In the Spell of the Barkley: Unravelling the Mystery of the World's Toughest Ultramarathon

Contents

  1 A bizarre race in Tennessee

  2 Inspired by the extreme

  3 On the boundary of the impossible

  4 Out there

  5 Lessons from Barkley toppers

  6 Breaking through mental boundaries

  7 Farther

  8 A year without the Barkley

  9 In my veins

10 Team spirit

11 The simple things

12 Un-Fun Run

13 The bugle

14 Racing into the future

Acknowledgements

1

A bizarre race in Tennessee

‘Where Dreams Go to Die’

Barkley motto 2016

Monday 3 April 2017, early afternoon: you could cut the tension with a knife. The race has been going for 59 hours and 59 minutes, and the final seconds of the final minute of the maximum race time are ticking away. Standing at the Yellow Gate (the finishing line) in the campsite at Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, East Tennessee, 20 or so spectators eagerly peer at the trail towards Bird Mountain. Gary Robbins, the Canadian ultrarunner, will come from there. He’s got 30 seconds left and the odds he’ll finish on time are pretty much zero. Then someone shouts, ‘He’s coming!’ Two women clasp their heads with excitement and disbelief. What a finale!

A man with a red beard and rain jacket appears by the campsite shower cabin. It’s Gary. Only, he’s coming from the wrong direction. The spectators start to cheer him on, ‘Come on Gary!’

But they are also confused. Shouldn’t Gary be coming from the other side? The seconds are passing: 57, 58, 59… Ah man, no way! The Canadian gives one last sprint, taps the Yellow Gate and collapses. He misses the time limit of 60 hours by a few seconds. He lies on the ground in the foetal position. His wife comforts him. Panting and in a strange voice, he babbles pretty much incomprehensibly, ‘The trail’, ‘fog’, ‘wrong way’, ‘pages’.

The mood turns grave. Devastated, no one speaks. The Canadian lies exhausted and emotional on the ground. A personal drama is unfolding, but the precise circumstances aren’t yet clear. Race director Gary Cantrell – better known as ‘Lazarus Lake’, or ‘Laz’ for short – tries to unravel the mystery. ‘He came from below when he should have come from up top. I’m curious to know where he went wrong.’ Gary Robbins touched the finish line of the hundred-mile race after a time of 60:00:06 – six seconds over the maximum race time. Never was a Barkley runner Out There for so long with such little success.

Later, Laz explained that Gary had made a navigation error shortly before the end of the race and went off-course. ‘He did not miss the time limit by six seconds. He failed to complete the Barkley by two miles.’ Legendary words. Gary missed the last two miles of the 100-mile course and took a detour, ending up on the wrong side of the finish line. No finishing the race for him, then. One of the rules of the race is that you must follow the course, however difficult that may be. The famous ultramarathon has a different motto each year. ‘Where dreams go to die’ is the sarcastic one from 2016, the year in which Gary achieved his first ‘did not finish’ (DNF).

Minutes later, the broken ultrarunner stood up. He locked the race director in a lengthy embrace. It was an emotional sight. No one said it, but everyone knew that Gary Robbins wouldn’t go down as the 16th finisher of the Barkley 100. Laz played ‘Taps’ on the bugle. This is the ritual for any participant who doesn’t finish, to symbolise them tapping out of the race. There was respectful silence while the bugle played. The Barkley had swallowed another runner. Later, videos of the Canadian curled up in the foetal position went viral around the world. People responded with horror on Twitter. So close to finishing this brutal race, so close to eternal fame in the global community of ultrarunners.

This is what failure looks like. The Barkley is hard and raw. Immediately after the 2017 race, there was a lot of attention on social media about the mere six seconds that stood between Gary Robbins and a legendary finish in the mythical ultrarun. 60:00:06 was a nice number, with a controversial story behind it.

No one was talking about the extraordinary achievement of John Kelly, the only runner who did finish the Barkley Marathons that year, someone commented on Facebook. There are years when no one finishes the race. ‘The Barkley isn’t about finishing, it’s about failing,’ was one of my responses on a running site. I now know how it feels to fail in this race, I’ve heard the bugle play for me several times. To date, no one has finished the full race since John Kelly.

I wasn’t there in 2017, but I followed the race on Twitter and read every article that came out about it. I’ve been doing that for years if I can’t be there in person. It must have been late summer 2010 when I first read about the Barkley Marathons, in a blog by a runner who regularly took part in obscure races over extreme distances. The article that caught my eye was about an unusual 100-mile ultramarathon in Frozen Head State Park, somewhere deep in the forest of East Tennessee. To take part in the race – so I read – you need to write a letter to the organisation explaining why you want to be involved. The title of this essay is ‘Why should I be allowed to enter the Barkley Marathons?’ Having to write a cover letter to partake in a running event is highly unusual (and quite challenging in itself for me, since I’m Dutch and English is my second language). But the article soon made me realise there were far more unusual things about the Barkley than this. The application procedure is kept secret and the exact time and date of the race start are not announced beforehand. Participants also run for miles off-trail through the forest, and they frequently get lost. In 2010, only one participant finished the race. Only one!

The article about this strange ultramarathon fascinated me. As soon as I started reading about it, I sensed a veil of secrecy surrounding it. I questioned whether the race actually existed and did some more research online. I couldn’t find any definite references to a date, location or any registration details, so the seed of curiosity was sown. A few months later, I found a book about the Barkley Marathons called Tales From Out There, by ‘Frozen’ Ed Furtaw. The author was the first to finish the Barkley – a long time ago, when it was half the distance that it is today. I read the book in one sitting. Frozen Ed (the nickname, a pun on ‘Frozen Head’, was bestowed in honour of his Barkley exploits; it turns out the ultra world is full of nicknames) described a race that was fundamentally different to all others. The more I read, the more mysterious it became. One of the many unusual rituals of the race is the lighting of a cigarette to signal the start. Then there are the numerous elements that make the race hard. It’s not so much the distance of the Barkley Marathons that makes it extreme but more the terrain. Frozen Ed describes how the steep climbs and descents – many of which go off-trail through thick undergrowth and briers – exhaust the runners, breaking both their skin and their spirit. The challenge isn’t to win but to run the race. That’s how hard the Barkley is. The runners must contend more with themselves than with the other participants. They even help each other complete the first four of the five loops. Frozen Ed also writes about ‘humility’. To be able to do the Barkley, he believes respect for the challenge is more useful to you than too much self-confidence. But humility alone isn’t enough. It isn’t possible to finish the race without respect for yourself and the deepest willpower to overcome pain and extreme fatigue.

The Barkley consists of a 20-mile loop that has to be run five times. The direction of the loop changes each time. Loop 1 is always clockwise. The directions of Loops 2, 3 and 4 change each year. The direction of Loop 5 is chosen by the first runner to start the last loop. The second participant in Loop 5 runs in the opposite direction to the first runner. So, if number one runs anticlockwise, number two has to run clockwise. The time limit for finishing the Barkley is 60 hours, or 12 hours per loop. That means you need to start Loop 4 within 36 hours of the start of the race. Anyone who completes Loop 5 but hasn’t touched the Yellow Gate within exactly 60 hours is disqualified. If a participant finishes Loop 3 within 40 hours, he or she has achieved what is known as the Fun Run. Not many people have completed the Fun Run. And even fewer people can call themselves Barkley finishers.

When I read Frozen Ed’s book, it became clear to me that the Barkley is far more than just a race. The tales of runners who have gone to extremes – often without reaching the finish – aren’t about a running event, but rather a test of how far athletes can go with sleep deprivation, physical exertion and mental challenges. ‘The Barkley won again this year,’ is the conclusion after one race that – yet again – no one managed to finish. The Barkley seems to have been conceived to challenge what is humanly possible. Frozen Ed explains how race director Laz always makes the course a bit harder each time someone finishes. Accordingly, the race always invites participants to go further.

