The Barkley Marathons

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0:15Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And we are giving up right out of the gate on our episode about the Barclay Marathon. That's right. Our friend Chad, we want to shout out our friend Chad Crowley, who we've talked about before, who was the producer and director and showrunner of our TV show back in the day. Right. I got this idea from Chad because we had coffee over the holidays, and he is running ultra marathons now. Wow. Which is a very Chad thing to do. Like, he starts running a handful of years ago, and now is running ultras.

0:53Mm-hmm. And I was like, Chad, how long is that? And he said 60 miles generally. And I said, could you run to Athens? He said, how far is Athens? And I said, I can't remember how far. I said like 80 miles. He said, I could run 100 miles. Wow. But he'd need a ride back. Are you kidding? He said, it might take a while, but I could probably run 100 miles. And I'm just like floored by this idea that people can do this. And he said, man, you should do an episode on the Barkley Marathons, which I'd heard of before. Oh, really? Which is this ultra marathon plus, a trail run plus, in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee that is known for just being a crazy race, a crazy hard race, and having a really unusual origin story and unusual founder and just how it's all done.

1:47It's just this remarkable story, and I agree. Yeah, there's a really great documentary from 2017 called the Barkley Marathon, colon, the race that eats its young, which is a nickname for that race. And there's a few people in there who are seasoned trail runners, ultrathoners, like people who know their stuff and have done crazy things as far as running goes, who are like, this is far and away the hardest race on the planet. Like there's nobody who's doing anything like this. And if you think you know what you're doing, you're going to be completely amazed at how far off you are and what you thought this is going to be like.

2:27It's that hard. Yeah. You got a chance to watch it. Yeah, it was good. And there was a guy who was a special operations, like I guess a former special ops soldier. Yeah. It was like, I've done crazy stuff with my body, and it did nothing to prepare me for this. Yeah, it was really well done. It's on YouTube, and I recommend watching it because it really – there's a lot of drama that takes place the year that they did the documentary. I think they did it on 2012 or 2013 maybe. Oh, was it? And it came out in 2017, you said? Oh, okay. So, yeah, I was confused at what year it was. I think it was 2012 or 2013.

3:10And it was there's a lot of good drama. So we don't want to spoil some of the stories that happen. But I recommend watching. And here we go with Barkley Marathons. Oh, OK. So the whole thing about Barkley Marathons is that you can trace them back. I mean, you could start at the very beginning. We talked about in our what was the one crazy marathon episode we did not too long ago? It's on marathons. No, it was on a specific marathon in, I think, Los Angeles. Oh, I don't know. We did one of marathons years ago. No, remember the guy who was running the human zoos at the World's Fair came up with a, like a, he called it the Special Olympics Marathon.

3:51This was months ago, man. Hey, you can't remember it either, buddy. All right. Well, I can't remember. Do you remember it existed at least? Yes. Anyway. Oh, get this. apparently we did an entire short stuff on Saturn's rings and didn't mention it because I have no recollection of doing a short stuff on Saturn's rings. Do you? I don't remember that. You do remember we did a Saturn episode that came out like a few days back. I'm so mad at you right now. Don't you? We're still getting emails on that one. So yes, I do. Okay. All right. Cool. What LA marathon are you talking about? It might not be LA, but it was, it was like just you remember like that one Italian guy I think he was running in like oh he'd stop and eat people's fruit and yeah yeah yeah everybody and there were the two guys from Africa who I remember that now yeah it was I can't remember where it was or what the name was yeah oh boy people are just screaming at their pod player right this the sad thing is the whole reason I brought that up Chuck was to say that um we went over a lot of the origins of marathons in that episode, so we don't need to do that in this episode.

5:01Can you believe that we just did all that? And in our marathons episode. Yeah. Anyway, let's not even do that. Marathons have been a long, a long time. Yeah. Ultra Marathon started in the 1970s, and that's what we're really talking about. And this guy, Gary Kentrell, a.k.a. Lazarus Lake, or Laz, he's in his 70s now. He is the creator, along with his friend, of the Barkley Marathon. whom he named after his friend, a farmer named Barry Barkley. In the documentary, very sweetly over the end credits, they ask him with Barry why he named it after Barry. And he said, well, he used to help me with a lot of races, and I don't know, it just spit.

5:44Yeah, Barkley, he's a farmer. He's like, he's never run anything like that. And he said, I have no idea why he named it after me. Yeah, so there's no real reason, but they're called the Barkley Marathons. And Cantrell has an interesting story in that he is a former athlete. He's run supposedly over about 150 ,000 miles in his life. But he smokes camel cigarettes. He just floods his body with Dr. Pepper. He's, you know, older gentleman now and has kind of wrecked his legs from all that running. So he hasn't run for a while. But he got interested in this as a Boy Scout in Tennessee as a teenager or preteen, I guess, when he started doing backpacking trips that he hated until he found out there is a great joy in overcoming a hardship and doing something tough physically and completing a goal and got kind of hooked on that feeling.

6:37Yeah, he also apparently really liked the idea that if he continued to work at something, he would continue to improve. Yeah. And that's a big part of running. That's a big part of running. That's a big part of hiking. That's a big part of doing anything worthwhile. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, he got the bug pretty early on. He started running marathons. I think in 1966 he started running. By high school he was running marathons. And then he started running ultramarathons. And he was there like right at the beginning of the ultramarathon craze, which I think kicked off in 1974 with California's Western States 100.

7:17A guy named Gordy Ainsley set that up. And so by this time, you know, ultra marathons were starting to catch on. And Gary Cantrell was enough of a runner that he knew of these things. But he was also married. He was starting to have kids. He had a job as an accountant. And he just couldn't travel the country to go participate in ultrathons. So he started setting his own up around Tennessee. Yeah, exactly. They first took the form of what he called journey runs, which is, this all sounds fun. If I was into running, I would do something like this. But he and his friends would get together and be like, all right, let's run from Knoxville to Nashville.

7:57Or let's run, I love the through run. Their idea of a through run was either from Alabama or Kentucky running to the other just straight through Tennessee. Let's run through the state of Tennessee. Right. Pretty fun idea. They were doing these. They led to some other kind of legit races. I think one of the two is still around. He called it, and he's always had a sense of humor. You can tell by the way he names these things. The last annual Vol State, obviously volunteer state, road race, which is a 311-mile run from Missouri to Georgia in 10 days. Missouri to Georgie. Exactly. Exactly. 10-day cutoff time, no comfort stations along the way.

8:40You have to source all your own food and water and shelter along the way. And then another one called the Idiot's Run, which I don't think is around, 123-mile gravel, all gravel road run. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's so bad. That's just such a bad idea. Well, he called it the Idiot's Run for a really good reason. And that's the whole, his whole jam is like he loves coming up with a kind of race that just is at the border between the possibility and the impossibility of human endurance, of what the human body can actually do. Like he wants it just inside of that limit so that you could, if you push yourself enough, complete this race.

9:25But most people are just not going to be able to because it's so close to impossible. Yeah. I mean, many, many years, the Barkley Marathon has no finisher at all. Many years, no one makes it to the fifth loop. There are four loops that we'll get into all this in a second. um it's happening more and more now I think just there are more veterans that come back that once you kind of know the deal I say it gets a little easier but you know a little easier in that it's possible to finish it's never easy but I think the veterans have a an advantage for sure yeah because I think I think the astonishment at how difficult it is yeah probably takes up a lot of your mental energy and focus while you're doing it for the first time.

10:12And that, yeah, once you've even tried it before and even dropped out, you probably are past that. And it's got to be a huge leg up. Totally. So we should talk a little bit about the whole basis of all this, right? Or do you want to take a break? Yeah, let's talk about where this thing's held, right? Okay. Well, the whole thing is held at Frozen Head State Park. It's named after... That says it all, huh? Yeah, it's named after the tallest peak in this state park. It's in northeastern Tennessee, which is kind of, I guess, where northeastern Tennessee is where Virginia and North Carolina come together with Tennessee.

