A Hollywood thriller of a race
The Barkley Marathons is more art than running race, especially with a nail-biting finish like the one we witnessed this year
Ah, the Barkley Marathons. I sometimes wonder, if I hadn’t seen the film, would I care about this race? Or would it be like the tree falling in the woods that no one hears? Would it even make a sound?
But after seeing the film (or films) and getting to know the folklore, and the icon that is the race director, Lazarus Lake, each year I find myself being sucked in to the Twitter feed of Keith, the only official media coverage of the race.
If you don’t know anything about the Barkley Marathons, the standout stat is that in 35 years, before this week, only 17 people had ever finished it. Many races claim to be the toughest, the hardest on earth etc, but this is the one. The baddest of the bad.
It’s “only” 100 miles and has a seemingly generous cut-off time of 60 hours. Compare that to the UTMB, for example, which takes place in huge, towering mountains, is slightly longer at about 105 miles, and has a cutoff time of 48 hours. And yet thousands of people finish it each year.
Why Barkley is so tough would take this entire Musings, or an entire film, to explain. But suffice to say it drives even the toughest ultra runners to the very edge of their capabilities.
“People want to find their limit,” Lazarus Lake says in the film. “But you can’t find that limit until you try to do something more.” For most people, the Barkley Marathons is that more, that step beyond their limit.
People often ask me if I’d consider taking it on, to write a book about it. But while I seriously thought I could possibly run around a half-mile block in New York for 52 days, I know I’d have no chance of finishing the Barkley. I’d be lucky to make it around two of the five loops (40 miles).
The race is not without its detractors. People say it’s cliquey and exclusive. With only about 40 starters each year and no transparent entry process, it does seem to include many of the same runners year after year. It’s unashamedly Lazarus Lake’s pet project, and it seems as though he has to like the idea of you running it if you want to get in. You have to be someone he deems a good fit for the race.
Yet despite this, the naysayers are few and far between. I think people see it more as a piece of living theatre, or a work of performance art, than as a race we should all be able to enter if we want. It sits in its own world, and most of the ultra running community seems content to watch on from the sidelines (99% of us secure in the knowledge that we would have no chance of getting around even if we did get a place in the race).
As a work of art, it has numerous quirks. For example, the start time is only announced an hour before the start, and that can be in the middle of the night (as it was this year). The runners have to find books hidden in the woods and tear out pages to prove they’ve been everywhere on the course. And the only official updates for the watching world come from a man named Keith who tweets sporadically and often cryptically.
To follow the race means piecing together bits of information, like some sort of game. A few people take this to the Nth degree, compiling spreadsheets and cross-checking stats and data to work out what’s going on. For example, a few people noticed that Damian Hall had gone quiet on Strava in the days leading up to the race and so speculated, correctly, that he was in the race.
Keith initially only refers to the runners by his own idiosyncratic descriptions. So on the first lap we had “guy with very daring shorts”, “guy with awesome glasses”, “man in black” and “small European woman”.
People quickly guessed that that was Jasmin Paris, who last year had become the first woman ever to finish four of the five loops. No woman had ever finished the race - and the great Courtney Dauwalter had attempted it twice.
A ripple of excitement ran through the Barkley internet-verse at the first confirmed sighting of Jasmin Paris. Photographers out on the course confirm the online guesswork when they start posting pictures on Instagram. In this first picture (below) Jasmin had an intense look of focus on her face. She wasn’t messing about.
As the hours, and days, passed, more and more runners dropped out. Seventeen hours in, half the field had dropped out. And there were still 43 hours left to go.
I’m sure you all know what happened? In the last hour we refreshed and refreshed Twitter for any updates. Four runners had completed the race - the most ever. Damian Hall, who had started the final loop in good time, over an hour ahead of his final loop start time last year, came back to camp having failed to find one of the books in the dark on that final lap … again. Another incredibly close effort.
The only person still out there in that last hour, one of only two female starters, was Jasmin Paris. As the minutes ticked by, everyone across the world - everyone in the Barkley-verse at least - was praying she would make it. That must have been a lot of people, because #smalleuropeanwoman was now trending as the number one hashtag on Twitter.
Unless you were actually there, the only way to know what was going on was to refresh Keith’s Twitter feed. Nothing. Nothing. Two minutes left. Nothing. One minute left. Nothing. The time was up. Damn it. She hadn’t made it.
Then his tweet popped up: “Jasmin Paris finished loop five of the #BM100 in 59:58:21.” Oh. My. God. After almost 60 hours, she had made it with 99 seconds to spare. Wow.
The footage, when it surfaced, was as dramatic as you’d expect, as she hauled her broken self up the final stretch, barely able to see, but running, then slumping over the finishing gate and collapsing to the floor. If this race was a work of art, then this year’s ending was the pièce de résistance. Pure drama.
The internet has barely stopped talking about it since. The article about the race was the most-read story on the BBC website that day - ahead of the stories about Kate Middleton’s cancer and the attack in Moscow. It was the most-read story in the Guardian’s sport section. She was on BBC news, where she revealed what she was thinking as she made her way along that final stretch.
“It was the thought that if I didn’t make it,” she said, “I’d have to come back and do the whole thing again, because I would have never let it rest.” At that moment I can imagine what a driving force that thought must have been. No, not again. Not ever again. Let’s finish this now!
Perhaps the final word, though, should go to the artist, the puppet master behind the scenes, Lazarus Lake, who being a bit old school, still uses Facebook to share his thoughts. He said that Jasmin was actually in a bit of a mess after loop four (perhaps unsurprisingly) and that he had considered telling her to stop, or at least to wait a while until she felt better before carrying on. But, he says:
the clock was running
and every second had counted for a long, long time.
jasmin was not just some ordinary athlete.
she had proven herself many times over.
the weather was not life threatening…
.
but most of all she was on the verge of a transformative performance.
she deserved to decide the outcome of her race "out there”
so i just watched her head out into the darkness.
.
the rest of the story the world knows….
.
or knows most of it.
if you have not been "out there”
your mind cannot create an image of just how hard it is
nor of the sheer horror that is that course.
whatever superlative you want to apply to her performance,
it was better than that.
He then generously adds, “But that applies to four other athletes as well.” Yes, let’s not forget those guys. Still now, only 20 people in history have finished this race. And every one of them has been to the gates of hell and walked through and come out the other side.
Damian Hall joked afterwards: “I congratulate myself on smartly avoiding a #BM100 finish this year (as it may have been overshadowed).”
I’m sure he would have loved to finish, but like all good works of art, the narrative is everything, and third time lucky, after two spectacular failures, is so much more dramatic and incredible than simply nailing it first time. Just ask Jasmin Paris.