channel—the Bluesky and X feeds of
Keith Dunn. Dunn is a 66-year-old lawyer and three-time
Barkley entrant from Arlington, Virginia, who has become
famous in trail running circles for his exclusive but
often nondescript social media posts about the event.
Among the known participants in this
year’s Barkley event were Oregon’s Max King,
45, the 2011 world mountain running champion and 2014
100K world champion; Montana’s Allison Powell, 34,
a finisher of numerous 100- and 200-mile races, including
last year’s Cocodona 250 in Arizona; Colorado’s
Paul Terranova, 52, a five-time Western States 100 finisher
and two-time Hardrock 100 finisher; French-Canadian runner
Mathieu Blanchard, 38, twice a podium finisher at the
Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France, and runner-up
at last summer’s Hardrock 100 in Colorado; Frenchman
Sébastien Raichon, 54, winner of last month’s
demanding Winter Spine Race in the U.K.; British runner
Damian Hall, 50 a past winner of the Winter Spine Race
and this year’s runner-up; France’s Aurélien
Sanchez, 34, a 2023 Barkley finisher; and Tennessee’s
John Kelly, 41, a nine-time Barkley starter and one of
two three-time Barkley finishers.
This year, 19 runners completed the first
lap, according to Dunn’s posts, but only four successfully
completed two laps and started a third—King, Hall,
Raichon, and Blanchard. But amid rain, fog and temperatures
in the low-40s, only Raichon was able to successfully
complete it.
He finished the loop after 38 hours, 5
minutes and 46 seconds, which allowed him to earn Barkley’s
sub-40-hour “fun run” status. But because
he failed to complete the third lap in under the 36-hour
time limit, he was unable to start the fourth lap. Hall
returned 30 minutes after Raichon, but he apparently didn’t
have the required book pages, so his race ended in frustration,
too.
The race was profiled in the 2014 documentary,
The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young.
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