10:48It's a beautiful area. This would be in the Cumberland Mountains. And this particular state park is not like the kind you just, you know, go to, everybody goes to on the weekends for a picnic. It's pretty remote. it's 330 acres but this 330 acre state park is surrounded by 24 000 acres of forest land and the whole thing i guess started with um convict leasing so this this area is like really dark yeah you know no totally and if you look at you know they do these aerial shots in the documentary of this prison that we're about to talk about and it's just you know it's in the middle of nowhere, like at the bottom of, you know, sort of a ravine and very inhospitable.

11:35I mean, you'd like to think about places like Alaska being like, you know, some of the most inhospitable places in the United States. But I mean, the mountains of northeastern Tennessee are no joke. No. And this area is inhospitable because of its terrain and in part because of the weather and the elevation. Yeah. But the whole reason there's a prison there is because back in the 19th century, Tennessee started making money by leasing its prisoners, convicts, to mining companies, coal mining companies. Just make a little extra on the side from forcing your prisoners to engage in hard labor, right?

12:11Well, I think in our, man, I need to keep a list of all of our episodes handy because I can't remember the name of it, but do you remember that one war, the strike war in the 19th century, and I think coal mines in - Matawan. Matawan, yes. Thank you. In that episode, we talked a lot about what happened also in Tennessee's coal mines where the labor was taking on management and it was resulting in wars. Well, one of the things that resulted out of this in Tennessee was that the laborers, the free laborers who worked for the coal mining companies would frequently help the convicts whose labor was being leased out by the state escape.

12:51And so Tennessee was like, well, fine, we're not doing that anymore. But undeterred, they just started setting up their own coal mines and using the prisoners directly instead of leasing them out. Exactly. And they needed somewhere to put those prisoners. So our workers, I guess, slash prisoners. So they built a new prison. It is called Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. And in the 1930s, a lot of that land eventually became that great conservation area that we were talking about, those 24 ,000 acres. and the New Deal era Civilian Conservation Corps built a lot of trails. It became a natural area, you know, officially in the 1970s, but there are these trails there now.

13:34Not like, again, like you said, not like a lot of state park trails that you go to. A lot of these trails are still pretty rough. The prison stayed open, but why we're telling you all this is for a couple of reasons. One is at one point in the race, they navigate through a tunnel, like a little water channel that goes under the prison. And that's part of the race route where you're definitely going to get your feet wet. I don't think we mentioned you're running through rivers and things. So like wet feet and it's just a part of the challenge of this race. Yeah. But the prison remained open. And James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., was sent there with six other men.

14:16He escaped in 1977 from Brushy Mountain and spent 54 hours in that rugged terrain, eventually being recaptured about eight miles from the prison. And Lazarus Lake, old Laz Cantrell, heard this story, heard they made it only eight miles in that 54 hours. And he said, man, I could travel 100 miles through that terrain in 54 hours. So he invents this race sort of inspired by this. He said that he still gets hate mail every year and angry letters for people that think it's some sort of tribute to James Earl Ray. And he's like, no, it's the opposite. Like it was started because I'm making fun of the fact that this guy only made it eight miles and we're doing 100.

15:05Right. 130, really. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. We know the name of the marathon. We know where it takes place. We know who started it and where it came from. And we'll be back with more of the Barkley Marathons right after this.

15:51So, like you said, I think in 1977, James Earl Ray escapes and Cantrell lived in the area. He said it was big news at the time. So he was aware of this. And a few years later, he and his friend Carl Hinn, known as Raw Dog, for reasons that I don't want to ask about. I don't think it was in 1985. You don't know? All right. You're a good point. So they decided to hike into the state park. This is a place where he's like, OK, like we could totally do so many more than eight miles in 54 hours. Let's go check this out and have fun. And like you said, most of this area are not nature trails where like there are signs posted.

