INTO THE WOODS
In the backwoods of Tennessee there’s a race so brutal that only 17 people have ever finished it. Its vicious course and capricious quirks take the world’s toughest runners down the rabbit hole even before the hallucinations start. With another Barkley Marathons story about to be written, we look back through the pages of last year’s epic tale
LATE ON LOOP 4 OF THE BARKLEY MARATHONS,
after more than 40 sleepless hours threading and thrashing through the untracked hollows and highlands of Frozen Head State Park in the Cumberland Mountains of east Tennessee, John Kelly finally runs alone.
At the top of Little Hell rise in the black predawn, he looked back and Damian was gone. Kelly’s good friend, top UK ultrarunner and RW columnist Damian Hall, was a first-timer at the event; in Barkley parlance, a virgin. Kelly, a native to the area and five-time previous Barkley contestant, had introduced Hall to Gary Cantrell, aka Lazarus Lake, Barkley’s notorious architect and organiser. And at 10.46am on 14 March, when Laz touched the flame to his unfiltered Camel, starting the 2023 Barkley, Kelly guided Hall and a posse of other elites through the first 20-plus mile loop. To be deemed an official finisher, a runner must complete five loops within 60 hours. Prior to this year, in Barkley’s 37-year history, only 15 people had accomplished this feat. In 2017, Kelly became one of them. The 2023 race kicked off on a cool blue morning with no rain forecast. As the runners peeled off the trail and into the bush – 80% of the course is through the park’s oak- and hickory-laced backcountry, which runners navigate solely by compass and rudimentary map – each hewed to their own interpretation of Laz’s obscure course directions. On that first loop, with so many world-class endurance athletes moving under ideal conditions, it seemed that this might be the year when multiple runners cracked Barkley’s code. Rather than no finishers, or perhaps one or two, there might be a handful – enough to suggest that, after nearly 40 years, Barkley had become less of a Sisyphean psychodrama, and more a race like any other.
So many runners converged on the first of the 14 paperback books secreted around the course – runners must tear out a specific page to prove they’ve reached that spot – that three-time finisher Jared Campbell distributed pages to the runners. The gesture slowed Campbell’s progress, but Barkley’s shared hardship engenders a spirit of solidarity. Eventually, though, every runner stands and falls alone.
The moment comes now for Kelly. For the few who make it that far, the fourth loop is the hardest. The adrenaline has drained and caffeine
