‘60 hours of hell’: hardship is the only way forward at the Barkley Marathons

Endurance race designer and creator of the Barkley Marathon Gary Cantrell, also known as Lazarus Lake, from Tennessee, poses in Castanet-Tolosan near Toulouse in January 2025.Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

A month before the 2025 Barkley Marathons, Lazarus Lake is out on his daily eight-mile stroll along the rural roads near his Bell Buckle, Tennessee home. Pausing mid-step, he fixes his gaze on a vine creeping onto the asphalt – kudzu, the invasive scourge of the American South. Laz pins it with the toe of his worn-out shoe, then crushes it with a sharp twist. Pop. “Nature isn’t about balance,” he says, kicking the remains aside. “That’s a common misconception – it’s war.”

Frozen Head State Park, where he’s held the Barkley since 1986, has managed to fight off this botanical kraken – so far. Introduced from Japan in the 1930s to combat soil erosion, kudzu earned its reputation as “the plant that ate the South” by swallowing entire forests, abandoned houses, and telephone poles at a pace of up to a foot per day. The government once paid farmers to plant it; now they pay them even more to destroy it.

Frozen Head’s relatively intact ecosystem provides a natural defense, but its steep, scarred mountains bear witness to countless other invaders – a fitting setting, as Laz sees it, for the world’s toughest footrace, where change, adaptation and the struggle to survive play out over what Outside magazine once described as “60 hours of hell”.

The Barkley is combat – in 39 years, only 20 have finished this briar-gnarled ultramarathon. With books hidden in the woods as unmanned checkpoints, enough elevation gain to thwart a Sherpa, and a panic-inducing 12-hour start “window” – this run is more crucible than race.

Yet three broke the code in 2023, and a record-setting five finished in 2024. The answer, at first glance, seems obvious: perfect weather. Gone is the pea-soup-thick fog, the sudden torrential rains, and the mud-slop footing. But the deeper reasons aren’t as clear. One factor may be Laz’s decision to intervene.

A few years back, when temperatures climbed into the 80s, he retreated the start of the race into March. Traditionally anchored to April Fool’s weekend, a sly nod to the absurdity of its demands, it was a tactical move to outflank a spring creeping ever closer. The challenge for Laz has always been keeping the Barkley on the razor’s edge of possibility –where runners suffer but still stand a chance. That means holding it at winter’s retreat, before the heat takes hold and the trees fill out making navigation nearly impossible.

The day before this year’s race, I spot three-time-finisher John Kelly. He’s at the back of the line to check in. It’s been two years since I saw him, and he somehow looks younger – slightly tousled dishwater-blond hair, boyish face. I remind him of his pre-race hike that year, when he heard a staccato clatter, like a shaken maraca. The angry timber rattler began to coil. “I don’t think I’d ever seen one that early,” mutters Kelly, who grew up on the edge of the park.

“We’re not really certain what’s going on,” says a park ranger who shows up in camp. “It’s a bit of the frog in a boiling pot situation. But it’s not unusual for a snake to come out of their hole on a warm day.” He declines to be quoted – politics – and shies away from the word climate change.

Laz doesn’t. “Hell, I’ve been hiking in Frozen Head since before it was a park,” he counters. “These snakes aren’t just sunning a bit; they’re on the move. It’s Grandfather Syndrome. If you actually go out every day for 60 years and pay attention, it’s hard to watch. Fall is approaching spring from the other side. We’ve got one month of winter.”

The next morning, he sends 40 of the toughest ultrarunners in the world into the wilds by lighting a cigarette. Most are in shorts. “We might have to move it back to January,” Laz says later in the afternoon. His checked flannel jacket is off as the temperatures have now climbed into the low 70s.

To combat the recent string of finishers, he’s added severe nastiness to this year’s course. Just to get to the first book, runners will turn off-trail, tackle a 1,500-foot climb, then navigate their way down a treacherous 1,800-foot descent. From there, a new slope waits: Ball Bearing Hill. This and other navigational trickery led one Barkley veteran to predict that three, maybe four will make three loops – “no finishers.”

John Kelly is one of 11 who return from the first loop under the cutoff. Ten will go back out. Turning in his book pages, he says, “the course is on the verge of perfection”. Night has settled over the park, thick as coal, and he has no idea when he returns again – it will be 15 hours later, and all chances of a finish will be gone.

