Cabbages and Kings

The Race that Eats Its Young

You don’t run the Barkley Marathons to come in first. You run to come in at all.

Image credit Dara Barnwell. Wouldn't you like to go running in the woods around this abandoned max-security prison? Yes, you would.

On June 10, 1977, nine years into serving his ninety-nine-year prison sentence for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Earl Ray, along with six other inmates of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee, scaled a twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, and escaped into the wilderness. Ray had previously escaped the Missouri State Penitentiary on a bread truck and had evaded the FBI over the course of a three-month, four-nation manhunt after killing King, but the northeast Tennessee backcountry, with its mountains, dense undergrowth, poison ivy, bears, and mercurial weather, bested him. After two and a half days, the authorities found him face down in the brush (albeit alive), only eight miles from the prison.

Most people might be piqued by the story’s strangeness, or relieved that one of America’s most infamous criminals was caught after escaping from prison. They probably wouldn’t think, “I could do better”, or set up a grueling, intentionally bizarre, and soul-crushing annual race in that same wilderness to mock James Earl Ray’s pathetic bushwhacking skills.

Gary Cantrell is not, and never was, most people. Nicknamed “the Leonardo da Vinci of pain” by Trail Runner Magazine, Cantrell — or, as he’s christened in the ultrarunning community, Lazarus Lake (don’t ask me why) — was confident that he could have gone a hundred miles. In 1986, after experimenting with various loops through the Cumberland Mountains, he inaugurated the first Barkley Marathons, named for his old friend and running buddy Barry Barkley. In those forty years, only twenty people have ever finished it — none of them Gary.

Don't let the "backcountry Santa" look fool you . . . he mustn't be trusted! Image credit Ultrarunner Magazine

If you want to enter next year’s Barkley Marathons (even if you think you do, you don’t, and by the time you finish this article, you’ll know you don’t) — good luck. There is no website and no easily accessible application process. The few thousand or so ultrarunners (an ultrarun is any distance longer than a marathon — this is also why “Barkley Marathons” is plural) who figured out the correct email to write to did so only after an intense ordeal of internet sleuthing, possibly with some help solicited or coerced from Barkley veterans, who aren’t exactly spilling the beans online.

You must then submit an entry form full of bizarre and irrelevant questions to answer, then an essay on why you think you should be allowed to run the race . . . and submit it in exactly the right minute of the right day. Your application will still have to compete with thousands of others. The frustrating nature of the process (some people have to keep applying for years before they get in) is deliberate: just having the mental grit to apply is an indication that you might be a good candidate for such a psychically torturous race, and making everything difficult, quirky, and frustrating is the Barkley’s modus operandi. The forty accepted racers receive a letter of condolence from Gary/Laz, who picks one unwilling racer to be a “human sacrifice” every year. The “sacrifice”, though an accomplished runner who “deserves to be there” (a damning judgement if ever there was one) is told that, in Laz’s eyes, they have no chance at finishing the race.

Sometime between February and April, the forty converge on Frozen Head State Park, which butts up against the now-defunct maximum-security prison. In addition to the $1.60 entrance fee, first-time runners of the Barkley bring a license plate from their state or country, which joins hundreds of other tribute plates hung at the race’s yellow starting gate. Sometime between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m, Lazarus Lake blows a conch horn to signal that the race will begin in an hour. The runners line up at the starting gate and Lake lights a cigarette to start the race. They take off.

The physical challenge of the Barkley should be obvious. A hundred-miler is already daunting, and ultrarunners are frequently strained and exhausted to the point of hallucination in its final miles. Competitors in the Barkley Marathons run day and night for two and a half days, facing mud, steep slopes, foot-long saw briars, dehydration, sleep deprivation, heavy rain/sleet/heat/snow (sometimes all in the course of a race), and bears if they happen to be along the route, usually logging more in the neighborhood of 130 miles. There are only two water stations, and with the exception of a crew member waiting at the loop’s start-finish gate, no assistance except what they and fellow runners bring in their backpacks.

Image credit Maggie Gigandet

At one point, racers run through a tunnel under Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary (a tunnel which, unsurprisingly, can be flooded waist-deep with rain) and past the wall Ray hopped over in a nod to the pathetic escape which inspired Cantrell’s race.

