Download the barkley marathons9/3/2023 One runner this year saw his attempt end when he lost a running belt containing all the pages, and though he found it, doing so required him to spend "nearly three hours essentially doing hill repeats on a section known as Little Hell." Fun! Runners must retrieve pages from a series of books scattered throughout the course to prove they completed a full lap, with page numbers corresponding to their bib numbers. The race was inspired by James Earl Ray's 1977 escape from prison in the same part of the Appalachians-really-and preceded by the lovingly named "Idiot's Run," which organizers bragged of as "the the single grimmest race held anywhere in the world," so pretty much everything about its founding points to it being the product of twisted minds. Descriptions of notable points along the course (July Ridge: "In 2006, runner Dan Baglione set a course record for futility, when he got lost here, two miles into the course, for 32 hours.") sound less like descriptions of a voluntarily contested race and more like something a sadistic Dark Souls NPC would say ("Runners use leather gloves to pull themselves up Danger Dave's Climbing Wall, an 80 percent gradient of rocks and mud that ascends 400 feet in one-fifth of a mile.") A lap is roughly 20 miles with roughly 12,000 feet of elevation gain, though completing a lap cleanly is notoriously difficult in its own right, as there are no course markers, GPS devices are banned, a good deal of the race takes place in the dark, and the terrain is extremely imposing. This year was no easier.įor a runner to finish Barkley, they have to complete five laps within 60 hours. Only 15 total people have finished the race in the 36 years it's been run. Tennessee's Barkley Marathons stand alone in the world of big-time ultramarathons, chiefly because runners are less concerned with finishing with a good time than finishing at all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |