These Celebs Ran the 2024 NYC Marathon A year after a record The Foot Locker XC Championships Are Ending Barkley Marathons last March, this year’s edition near Wartburg, Tennessee was much tougher.
Despite mild weather and relatively good conditions, none of the roughly 45 runners entered in the event known as “the race that eats its young” completed the course in this year’s event, which ended late Wednesday night.
The notoriously hard ultra-distance trail running race typically consists of five 20- to 26-mile loops on and off trails in the hilly terrain in Frozen Head State Park. The course, which is often wet and slippery, has lots of climbing and descending, plus debilitating sections of bushwhacking. As an added challenge, runners have to tear out specific pages of books placed along the course.
Runners have 13 hours and 20 minutes to complete each loop and 60 hours to complete the entire course. But since event director Gary Cantrell, aka “Lazarus Lake” started it in 1995, it has only been finished 26 times by 20 runners. As a consolation, anyone finishing three loops in under 40 hours gets credit for earning the event’s tongue-in-cheek “fun run” accolade.
Last year, A year after a record the race under the 60-hour limit—Ihor Verys (Canada), John Kelly (Tennessee), Jared Campbell (Utah), Greig Hamilton (New Zealand), and Jasmin Paris (Great Britain). Campbell became the first four-time finisher, Kelly became the second runner to finish three times, and Paris became the first woman to finish the race—with just 99 seconds to spare.
But after that, Cantrell mused that he needed to make the course tougher, and apparently he and successor, Carl Laniak, added a new section to the course that added at least 45 minutes to each loop.
This year’s race began on Tuesday morning. Laniak blew the conch shell at 10:37 a.m. ET, marking one hour until the start of the event. And then, true to tradition, the race began 60 minutes later when Cantrell lit a cigarette. And, very quickly, the course took its toll on runners, and the majority of the runners in the field failed to complete the first loop.
“The thing is, they are coming back to camp from all directions and in some cases cannot describe where they were,” unofficial Barkley onsite chronicler Keith Dunn wrote on X. “This is old school Barkley.”
From there, it was more of the same as the Barkley course continued to chew up runners. This year, only four men of the 35 men in the field completed the second loop—Kelly, Japan’s Tomokazu Ihara and French athletes Maxime Gauduin, and Sébastien Raichon—but none completed the loop in time to start the fourth lap. Kelly, in his ninth Barkley start, completed the third loop in 39:50:27 to earn the “fun run” status.
Several strong women were entered in the field this year, including Americans Kelly Halpin (Wyoming), Christiana Rugloski (Colorado), Dena Carr (Texas), as well as French ultrarunner Claire Bannwarth and Isobel Ross of Australia. Bannwarth, a two-time winner of the Winter Spine Race in England, set a new fastest known time on the 500-mile Colorado Trail, seemed to be the strongest candidate at the start, but none finished the first loop in time to continue on the course.
Brian Metzler is a Boulder, Colorado, writer and editor whose work has appeared in Runner’s World, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Outside, Trail Runner, The Chicago Tribune, and Red Bulletin. He’s a former walk-on college middle-distance runner who has transitioned to trail running and pack burro racing in Colorado.
