The Barkley Marathons - The Immortal Horizon - Part 2

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Not all group chats are the same.

Just like not all atoms are the same.

Adam Brody, for instance, uses WhatsApp to pin messages, send events, and settle debates using polls with his friends, all in one group chat.

Makes our guys' night easier.

But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp, which means he still can't find that text from his friends about where to meet.

Hang on, still scrolling.

No, the address is here somewhere.

It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be leading my boys into extreme danger tonight, but I'll need some masochists in need of therapy.

First up, two men for whom Doc is definitely just a nickname, Noah and Tom.

All right.

Well, riddle me this, Eli.

If I'm not a doctor, why would I have such easy access to so many drugs?

I mean, look, I too only need seven minutes before I'm finished, so it's a pretty good nickname.

Makes sense.

Exactly, yeah.

Humble Brad.

And also joining us tonight.

And also joining us tonight, two guys for whom a healthy sense of competition includes regicide, Heat and Cecil.

Okay, I'm not crazy.

Like the most important thing is going out there and having fun while you murder a king.

But not MLK.

Yeah, if you listen to last week episode, that's important.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Hey, patrons, without you, we might have to start a racism-themed extreme race to make ends meet.

The Hitler hike, the Goebbels Gallop, if you will.

Oh my god.

All fevered imaginings exclusively, thanks to you.

And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, no illusions.

What person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

Today, we're going to be covering the second half of The Immortal Horizon by Leslie Jameson.

And, Tom, even we couldn't fit that much crazy into a single episode.

You ready for the grand finale?

Let's finish this marathon.

All right, Tom.

Let's let Leslie take it away.

Julian has completed 500-mile races so far, as well as countless short ones.

And I once asked him why he does it.

He explained it like this.

He wants to achieve a completely insular system of accountability, one that doesn't depend on external feedback.

He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he's running, so that the desire to impress people or the shame of quitting won't constitute his sources of motivation.

Perhaps this kind of thinking is what got him his PhD at the age of 25.

It's hard to say.

No, it's not.

It's not hard to say at all.

Did he get a secret PhD?

Yeah,

from himself, we talked about it.

I feel like the institution must have known.

Barkley doesn't offer a pure form of this isolated drive or PhDs, but it comes pretty close.

Unless some asshole ruins it with a long-form article, in which case.

When it's midnight and it's raining and you're on the steepest hill you've ever climbed and you're bleeding from briars and you're alone and you've been alone for hours, it's only you around to witness yourself quit.

or continue.

And yes, you have a very deep desire to please a guy named Laz Lake,

both sexually and with material gifts.

Including that time you went to Liberia to get him a license plate offering.

But it's also very zen and detached and enlightened.

I just want to take a moment for the record and say that a PhD is significantly more impressive than running 100 miles by yourself.

There aren't any bobcats with a PhD.

You know what I'm saying?

Not a single one.

At four in the morning, the fire is bustling.

A few frontrunners are in camp preparing to head on to their third loops, gulping coffee or taking 15-minute naps in their tents.

It's as if the thought of the full weight of loneliness has inspired an urge toward companionship back here.

The same way Julian's hunger, when he stops for aid, makes me feel hungry, though I have done little to earn it.

Another person's pain registers as an experience in the perceiver, empathy as forced symmetry, a bodily echo.

That's just empathy, Leslie.

That's the word.

Empathy.

Also, you're also just supposed to be periodically hungry for like three times a day.

Like, regardless how many briar patches you've wrestled back, there's no need for a justification here, lady.

Just think, Les tells me, Julian's out there somewhere.

Out there is a phrase that comes up frequently around camp.

So frequently, in fact, that one of the regular racers, a wiry old man named Frozen Ed Furtaw, like Frozen Head, get it?

Who runs in sunset orange camo type?

What do they camouflage of?

A brush fire?

What is that?

Okay, well, you might be invisible next to other insane people in all this.

He self-published a book called Tales from Out There, The Barclay Marathons, The World's Toughest Trail Race.

The book details each year's comet trail of DNFs and includes an elaborate appendix listing other atrociously difficult trail races and explaining why they're not as hard.

Oh, okay.

This one's right below what it feels like to chew tinfoil on my reading list.

Yeah.

All right, but the fact that there's a book like that makes me feel like if we started a race where the rules were like, All right, you have to race barefoot and we get to kick you in the nuts the whole time.

Some of these idiots would sign up there.

Yeah.

And laws would sue us.

I was proud of Julian, I tell Laz.

It was dark and cold.

He could barely swallow his can of insured.

He just put his head in his hands and said, here I go.

Laz laughs.

How do you think he feels about that decision now?

Well, probably moo.

He has no attachment to.

It starts to rain.

I make a nest in the back of my car.

I type notes for this essay.

I I watch an episode of the real world Las Vegas.

Oh, God, I'd rather run the race.

And then turn it off.

Just as Steven and Trishelle are about to maybe hook up to conserve power for the next day.

And also because I don't want to watch Steven and Trishel hook up.

I wanted her to hook up with Frank.

I try to sleep.

I dream about the prison tunnel.

It's flooding and I've just gotten a speeding ticket.

And these two things are related in an important way I can't yet fathom.

And I'm trying to make my word count desperately for this essay.

I'm awoken every once in a while by the mournful call of taps, like the noises of a wild animal echoing through the night.

Julian arrives back in camp around eight in the morning.

He was out for another 12 hours, but he managed to reach only two books.

Sissy.

There were a couple hours lost.

Another couple spent lying down in the rain, waiting for first light.

He's proud of himself for going out, even though he didn't think he'd get far.

I'm proud of him, too.

Nobody cares about your external pride, Leslie.

Screamed at me with Zen Enlightenment.

What the fuck is happening?

We join the others under the rain tent.

Charlie Engel describes what forced him back during his third loop.

Fell flat on my ass going down rat jaw, he said.

Then I got up and fell again, got up and fell again, and that was pretty much it.

Hey, don't put this in your article, okay?

It's boring.

There's a nicely biblical logic to this story.

It's the third time that really does the trick, seals the deal, breaks the back, what have you.

I feel like it's more mother-goosey than biblical, but whatever.

Fine.

Is the rule of threes in the Bible?

Laz asks whether Charlie enjoyed the prison section.

Laz asks everyone about the prison section, the way you'd ask about your kid's poem.

Did you like it?

So, did you come?

Really?

I keep telling you, Heath, that is an inappropriate question to ask about your kid's poetry.

We say it all the time.

We say it all the time.

Charlie says, how's he going to know otherwise, though?

Charlie says he did like it.

That's what I said, Tom.

You know.

If you have to ask the answers, no.

Right.

Yeah.

Charlie says he did like it much.

He says the guards were friendly enough to give him directions.

They were good old southern boys, those guys.

And I can tell from the way he says it that Charlie considers himself a good old southern boy as well.

They told us, just make your way up there, holler.

And then those California boys with me, they turn and say, What the fuck is a holler?

You should have told them, says Laz, that in Tennessee, a holler is when you want to get out, but you can't.

These people pick the president.

Honestly, like actual electoral votes should be apportioned by how many applicants for this race your state has.

Like each applicant is minus one to your electoral vote.

Who if you mean Barkley or white, either way.

That's exactly what I said, Charlos tells us.

I said, when you're standing barefoot on a red ant hill, that's a holler.

The hill we're about to climb, that's a holler.

Holler's tricky.

We don't really have a word for it in English.

It's basically, I'm an idiot, but it's kind of deeper.

It's

interesting, profound.

The rain is unrelenting.

Laz doesn't think anyone will get the full hundred this year.

There were some stellar first laps, but no one seems strong enough now.

People are speculating about whether anyone will even finish the fun run.

There are only six runners left with a shot.

If anyone can finish, everyone agrees it will be Blake.

Laz has never seen him quit.

Julian and I share a leg of chicken slathered in barbecue sauce.

How the fuck do you share a chicken leg?

Thank you.

That's like sharing a sip of water.

What the fuck are you talking about?

You can't.

Like, there's no way to picture this without some weird Foliers commercial fucking lady in the trail going to watch it.

But also, like, fuck you for taking his chicken.

He's just run a hot fucking 20 miles through the guy.

Let him have his fucking chicken leg, baby.

Jesus Christ.

Can I finish that?

Yes, he's going to break the finish now.

There are only two left on the grill.

It's a miracle the fire hasn't gone out.

