Only two competitors were able to make it to the fourth loop in New Zealand’s Grieg Hamilton and Belgium’s Karel Sabbe. This year, for the fourth time in a row, no runners were able to complete the five-full laps of the course. Oh, and to add salt to the wound, if you bow out of the race you must surrender yourself at the start gate and listen to someone play a bugle to symbolise your tapping out. Your bib number is the page number you need to rip out of those books - if you are missing a page when you return from a loop, tough, you didn’t officially complete it and your race is now over. Each loop requires runners to make it to various points in the park and at those checkpoints are books that Cantrell has placed there. The bib also takes up a much more significant role in this marathon. They will have to combat freak weather, 60,000ft of elevation (the equivalent of going up and down Mount Everest twice) and enough thorns and thistles to ensure that a healthy dose of blood is spilt, along with the sweat and tears. Taking place in Frozen Head State Park, runners are taken through the park’s 24,000+ acres and by the now-closed Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Only 40 runners can compete every year and each runner has to pay a $1.60 application fee, fill out a form entitled "Why I Should be Allowed to Run in the Barkley" (returning runners must also supply Cantrell with a packet of Camel cigarettes) and all applicants are given a ‘letter of condolence’ if they are successful. This is a race like absolutely no other - even getting into the marathon is a challenge. It has seen more than 1,000 runners compete in it, yet only 15 individuals have ever finished and in this year’s instalment, which finished on Thursday, not a single runner was able to complete the entire route. Participants have just 60 hours to complete the full five-loop course (12 hours per-loop) of this 100-mile ultra (though most finishers end up running about 130+), across some of the nastiest terrain on Earth.
Thus, in 1986, the inaugural Barkley Marathon was born and 35 years later, it is still considered one of, if not the toughest ultra-marathon in the world. A paltry effort, believed Gary Cantrell, a Tennessee native who boldly claimed, “I could do at least 100 miles.” Ray was no Andy Dufresne though and, after just 55 hours and a massive police manhunt, he was found a mere eight miles across the prison’s treacherous backwoods. In 1977, James Earl Ray, the gunman behind the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr., embarked on an ill-fated escape from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in the town of Petros in Morgan County, Tennessee.
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