Throughout the night, Taps rings solemn through camp on an old bugle – honoring the many runners who’ve fallen short – while the few that remain press past rusting mining equipment wrapped in briars, brittle dynamite shacks, and caved in mines. “One wrong step,” Kelly had told me, “and you could find yourself at the bottom of one of those shafts.” Strip mining, deep mining, logging – all have exacted their toll. But nothing has proved as indomitable as nature unleashed by man’s misguided attempts to intervene.

Last year a runner was knocked sprawling by a dark, grunting beast. Originally brought to the Smoky Mountains for sport hunting, wild hogs bred with local hogs to create an aggressive, highly adaptable hybrid. The state responded by introducing legislation to allow open-season hunting year-round on them. This backfired spectacularly. Unrestricted hunting inadvertently encouraged people to illegally transport and release hogs into new areas, including Frozen Head, hoping to create additional hunting opportunities.

The ranger I spoke with had just “downed him” one the other night – more than 100, he said, in the last year. But he’s not naïve – that’s barely a dent. “I just want to keep them from the visitor center and the playgrounds.”

But invasive pests, whose larvae now survive increasingly mild winters, are proving the toughest foe yet. In the 1990s, a six-legged scourge barely 3mm long advanced from the south – the southern pine beetle. Once held in check by substantial winters, they bore through the bark and create intricate galleries in the phloem tissue. The pine responds by producing resin to “pitch out” the beetles, but when too many attack at once, the tree’s defenses are overwhelmed. Within weeks, their needles turn yellow, then red, before dropping entirely.

The next invader came in the form of innocent little tufts of what appeared to be lint – the hemlock woolly adelgid. This tiny aphid-like insect attaches itself to the base of hemlock needles and inserts specialized mouthparts to feed on the tree’s stored starches. Covered in a protective white, woolly wax that resembles cotton balls, a single adelgid can lay up to 300 eggs. The insects gradually drain the tree’s energy reserves, causing needle loss, branch dieback, and eventual death within four to 10 years.

In 2002, a metallic green beetle only about half an inch long arrived in Chicago as a stowaway in wooden packing materials – the emerald ash borer. It reached Tennessee in 2010, adding to the ecological pressure.

The earliest and perhaps most catastrophic scourge was the chestnut blight. It reached the park in the 1930s and killed an estimated four billion trees across the eastern United States. First discovered in 1904 at the Bronx Zoo, the fungal pathogen spread rapidly southward. From 1912 through 1914, the forest service sent crews wielding crosscut saws and axes through the woods to cut away a 60-mile “barrier zone.” The rhythmic chunk of steel biting wood echoed through valleys as hundred-year-old giants toppled in thunderous crashes. When Laz first hiked here in the early 70s, there were chestnut stumps “you could park a Volkswagen on.”

But the blight jumped the zone, and “Above the level of a man’s head,” observed naturalist Donald Culross Peattie, “the woods will never look the same again.”

Through this lens, each Barkley runner isn’t just battling distance, elevation, and Laz’s mind games – they’re moving through a landscape that’s fighting its own race against overwhelming odds.

Nearing the 40-hour mark, Frozen Head seemed to remember itself. “50 mile per hour wind, steady rain, less than 1:15 to go,” Keith Dunn, the Barkley Twitter man posts. “The runners better be on Ball Bearing Hill if they hope to get here in time. Wherever they are, things are getting intense. This is the Barkley.”

Hopes of a finish are long gone. All that’s left is a Fun Run – a special check-down finish of three loops. For this, Laz grants a cushion of four extra hours – but no runner arriving after that extended window can continue on to loop four. To proceed, they needed to start at the 36-hour mark. For the best of the best, it’s a consolation prize – but three are out there fighting to get it.

Those in camp wait and stare into the night. Ten minutes remain. Then a holler cuts through the silence and a light appears at the bottom of the hill – John Kelly. He reaches the gate in a desperate sprint. His haunted, hollow eyes move to his watch. He’s made it. The thought folds him over the gate. The two others won’t be so lucky. Laz stands nearby, under a budding oak, smoke curling from his cigarette. The Barkley has won.

To say Laz over corrected ignores the race’s history. After Kelly finished in 2017, it took another five years before anyone finished. Whenever the bar is raised, a readjustment period follows. It’s the way of things that live on the edge.

If you look hard enough, you can still spot chestnuts in the park, young ones. It’s been observed that though the trunks die, the roots often survive the blight to send up new shoots. Within 10 to 15 years, most will be infected again. Yet they persist despite near-certain failure, till one day they’ll adapt enough to thrive again.

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