The chicken's good and cooked as promised, steaming in our mouths against the chilly air.

I baby bird the last of the shared chicken leg into Julian's mouth.

And then he sprints off into a briar patch on purpose with duct-taped assless chaps that he made.

I'm proud of him.

He doesn't want to hear it, but I am.

A guy named Zane, with whom Julian ran much of his first loop, tells us he saw several wild boars on the trails at night.

Was he scared?

He was.

One got close enough to send him scurrying off the edge of a switchback, fighting stick in hand.

Would a stick have helped?

We all agree, probably not.

I mean, it would have given him a nice thing to display his corpse on.

Fun fact, next year, getting eaten by a wild boar, part of the race.

I mean, at least after stick fight one, you know,

A woman, clad in what looks like an all-body windbreaker, is packed a plastic bag of clothes.

Laz explains that her husband is one of the six runners left.

She's planning to meet him at Lookout Tower.

If he decides to drop, she'll hand him his dry clothes and escort him down the easy three-mile trail back into camp.

If he decides to continue, she'll wish him luck as he prepares for another uphill climb, soaked in rainwater and pride, unable to take the dry clothes because accepting aid would get him disqualified.

Doesn't count unless you've got festering taint mold.

Sorry about that.

Okay, I'm sorry.

You're not allowed to accept aid.

What happened to the fucking campfire filled with cookies and shit?

I'm confused about the rules.

Like they can have, I think, performance enhancing drugs.

Like he had no-do's in a fanny pack.

You can have electronics with batteries, but they can't like...

have a hand shirt in a little bag

the handing that's the problem you have to have you can reduce the misery.

You can't have anything that reduces the misery.

Tom said to himself in coincidence with our podcast.

I hope she shows him the dry clothes before he makes up his mind, says Laz.

The choice is better that way.

Babe, is that my good Ed Hardy shirt you have right there?

Fuck, it is.

Yeah, it's so soft.

I love that.

I really like that.

It's American apparel, I think.

It's so nice.

I look super yoked in that.

Is that a crowd blood?

The crowd stirs.

There's a runner coming up the paved hill.

Coming from this direction is a bad sign for someone on his third loop.

It means he's dropping rather than finishing.

People guess it's JB or Carl.

Must be JB or Carl.

There aren't many guys still out, but after a moment, Laz gasps.

It's Blake, he says.

I recognize his walking poles.

Not the guy you told me to be invested in two paragraphs ago.

Okay, I'm sorry.

Wait, wait.

You're allowed to use walking poles?

So confusing.

These rules.

Okay,

that is damn near like telling us at this point that they've been driving four-wheelers this whole time.

Blake is soaked and shivering.

I'm close to hypothermia.

He said I couldn't do it.

He says the climbing rat jaw was like scrambling up a playground slide and roller skates.

Well, unless, of course, you have fucking walking poles.

But otherwise, he doesn't seem inclined to offer excuses.

He says he was running with JB for a while but left him on rat jaw.

That's bad news for JB, says Laz, shaking his head.

He'll probably be back here soon.

Laz hands the bugle over.

It's as if he can't bear to play taps for Blake himself.

He's clearly disappointed that Blake is out, but there's also a note of glee in his voice when he says, you never know what'll happen around here.

There's a thrill and the tension between controlling the race and recognizing it as something that will always disobey him.

It approximates the pleasure.

Pleasure?

Of ultra-running itself, the simultaneous exertion and seeding of power, controlling the body enough to make it run this thing, but ultimately offering it to the uncontrollable vagaries of luck and endurance and conditions, delivering oneself into the frichon of this overpowering.

Okay, the Barclay is being described as reluctant butt stuff there, right?

Like, it's like identical to that.

Like, you move and the torture marathon stays in place.

Doc Joe motions me over to the fire pit.

Hold this, he says, and shoves a large rectangle of aluminum siding in my direction.

Okay, happy where that landed.

Yeah, me too.

He balances a fallen tree branch against its edge to make a rain roof over the fire, where the single remaining breast of chicken is crisping to a beautiful charred brown.

Blake's chicken, he explains.

I'll cover it with my body if I have to.

This is like Tom threatening to pull off someone's arms if they try to take the cupcake he saved for me.

And it was my birthday.

So what?

Plan better.

Sure.

That's what he said at the time.

All right.

