when an Englishman, Mark
Williams, fuelled by tea and
cheese sandwiches, completed
the ive loops in 59 hours and 29
minutes.BRAVE COMPANIONS
It is check-in time at the Frozen
Head State Park campground.
“Tomorrow, I’ll be calling you an
evil man,” says one runner.
“If that’s all I’m called,” Laz
says, “it’ll have been a failure.”
The map is revealed, taped
to a picnic table. The runners
crowd around to copy the
various sections of the course- ‘Gnarly Mouth’, ‘Rat’s Jaw’,
‘Hillpocalypse’ – on to their own
maps. They can also consult Laz’s
directions: “Look for a weird rock
at a conluence of two streams...
and go down a hillside. If it looks
too steep, that’s the right one.”
Completing three loops of
the Barkley is known as a ‘Fun
Run’. During the last two loops,
however, exhaustion sets in and
some runners have even found
themselves hallucinating. In
2005, one participant became
convinced that there were houses
on top of one of the mountains
and that he was a rubbish
collector sent to empty the bins.
Laz says that to inish the
Barkley, all you have to do is
average 3.2km an hour for 60
hours. How diicult can that be?
A few minutes walking the course
gives you some idea. The slopes
are so steep that they look like
they’re folding over you.
Cantrell – better known among
runners as Lazarus ‘Laz’ Lake.
“The less likely it is that they
can do it, the more attracted
they are to it.”
The course was indirectly
inspired by James Earl Ray,
Martin Luther King Jr’s
assassin, who escaped from the
nearby Brushy Mountain State
Penitentiary in 1977. When Ray
was recaptured after 56 hours
on the run, he had barely
travelled 13km. On hearing
this, Laz thought he could have
made at least 160km. (As it turns
out, he couldn’t: he has never
completed more than two loops
of his course.) The race
was named after Laz’s friend
Barry Barkley.
The irst Barkley Marathons
were held in 1986. Thirteen
people participated. No one
inished. The next year, Laz
made the course harder. No one
inished. And so on, until 1995,IN THE FINAL TWO LOOPS,
SOME HAVE HALLUCINATED
FROM EXHAUSTION
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