The Knoxville Marathon is happening this weekend. It's a great event, and everybody taking part deserves respect for the time and effort involved in training and racing.
But it's worth pointing out that an endurance event of almost unimaginably greater scale, the Barkley Marathons, is taking place this weekend just up the road at Frozen Head State Park, northwest of Oak Ridge and Oliver Springs. Former participants say it's one of the toughest ultramarathons anywhere in the country, or the world, and they have a good case. The course record is just under 56 hours; that's less than two miles an hour, which would be equal to a 13-hour marathon. Considering that the course record for the Western States Endurance Run in California, which is also 100 miles, is just over 15 hours, you can get some sense of the scale here.
The race starts Saturday morning and consists of five 20-mile (or maybe a little bit longer) loops through the park, much of it off-trail, some of it through brush and briar patches, with something like 50,000 feet of elevation gain. That's about like climbing Mt. Everest. Twice. (The 60-mile, three-loop version of the race is what these people consider the "Fun Run.") The Barkley has been held since 1986, and about 800 people have started it. Last year's winner, Jonathan Basham, however, was only the ninth runner to finish the full five loops inside the 60-hour cutoff time. If anybody finishes this year--and there's some speculation that maybe the race will have its first two-time finisher--it will be sometime Monday afternoon or evening.
The race has its own culture of sadistic perversity. There are no entry forms, no website, certainly no Facebook page or official Twitter feed. Race founder and organizer Gary Cantrell got the idea for the run after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin, James Earl Ray, escaped from Brushy Mountain (which is adjacent to Frozen Head) in 1977 and could only get a few miles away in three days. The course directions, which change every year, are designed to get you lost. Cantrell sends notes of condolence to the runners who get into the race every year.
Eli Saslow of The Washington Post wrote about the Barkley in 2007. There's a new story about last year's race at Runner's World this week. There's also a book, written by Barkley finisher Ed "Frozen Dog" Furtaw, called Tales From Out There.
So hats off to all the regular marathon (and half-marathon and 5K) runners this week. But let's also all take a few minutes to worry about the poor demented souls who will be out there, as they say, for the Barkley this weekend.
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