The Barkley Marathons
In 2014, the very intense-sounding documentary “The Race That Eats Its Young” was released. I still haven’t seen it, but I’m confident that it documents the history of the Barkley Marathons up to 2014 and showcases the mystery and misery of the event better than I can describe myself. There’s several more documentaries and YouTube videos that have been made on the event since, so go ahead and watch those. My story here is a personal one, describing my experience at the event in 2015 as well as the build up to the event over the winter and spring preceding it.
Also in 2014, I ran and won the inaugural Barkley Fall Classic, a ~30ish mile race in Frozen Head State Park that awarded its champion a spot in the actual Barkley Marathons the following spring. The race took place mostly and maintained and marked trails, unlike its big brother counterpart, and I ran pretty well to a 6:28 finish. Ultrasignup still marks this as the course record, but I’m fairly certain that the present-day course no longer resembles in any way the run we did that day. I don’t really remember much, but I finished covered in blood from crawling through briars up Rat Jaw and the then-pervasive threat that I was going to participate in Barkley the next spring.
I won’t reveal the mega-secret entry process, but I signed up and paid my $1.60 or whatever it was and got a license plate and cigarettes and socks? I don’t remember precisely what I laid at the feet of the venerable Lazarus Lake in a sacrificial offering, but it was something like that.
“Training”
In 2014 and 2015 I was a sophomore and junior, respectively, in college at Virginia Tech. I was running trail races all over the East Coast with my very best friends; these were certainly the glory days, although I notice more and more that every passing year is its own version of the glory days. The Barkley Marathons fell upon my eardrums like the whisper of a psychedelic vision, passing from friend to acquaintance in a mysterious half-story. It seemed that nobody was describing the event as it was, only that we should avoid its name as if it was called the Voldemort Marathons. I was quite intrigued by the prospect of “the world’s hardest endurance event,” and my youthful disrespect of the event actually played to my advantage. I figured I could finish it on my first try no problem; after all, it was just a little scavenger hunt in the diminutive Tennessee Mountains.
The Barkley Marathons is an unmarked route of 5 laps through very steep and spiky terrain in Frozen Head State Park, where participants must reach a series of checkpoints throughout each lap and rip a page corresponding to his or her bib number out of a hidden book. Fundamentally, I figured that training must consist of two things: 1. lots of steep climbing and descending and 2. being able to keep a sound mind when your mind doesn’t want to be sound.
For factor #1: I did lots of steep climbing and descending. Laps and laps and laps of steep powerline cuts, trails up the rugged sides of the Appalachian hills. Rocks and roots and briars and misery. Cold and heat and dark and light, skipping class and walking up and down a hill all day and night and then skipping class the next day to sleep the whole day. I spent my spring break at Frozen Head, 5 days in the pouring rain trying to get an understanding of how the landscape worked. Every day of this trip I slept underneath dripping overhangs, sprawled on uneven rocks made soft and decadent by sopping and decomposing leaves. In my mind, if I could just be as miserable as possible in the same place that I would be as miserable as possible during the race, then I wouldn’t be miserable at all.
“Training”
“There was no way of knowing if one bite of a cookie would dissolve your brain into a kaleidoscope of confusing new dimensions or if it would take 4 full cookies to do the same.”
For factor #2: I did almost all of this training heavily under the influence of marijuana edibles, which I cooked up myself in my kitchen in Virginia. The THC of marijuana can be extracted into any sort of fatty oil upon melting and heating, and my favorite fatty oil is butter. I made big pans of chocolate chip cookies made with butter infused with the Devil’s Lettuce, under conditions not quite up to the stringent code found at today’s dispensaries. As a result, there was no way of knowing if one bite of a cookie would dissolve your brain into a kaleidoscope of confusing new dimensions or if it would take 4 full cookies to do the same. Regardless, my goal was to render myself mentally useless and then bushwhack through thick Appalachian forests and try to find my way home.
I once walked a 40-mile loop from my apartment through the woods, through various private properties and countless impenetrable thorn bushes, fueling myself only with cookies that made my mental condition that of a raving lunatic and a cantaloupe that I carried in my backpack and somehow ate with no utensils. Another time I headed to our local trail system in a downpour of freezing rain and fog and conspired to cross from various locations on the ridgeline of Brush Mountain to various locations on the ridgeline of Gap Mountain 10 times, utilizing no trails and again relying on poisonous cookies and rainwater for fuel. I squirmed through Rhododendron, jumped off of slippery rock outcrops into hidden stinging nettle and mats of thorny plants grown tangled together over years and years of neglect. I waded through hip-deep Poverty Creek 10 times and ended up so far away from my starting point that I had to jump who knows how many fences in the dark to get back to town. Since marijuana makes even a 10-mile trail run seem far more adventurous than it actually is, every one of these unhinged wanders seemed like I had traveled to the Serengeti and back under my own power.
All this to say, my idea of training for a crazy event was to just become as crazy of a person as I could. I believe I arrived at the start line of Barkley in a state of mind commensurate with that of an insane asylum resident, and I thought that that would help me succeed.
The “Race”
My friends and I drove from Virginia to Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee the day before the start of the Barkley Marathons, “Fool’s Weekend” at the very end of March into the beginning of April. In attendance were several of my friends and running partners there to support me (each loop terminates at its starting point at a campsite in the park, where I could see loved ones every million hours and eat food and maybe take a nap but probably have to just grab food and leave) and generally just take in the spectacle and have a good camping trip. Also in attendance was my future wife, who had only started dating me a few months in advance of this event. Barkley was the first race of mine she had ever been to, and I don’t know why she stuck around after this but she did.
The night before was very exciting, holding with it the electric air of eagerness and the commotion of preparation. Even at this stage in my fledgling ultrarunning career, start line nerves had dimmed; my preparation was mostly the same and most races were marked and supported (generally I never thought I would die). However, Barkley was very different. Nobody knew precisely what they were getting into; the course was different every year, the weather was a mystery, barely anyone had ever even finished the race at all, and the starting time itself was only revealed an hour before it began. I outlined the course on my State Park map, I studied the cryptic riddles describing where each checkpoint was. If only I knew how utterly useless any of this assistance was.
The pre-race dinner hosted by Laz was frozen chicken grilled directly on a campfire, so it was completely burnt on the outside and still raw and frozen on the inside. Instead of salmonella, I opted for my own food and went to bed in my tent. The start time would be announced by conch shell one hour from itself, at any time from midnight to noon the next day. Needless to say, I slept in fits of 5 five minutes, needlessly waking up in despair thinking I had missed the start. Instead, I had a leisurely morning and the conch shell blew at 10 am or something, signifying a midday start to our adventure. Food packed, last will and testament signed, and up to the hallowed yellow gate the small group walked. Laz lit a cigarette, and we started up the trail.
As a first-time participant, my plan was just to follow the people who knew where they were going and observe every tree and rock and drainage and landmark I could, for use in future loops. This worked very well on the first loop. I stayed with my friend Henry from Virginia, who had been here before and knew what was going on. We started at what I felt was a frenzied pace, but soon realized that the cutoff for each lap was actually much more difficult than I had thought. Climbing and descending almost vertical hillsides devoid of markers, covered in leaves and briars overlying loose rocks, was painstaking and required huge amounts of energy both physical and mental. We hauled ourselves through the back woods, me trying to stay engaged in where I was at all times and also keep up with the others that led me to each book.
The “Race”
“Instead of salmonella, I opted for my own food and went to bed in my tent. The start time would be announced by conch shell one hour from itself, at any time from midnight to noon the next day.”
Lap 1 was relatively uneventful actually, several of us coming through the campground in quick succession and ready for Lap 2. I filled my pack with more stuff and headed out into the dying light for my second lap. I was still with Henry at this point, although both of us were having stomach issues and both of us were very tired. I had none of my trusted poisonous baked goods, but I was still fueling like a deranged weirdo, drinking olive oil and eating out of a jar of peanut butter with my finger. Needless to say, the night passed extremely slowly, with each step slowed by the mind’s thought that maybe I wasn’t going the right way. At a snail’s pace, I made my way through the first half of the loop, abandoning Henry when he decided to take a nap on a steep hillside in the freezing night. I arrived at Rat Jaw yet again, this time alone and very happy to see some friends and spectators arranged around the spattering of water jugs that the race leaves us beneath a fire tower. The morning had arrived again, light illuminating the way ahead of me and removing the bitter cold that had plagued my last 8 hours of crawling.
Into the second half of Loop 2 I went, the fatigue already attacking me. To this day I don’t do well with sleep deprivation, and even as a 20-year-old I had no business staying up past 10 p.m. A full night of wandering in the woods, preceded by a night of restless tossing and turning, did not play to my favor. I began missing obvious landmarks, walking way past a book in the wrong direction and bleeding precious time. Near the end of this loop, I sat down to collect myself at one of the books, promptly fell asleep, and inexplicably woke up at the next book. This merely foreshadowed the mental mirages I would experience later in the adventure, for which my drug-induced wanderings had not prepared me for.
I completed Loop 2 with all my pages, only 40% done with the race and already thinking up ways I could quit. Maybe if I just walked slower, I would be timed out? That way the blame of failure would fall on the ticking passage of time instead of my own will? Maybe I would feign injury? Maybe a wild boar would run at me from behind, tearing my hamstring and releasing me to the sweet embrace of my sleeping bag? Anything to stop wandering these destitute woods. Alas, I arrived at camp for the second time with about an hour to spare, plenty of time to refuel and head out again and plenty of time for my friends to see straight through my whining.
Off I went on Lap 3, this time in a counterclockwise direction. A small difference, but one that played havoc on my faltering psyche. Landmarks were switched around on their face and hardly anybody else from our starting 40 people went out on Loop 3, condemning me to a hopeless and lonely wander with seemingly no end in sight. At the top of the first climb, I encountered another runner, an orienteering champion from New Zealand I had spent some of my first loop with. He was still on Loop 2 but proclaimed that he was not continuing the race. Rather, he was doing hill repeats on the final climb of the loop because “it was great training.” Sure dude, sure. I suspect he succumbed to the same demons that were plaguing me at the end of the loop: it was not his fault that he was quitting, instead it was the fault of the clock and the fault of the perfect hill repeat hill he got to encounter and couldn’t resist.
On I went, and suddenly my mind started to play hideous and unwarranted tricks on me. All around me I saw tents in the woods, who upon further inspection revealed themselves as stoic and unmoving boulders. Hooded pedestrians crept around the edges of my vision, never coming to help the poor and bedraggled traveler that limped through their domain. Worst of all, a playground complete with screaming children and supervisory adults prompted me to believe I was in an entirely wrong drainage system and I took an hour-long detour through more hallucinations to realize that I was in the right place to begin with. Somehow I collected the pages from the book checkpoint throughout the afternoon, arriving at the old prison right about nightfall. This part of the route goes through a rather creepy tunnel underneath a prison, and I entered like a zombie, in pursuit of sleep and any excuse to quit rather than brains. Midway through the tunnel a man approached me and muttered something, which of course I ignored. At this point I knew that nothing I was seeing was real, least of all a man under a prison. Even so, the man grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me out of my alternate reality. It was another runner that I had caught up to, which means that this guy was moving slower than a desert tortoise.
THE “END”
“Somebody played Taps on a bugle, signifying the end of my adventure. I crawled into my sleeping bag and became deceased until the next day”
Having company was a lifesaver for both of us, but we were realizing with more than a slight amount of satisfaction that we were way behind pace to finish our third loop in time, that we would have to quit at the halfway point of Loop 3 together. Thank God. We climbed up Rat Jaw in the later stages of the evening, 40 hours after we had started. At the fire tower I again encountered my loved ones, who at this point were growing quite concerned over my tardiness. Brief explanations, and down we all hiked the interminable Quitters Road, the switchbacking trail to camp and the holy site that presents itself to quitters and finishers alike. All I remember was that I was in the presence of friends and the illusion of time had melted away completely. Upon quitting, a runner stands before Laz as he asks “why did you quit?” I remember standing there in the dark, headlamps and campfires illuminating the encounter. I ran through the options: “I ran out of time, it was getting dark, it wasn’t safe to continue overnight in my state, I wasn’t eating enough.” At last I settled on the correct response. “I’m a bitch.” Laz smiled and nodded knowingly, writing something in a small notebook that I’m sure will be memorialized in a museum someday.
Somebody played Taps on a bugle, signifying the end of my adventure. I crawled into my sleeping bag and became deceased until the next day, when the sun rose upon the mountains I had come to call home the last day and a half. Nobody else was on the course; in fact, nobody would come close to finishing the race that year. I packed up all of our camping stuff with my friends and then we went to Walmart in Oak Ridge, Tennessee for some reason. Maybe just to see that life went on obliviously all around us, even the neighboring towns unaware and uncaring of the inane event occurring to the north.
Barkley is an exotic memory for me, an event I can reminisce to my grandkids about. Everybody is fascinated by the event, even if they can’t explain why. I believe the captivation lies in Laz’s own testimony, that the event is just about at the limits of human will and achievement, possible but only barely. Since 2015, there have been 10 finishes of the Barkley, including the first woman in 2024. Laz will continue to raise the curtain higher and higher, as human limitation expands. I, for one, will not be one of the few to finish the race, but I’m glad I tried.