But running the Barkley is a stressful mental challenge as well. The race course is a twenty-mile loop run five times through the wilderness on unmarked trails, which are hard to trace in the day and infuriatingly confusing at night, with nothing but the directions runners copied on their maps back at camp to guide them. Competitors run two loops clockwise, then two loops counterclockwise, then a fifth loop that might be either: after the first runner to begin a fifth loop chooses a direction, the second must choose the opposite direction, and so on. To prove they ran the full loop, runners must find between nine and fifteen books placed on the course as they go (the number varies every year) and tear out the page number that corresponds to their bib. They receive a new bib with each loop. (The books tend to have scary names like A Time to Die and Heart of Darkness.) Whenever a racer drops out due to missing a book or sheer frustration and pain, a bugle plays “Taps” back at camp — a sound that rings out through the Tennessee woods all the first night.

The Barkley, therefore, is a grueling ultramarathon and an unusually tough orienteering contest and a scavenger hunt — and oh yeah, I forgot, you have only sixty hours to finish it (sixty hours to run a hundred miles), on a sleep-deprived, hallucinating brain. All but one of the finishers have advanced degrees, and most of them have science or engineering backgrounds. (Runners who finish three loops in sixty hours receive priority in next year’s applications as finishers of, I kid you not, the “fun run”.)

In short, every step of the race is designed to bring you to your knees. It’s no wonder that only twenty people have finished the run on time in forty-one years. It is a wonder (at least to me) that no one has died at the Barkley (yet).

Jasmin Paris was the first woman Barkley finisher in 2024. Image credit UltraRunner Magazine.

It tickles me to think that the first Barkley was held while James Earl Ray was still in prison at Brushy Head, only miles from the yellow gate. I wonder if he could hear the sound of Lake blowing the conch horn, or the bugle playing “Taps” over and over as runner after runner dropped out of the race that was originally conceived to mock him. Ray is dead, but Gary Cantrell’s bizarre, soul-crushing, and addictive ultramarathon lives on, with newbies applying and veterans returning year after year to push themselves to the limits in the Tennessee Wilderness and prove their strength, wits, whimsy, and grit against the Race that Eats Its Young.

Why do they do it? As three-time finisher John Kelly put it, “Sure, I’ve hit my limits in other ways. . . but not in this way where I’m forced to stare my limitations right in the face and see if I can figure out a way around them, right then and right there. It is a truly unique experience, and I’m constantly longing for that type of challenge and the opportunity to overcome it . . . But no matter what, I'm going to enjoy it, and relish the opportunity to try.”

Learn more:

Bysouth, Alex. “Barkley Marathons: Inspired by a prison break, is this the world’s toughest race?” BBC Sport, published 30 March 2019. https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/47040763

Gigandet, Maggie. “Meet Frozen Ed, The Barkley Marathons’ First Finisher.” trailrunner, published 20 May 2022. https://www.trailrunnermag.com/people/meet-frozen-ed-the-barkley-marathons-first-finisher/?scope=anon

Kelly, John. “How to Apply to Barkley”. Random Forest Runner, published 1 May 2017. http://randomforestrunner.com/2017/05/how-to-apply-to-barkley/

Levene, Abby. “What You Need to Know About the Barkley Marathons”. Run, updated 19 March 2025. https://run.outsideonline.com/news/barkley-marathons-2024/?_ga=2.54581355.1137621813.1773632991-1912943810.1773632991&scope=anon

Metzler, Brian. “Amid Cold, Rainy Weather, No One Finishes the 2026 Barkley Marathons.” Runner’s World, published 16 February 2026. https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a70378899/barkley-marathons-results-2026/

Ranson, Sophie. “The Barkley Marathons: the hellish 100-mile race with 15 finishers in 36 years.” The Guardian, published 28 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jun/28/the-barkley-marathons-the-hellish-100-mile-race-with-15-finishers-in-36-years

Sebastian Weinkopf is a senior from Southern California, currently taking AP Government and Politics with Mr. Munson. He enjoys jiujitsu, reading, running, and controversy.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse