of your backcountry nightmares,
an image only reinforced by Big,
his giant red pit bull.
Big had been shot in the chest
and abandoned when Laz found
him. “Someone wanted him for
a ighting dog,” he tells me, “but
he didn’t have the nature for it.”
Laz nursed him back to health,
and now the two are inseparable.
Despite his fearsome reputation,
Laz is not a ighter by nature,
either. He pores over history
books and writes stories about
his dog’s adventures, such
as the time Big swallowed a
whole skunk.
Laz’s house is nestled in
dense woods at the top of a hill.
Wrens have nested in a box on
the porch, where a spider’s web
stretches across a chair. Inside,
there’s a room with half a dozen
beds covered with quilts made
from Laz’s old race T-shirts,
ready for any itinerant runner
who happens to be passing
through. The house is full of
animal skulls he picked up on
runs and arrowheads he collected
with his father.
Among the oddities is an
intricately sculpted marble ball
covered in geometric designs,a gift from a former Barkley
runner. It’s only when I take a
closer look that I notice 1000 tiny
spots of glue.
“When it arrived, it was
shattered,” Laz says. “But I
found two pieces I could stick
together.” He had no idea what
it was supposed to look like, but
he spent months reuniting the
fragments. “I didn’t know until
it was put together that it had
elephants on it,” he tells me.
Forty-ive years ago, Laz
began to highlight every road he
had run on a local map. When he
exhausted the roads on one map,
he’d buy another and tape it to
the irst. He set out to cross all of
Tennessee’s 95 counties. Today,
the maps stretch 3.5m across. Laz
crossed Unicoi, the last county
on his list, in 2016.
“I never meant to be Laz,” he
tells me. Gary Cantrell irst
came across the rather cryptic
name Lazarus Lake in a phone
book. Initially, he used it as
his email handle, but slowly
but surely it morphed into his
ultrarunning persona.
In the 1970s, there were only
a handful of ultramarathons, and
none in Tennessee.quietened to a murmur. At the
yellow gate, which serves as the
race’s start and inish lines, Laz
is glancing at his watch. A harsh
note booms through the trees.
The conch has been blown! Tents
light up. It’s 12.42am on Saturday,
drizzling and foggy. Fog is the
worst weather condition to have
at the Barkley. “Headlamps are
no use,” Laz says. “Everything
turns into a wall of white. Turn
your headlamp of and it’s a wall
of black.” At 1.42am, instead of
iring a starting pistol, Laz lights
a cigarette. And with that, the
runners are of.PLOTTING THE PATH
When I meet Laz at his home
outside Bell Buckle, Tennessee,
three weeks before the race, he
is wearing a lannel shirt over
a white dress shirt and, no doubt,
a pair of white socks under his
boots. A red beanie embossed
with the word ‘Geezer’ covers his
thinning hair, which is pulled into
a knot. He looks like the hillbillyRUNNERS IN
THE MIST
06 The competitor Adam Lint
climbs up the ‘Rat’s Jaw’
07 Robbins descends from the
‘Fire Tower’ during the irst
of ive loops
08 Kelly, the local boy, is sprayed
with anti-mosquito spray
09 A runner in the thick fog –
the worst of all weatherBY THE END OF THE FOURTH LOOP, KELLY
COULDN’T RECOGNISE HIS CREW MEMBERS
FITNESS0908