Barkley Marathons: $1.60, a License Plate and a Cigarette

01How the Barkley Marathons began with a jailbreak

In 1977, James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, escapes from Brushy Mountain prison in Tennessee. He spends about 54 hours on the run in the woods and covers only 8 to 12 miles, depending on the source. Gary Cantrell, alias Lazarus Lake (“Laz”), finds the score pitiful: he insists he would have covered at least 100. With his friend Karl Henn, he creates the race, whose first edition is run in 1986 in Frozen Head State Park.

02An essay and $1.60

Want to run? You write an essay titled “Why I should be allowed to run in the Barkley” and you pay $1.60. If it's your first time (you are then a “virgin” in the race's jargon), you also bring a license plate from your state or country. Probably the best price-to-suffering ratio on the calendar.

03A conch, then a cigarette

No starting pistol. Laz blows a conch: you have one hour left to get ready. Then he lights a cigarette, at the park's yellow gate. That's the start.

04Books hidden in the forest

Five loops, 60 hours to finish. Officially 20 miles per loop; runners tend to count closer to 26. Along an unmarked course, books are hidden, around ten of them. At each one, you tear out the page that matches your bib number. At the end of each loop, those pages are your proof of passage.

0599 seconds: the Barkley's finishers

The numbers are dizzying: 20 finishers in 40 years of history according to iRunFar (26 finishes in total, some runners having finished more than once, according to Outside). The record year, 2024, has five finishers. Ihor Verys is the first, in 58:44:59. And Jasmin Paris, a British veterinarian, becomes the first woman to finish: 59:58:21, 99 seconds before the cutoff.

Since then, nobody. No finisher in 2025. None in 2026, when France's Sébastien Raichon completes a three-loop “Fun Run” in 38:05.