Every spring, in the hills of Tennessee, just a little over an hour away from Knoxville, 40 or fewer people are lined up at the entrance of Frozen Head State Park. They’re waiting for one of the most intense, ultramarathon races in the world to begin.
.
The Barkley Marathon is so intense that it has a 98% dropout rate with only 26 people who have finished since it began in 1986. The race is five loops of 20 miles each, making it 100 miles. There are no aid stations for the runners anywhere in the race. There are only two water bottle fill-up stations, and runners may have a crew that can only help them at the race camp, which is at the starting line. To prove that they didn’t take any shortcuts, they have to bring back pages of books that are littered around the course. The book pages have to correspond to their bib number.
The director and creator Gary Cantell blows into a horn on the day of the race that lets the runners know there is only an hour until the race starts. To start the actual race, the runners wait and watch for Cantell to light his cigarette. After this, they have only 60 hours to finish.
History of The Race
Gary Cantell was a runner himself before he started to make races. He had won eight marathons before 1978. He created his first ultra-marathon race, which he also ran with a few friends in 1979. After that, he assembled another race called the Idiots Run in Shelbyville, TN in 1981.
Cantell based the The Barkley Marathon on the route that James Earl Ray ran after escaping prison for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. Ray ran for two days in the Cumberland Mountains before he was caught. It was noticed that Ray didn’t go far because he made a loop and ended back up only a few miles away from the prison.
Cantell decided that he was going to make a trial based on Ray’s route, feeling that Ray could have run more than 20 miles in 54 hours. He convinced park rangers to give him a permit to hike the mountain and he and his buddy took ten hours to complete the first 7.5 miles. After that he decided that he had a few friends who would like to run the trail, so he made a race out of it.
The Trail
The Barkley Marathon runs through the Cumberland Mountain range which is also a part of the Carb Orchard Mountains.
The Cumberland has many streams and deep gorges that runners have to watch out for. Runners climb about 12,000 feet each loop they do totaling to 60,000 feet, which is the equivalent to two Mount Everest’s.
There is no set trail that the runners have to run on nor is there a real trail; it’s more of an offroad race. Runners are not allowed to have any GPS systems and can only use a compass and a map to navigate through the park.
The race goes back and forth from clockwise and counterclockwise each lap. If multiple racers get to the last lap, they have to go in opposite directions from each other.
How to get into the race
The Barkley Marathon must be one of the best open secrets in the running world. To get accepted into the race, you need to write an essay about why you deserve to participate in it, pay a fee of $1.60, then hope you are one of the 40 picked out of hundreds who apply. The hardest part about this process is that you have to figure it all out on your own since there is no due date or mailing address. The only way that you could get this information is by talking to someone who has done it before.
If you do get accepted, you get a letter of congratulations from director Cantell letting you know what date the race is and what to bring as an entry ticket. First time participants, the ticket is a license plate; for people who have done the race before, you must bring clothing items if you didn’t finish the race or a pack of Camel-filtered cigarettes if you did.
Finishers and records
Not many people have finished the Barkley Marathon, it’s impressive if racers can even get to the third lap. In the 38 years that the race has been held, only 26 people out of 1,094 have finished. This past year’s race had five finishers, which is the most there has ever been. This past year’s race not only broke the record for the most finishers but also featured the first-ever women finisher.
Jasmin Paris is a 40-year-old university professor in Scotland who finished the Barkley Marathon in 59 hours, 58 minutes, and 21 seconds; she was 99 seconds away from the cut-off time.
This was Paris’s third time running The Barkley Marathon, but in the last two races, she couldn’t get to the fifth lap.
Another person who holds two amazing records in the Barkley Marathon is Brett Maune. Maune was the first person to ever run and win the race two times, and he broke the time record by three hours in the 2012 race. He also broke his personal record that he set in 2011 by five hours.
The record was previously held by Brain Robinson who ran 55:42:27 in 2008.
The Barkley Marathon is something that regular people wouldn’t even consider doing. It takes months and even years of intense self-discipline and dedication to rise to the level that is required for this race.
The runners who do go out there and look at Barkley as a challenge instead of something impossible, are people who have this drive and will to push themself beyond what was thought to be impossible for the human body and mind.