16:31There's a path you can look down and follow. Like these are hard to find trails that you need to know how to use a compass, a contour map. Like you have to be good at orienteering is what it's called. That's right. In addition to hiking and putting up with all sorts of terrible, just uncomfortable stuff and pushing your limits. So these guys were like, let's just go for a fun hike for a day. Yeah. And they showed up there. there was a park ranger that was like you guys should leave like you shouldn't be out there it's like it's not like you think you're gonna get lost you're gonna get hurt you're gonna need rescue uh they ignored him they did make it through they did an eight mile they didn't even like yeah know his his existence yeah he just walked right by uh they made this eight mile hike uh this loop but it took him a full day which is you know you're you should be able to hiked much more than eight miles in a day.

17:30And it required a lot of orienteering, like you said, and paying attention to that kind of thing. And he said, all right, I think I have an idea here for a race. Let's make a nearly impossible to finish race. I think it's kind of hard to tell because there's not a website for this. You can't get like historical. I mean, people have written about it since then, but you can't get like the official website documentation on this race in history because it doesn't exist. They keep it very much under wraps. So the way he tells it on the documentary, it was always supposed to be 100 miles, but no one ever did more than the first three loops out of the five.

18:09Yeah. I think, though, maybe this first version was shorter. It was about a 50 to 55-mile course. It was held over April Fool's Day weekend, 1986, And the initial cutoff was 24 hours with 13 participants and zero people finishing. Yeah, and this is just a 50 to 55 mile version. Like you said, officially, the current Barkley Marathon is 100 mile. And in reality, it's also like 120 to 130 miles based on reports from people who've actually run it, right? Yeah, I mean, he changes the route every year a little bit. That's why it varies. But the year they did the documentary, it was documented at 130.

18:52And everybody is like, it's not 100. Just stop saying that. So the first version, like you said, is three loops. And it wasn't until two years after the first one that somebody completed it. And I mean, we're talking like dozens of people attempting this. And it took three times before one person finished. finished um and there was a something about this that i don't know if we've mentioned yet just this first version there was an elevation gain of 24 000 feet so all of the times you went up and down if you count all the ups it would equal 24 000 feet in elevation that you've climbed over these three loops um and that is a lot and in fact the guy who finished frozen ed fertile Yeah.

19:42He was just Ed Fertal until he won, and from then on he was frozen Ed Fertal. Yeah. He thought that there was a misprint in Ultra Running Magazine that the elevation was actually 2 ,400 feet, not 24 ,000. Yeah, and I guess we can go ahead and tell everybody the current iteration, like we said, is supposedly 100, but it's really more like 130 miles. It's got a 60-hour time limit. and the elevation is the total elevation climb over that race, if you finish it, is 60 ,000 feet, which is equivalent to walking up and back down Mount Everest twice. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, the total elevation is 120 ,000 because, yeah, if you go up 60 ,000 feet and you're coming back down, you got to come down 60 ,000 feet.

20:32Yes, it's harder to climb up, But it's not that easy to go down, too, especially if you're on an incline. And that's a big part of it, too, is sliding into things like briars and saplings. And it's rough. Like, just watching, like, the effects on some of the runners' bodies and, like, what they were coming back to camp looking like was pretty bad. Some guy had, like, a head wound, and they show him, like, slipping on rocks and hitting his forehead. It was really nuts what these people are doing to themselves. Yeah, I mean, their legs are all just because these briars, they have to go through one part, which is a really heavy briar area.

21:10But every single person's legs are just thrashed. Like looks like ground meat. Oh, yeah. Like disgusting, bleeding. Their feet are disgusting and blistered and just riddled. I think the one guy that we'll get to the stops, but the one guy, they were like, it would take you eight hours to fully dry your feet out. So, you know, you can't, you're not going to get dry feet. Right. Which is a big problem. And they're basically not sleeping. Right. When you complete a loop, you have what's called an interlooper period where you can do whatever you want. You can take however much time you want. You can get first aid.

21:50You can eat. You can drink. You can rest. You can change your clothes and socks. You can take a nap if you want. But that clock is still running. So how long you wait is up to you. I think the winner that year said he slept about an hour total. So just try staying up and awake for 60 hours in a chair. Without drugs. Yeah, exactly. People are doing this. And, you know, we say it's a run. Like a lot of this is hiking and bouldering and walking and crawling. So it's not like they're running the whole time, but it's just brutal. Yeah. It really is. One of the other things that really kind of gets us across, too, is in what you said.