Halfway through reading Tales From Out There, I found the author’s email address on the internet. I emailed him before I’d even finished the book. Ed was very enthusiastic about my zealous reaction and phoned me. During our conversation, he asked if I wanted to come to the race, which was due to take place in two weeks’ time. I politely declined the offer. The timing was tricky and a ticket to the USA from the Netherlands wouldn’t be cheap. Yet I lay awake for ages that night. I had to do it. The next morning, I bought a ticket to Tennessee.

This is how, in late March 2011, I stumbled upon an adventure into the unknown, flying from Amsterdam to Memphis then on to Knoxville, Tennessee. I like to travel but had never been to the USA before. I hired a car in Knoxville and slept in a motel for the first time in my life. Quite unexpectedly, I found myself fascinated with the country. It felt like many of the everyday things I experienced, did or saw, were from a film or TV show. Over breakfast in a Waffle House, I couldn’t get over the crazy amount of food that people ate. Giant waffles, huge stacks of pancakes and enormous steaks were carried past me. The waiting staff didn’t know what to say when I asked them for muesli with yoghurt – in the end they agreed to do me an egg. After breakfast, I drove to Walmart. I went straight to the ‘Outdoor’ section because I needed propane gas for cooking with. Next to the camping gas stoves stood a collection of firearms.

I stocked up on food to last me a few days and drove on to Frozen Head State Park, where the race is held. This was it! I passed the visitor centre and drove on towards the campsite. Apart from a few cars bearing stickers from popular running events in the USA, the campsite felt like the sort of completely normal, basic campsite you would expect to find in such a place. At the top end, I saw the rows of licence plates brought along by this and previous years’ entrants. As well as the $1.60 you need to pay to take part in the race, ‘virgins’ (runners participating for the first time) must also bring a licence plate from their home state or country. Then I spotted the famous Yellow Gate. I knew from Frozen Ed’s book that the Yellow Gate, which for normal people was no more than an ordinary yellow gate to stop cars from driving into the forest, was a magical place in the Barkley. It was the start and finish line. I parked up in front of it, got out and touched it with due awe. What a thrill to see a feature of an exciting book in the flesh. This wasn’t fiction but real life. Or was it? It was a strange sensation.

Not far from the Yellow Gate, next to the licence plates, stood a man with a long, grey beard and bulging eyes behind a pair of 1980s glasses. He wore a cowboy hat on his head. Jeans and a lumberjack shirt completed the hillbilly look of this character in his sixties. He was busy cooking chicken legs over a campfire. I knew straight away this was Laz. I’d never seen a photo but everything about this man told me that the Barkley was a product of his mind. Keeping control of my excitement, I went over to him. I introduced myself and told him I had come from the Netherlands to see the race first-hand. ‘Welcome,’ he said with a southern drawl. He introduced himself by his official name: Gary Cantrell. At first sight, he looked like an actor playing a character from Frozen Ed’s book. I felt like I was on a film set, with the Yellow Gate as part of the decor.

The film I was taking part in played out around me over the next three days. I had a huge grin on my face. Laz briefly introduced me to Frozen Ed, who was wandering about the campsite, and then went back to his cooking. With his fingers, he smeared the still-frozen chicken legs with barbecue sauce and placed them on the grill above the fire. The result was chicken legs that were black on the outside and pink on the inside. This seemed to be a tradition on the Friday before the start of the Barkley. Frozen Ed hugged me like an old friend and suggested I put up my tent next to his. I happily accepted his offer. I was amazed by how everything in such a special race as this was so accessible.

Not 10 hours later, I was standing by the start line at around one in the morning. It was the earliest Barkley start ever, I heard. Only Laz knows what time the race will begin, and that can be anywhere between midnight and midday. An hour before the start, Laz blows his conch shell, alerting runners to the fact that they have 60 minutes left before Laz lights his cigarette at the Yellow Gate to signal the start of