The first year, 1985, we had 13 people who came to try it. We started putting out word within the ultrarunning community that we were going to have a race. The next day, after making it all the way around, we told the rangers that we had friends who would like to run that course. When we showed the rangers our route, they told us we wouldn’t be able to make it. So we went up there in 1985 for a backpacking trip to scout out the area. When Ray escaped, he was out for 54 hours and they found him only eight miles from the prison. They call those mountains the ‘third wall’: If you get over the first two walls of prison, you’re not going to escape the third.
Gary “Laz” Cantrell, Barkley Marathons Co-Founder: After James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., he was held in the park in Brushy Mountain State Prison, which is where they kept the worst of the worst because it’s surrounded by the Tennessee Mountains. We talked to two of the race’s original organizers and one determined competitor to get the story behind “the race that eats its young.” Genesisīarkley’s co-creators drew inspiration from the rugged landscape of Frozen Head State Park in the Tennessee Mountains-and the story of a notorious killer. Runners have to decode a byzantine entry procedure just to get in the door, and the entry fee for newcomers is a license plate from their home state. Off the course, the Barkley is no less of a challenge. And every time someone does, the course is tweaked. Only 14 hardy souls have completed the full distance since the race started in 1986, including two runners at this year’s edition in April. So what, exactly, is the Barkley Marathons, the legendary event that every year draws 40 people to Tennessee’s Frozen Head State Park to attempt to finish a 60,000-vertical-foot course in under 60 hours? Ask anyone who has tried it, and you’ll get one answer: It’s the most brutal race on earth. The course is barely marked, and forces competitors to negotiate mountains and thick underbrush in rapidly changing conditions, but the Barkley is not an adventure race. Runners competing in it slog through the mud, look for hidden checkpoints, and cross through a dark tunnel, but they’re not running in an obstacle race like Tough Mudder. The Barkley Marathons is 100 miles long, but it’s not an ultramarathon.
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