22:33So you've got 60 hours to finish. And from the start, the clock's always ticking, right? Yeah. But you're going 130 miles. So if you do the math, Olivia helps us with this, and she pointed out that— Thank goodness. Yeah. You could sleep for two eight-hour nights and still finish this course at a 20-minute mile pace, which you can basically do on your hands and knees, and still complete it within the 60-hour cutoff. So the fact that some people can't even finish the first loop goes to show you how difficult this is, that if it were flat, it would be beyond easy. But those same limits, the time limit and the length put on this particular terrain or in this topography, it changes absolutely everything.

23:22Oh, yeah. This 12-hour time limit per loop must have come in after the documentary, right? Yeah, that confused me, too, because they were finishing in, like, 13 hours and something like that. I didn't get that. So, yeah, I think it must have been a new one. Yeah, I think so. So, finishing the three loops, if you finish three loops, that is considered a fun run. And that is a designation. And that is a huge accomplishment just to finish the fun run. We should add he also has a baby Barkley in the fall, the Barkley Fall Classic, which is a 50K, so 31 miles, and that has about 400 runners. But only about 35 to 40 participants are allowed per year to compete in this thing because it's out in nature, so the state won't let them have hundreds of people.

24:12Not a ton of people can go watch. It's just like family, and I think some former winners can be there. and it's a pretty small operation because they just can't run roughshod over the area. But they have the 60 hours to complete. Now, 12 hours per loop. The first loop is run clockwise. The second loop, which is at night, will go counterclockwise. And then again, day, night, clockwise, counterclockwise. And then this is pretty devious. The final fifth loop, if you get there, the first person to finish the fourth gets a choice, which way they want to run. And then they start splitting people up because almost everybody runs with a buddy or two.

24:56It really, really helps to have someone out there and they're really helping each other. But at the end, he's like, you're going to lose your buddy. Which way do you want to run? And the first person will say, I'll go clockwise. The next person has to go counterclockwise. And then they alternate. So at some point, if they finish that fifth loop, they're going to pass their former buddy going in the opposite direction. Right. Yeah. And in the documentary, Cantrell points out like these by this time, these people who had like formed serious bonds by running together loops are now direct competitors.

25:29Like now it's a race because they're in the fifth loop and whoever's going to finish in what time they finish. Yeah. Yeah. Is going to determine the actual winner. Like now there's a possible winner. Yeah. And everything changes. So I don't they probably don't like class pans. And then, you know, they're pulled apart, you know, sadly, when they have to go in different directions at that point. Yeah, I think it's probably, it makes it a lot tougher. But I get the idea that if you make it, if you're one of the maybe two, maybe three, maximum four people that are even on the fifth loop, then that's when things get serious.

26:04That's when it turns into an actual race. Yeah, that's what I took it as, too. And one thing that I didn't get, I got from context. I didn't see it anywhere because I guess it's so obvious. No one thought it needed to be spelled out except me. But it's the same loop, right? Yeah. Okay. So they're doing the same loop five times, which is why they do it clockwise and counterclockwise and different ones at day and night so that you can't just be like, yeah, I remember this. This is nothing. Now I remember exactly what the trail is. you're super disoriented the first time, but it's not like you have it down pat after that first loop necessarily.

26:40Yeah. And it definitely doesn't seem like it gets easier because they were finishing when they were fresh legged at loop one, they were finishing in about eight or nine hours for the fastest times. And then those fastest people were doing like 12 and 13 hours on the next loop through the darkness. Yeah. And we should mention the weather, you know, it's with these huge elevation changes, you're going to go from temperatures sometimes in April in the 80s, where it's low, to like 10 degrees at night. They have about 100 gallons of water they put out randomly on the course. Like there are no technical water stations, but you'll just happen upon a jug of water.

27:20And Laz said that, you know, one year they were 108-pound blocks of ice because it was 10 degrees at elevation. Yeah. It's just crazy. I say we take a break and talk about how you would get into this race and then what it's actually like running it. Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

27:43Okay.