Move, keep chicken leg in place.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Blake is out, if you can believe it.

Blake, guys.

Blake.

So

while I take a moment to recover from the shock,

I was team Blake.

This is disappointing.

Bring for some apropos of nothing.

Uh yeah,

yeah, question.

Yeah, break with it.

So does any of this strike you guys as,

I don't know, problematic?

Problematic?

Well, how?

Like a race to celebrate the escape of the guy who shot Martin Luther King.

That

doesn't feel great.

And a lot of these place names feel

pointed, like raw dog, like like having sex without a condom.

That's what that means.

Why is there a place named after unprotected sex?

This is a joke.

Is this Joe?

On whom

cool.

So, yeah, I think I'm gonna back out this year.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, now that you mention it, wait, wait, wait, wait,

that if you leap, you won't get to drive a new optical up on the radi.

Oh, yeah, what's that?

I call it Kikajurin.

Yeah,

Native American.

No, it's not.

No, it's not.

Excuse me, is anyone sitting here?

Oh, no, by all means.

Cool.

Thanks.

Oh, sorry.

No problem.

Take it.

Hey, doctor.

Oh, good.

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And we're back.

When we left off, some people had left off.

So tell us, Tom, who's still on and why should anybody give a fuck?

Why this sense of stakes and heroism?

Oh, thanks, Leslie.

I appreciate you.

Of course, I have been wondering the whole time, why do people do this anyway?

Whenever I pose the question directly, runners reply ironically, I'm a masochist.

I need somewhere to put my craziness.

Type A from birth, etc.

I begin to understand that joking about this question is not an evasion, but rather an intrinsic part of answering it.

Nobody has to answer this question seriously because they are already answering it seriously with their bodies and their willpower and their pain.

The body submits itself in utter earnest, in degradation and commitment to what words can speak of only lightly.

Okay, words can't really describe it as a hell of a statement when you're writing a 10,000-word essay about it.

I had to do two episodes, Leslie.

Two.

Mostly about her stealing his chicken, though.

Maybe this is why so many ultra-runners are former addicts.

They want to redeem the bodies they once punished, master the physical selves whose cravings they once served.

Okay.

But I feel like they're not telling us about all the runners who definitely relapsed.

As long as there isn't any other connection between self-harm and former addiction, that's a great answer, Leslie.

Let's not Google it.

There is a gracefully frustrating tautology to this embodied testimony.

Why do I do it?

I do it because it hurts so much, and I'm still willing to do it.

The sheer ferocity of the effort implies the effort is somehow worth it.

This is purpose by implication rather than direct articulation.

Laz says, no one has to ask them why they're out here.

They all know.

Yeah, I put bags of cocaine all around.

But the therefore is reversed in that statement, though.

Right?

Like, the fact that they know why they're out there is why you should ask, right?

Combined with the fact that nobody else can even fucking fathom a reason.

That's why you should ask them why they're out there.

It would be easy to fix upon any number of possible purposes, conquering the body, fellowship in pain, but it feels more like significance dwells in concentric circles of labor around an empty center, commitment to an impetus that resists fixity or labels, the persistence of why is the point, the elusive horizon of an unanswerable question, the conceptual equivalent of an unrunnable race.

And also the regular equivalent.

But how does the race turn out?

Turns out JB manages to pull off a surprising victory, which makes the fifth paragraph of this essay a lie.

The race has nine finishers now.

I get this news as a text message from Julian, who found out from Twitter.

We're both driving home on separate highways.

He's pushing his car with his feet like the flintstones.

He's fucking reading Twitter while he's driving, which is uncomfortable.

That's fine.

Pat, Leslie, I don't need your pride.

I am detached.

My immediate thought is: shit.

I wasn't planning to focus on JB as a central character in my essay.

He hadn't seemed like one of the strongest personalities or contenders at camp, but now I know I'll have to turn him into a story, too.

It's like trying to explain to people in 2015 that Joe Rogan will have an effect on the presidential election.

At Leslie, you're in the Epstein files.

Fuck you.

This is what Barclay specializes in, right?

It swallows the story you imagined and hands you another one.

I thought it specialized in razor briars.

Blake and Carl, both strong after their second loops, two of my chosen figures of interest, didn't even finish the fun run.

Pieces of shit.

I started with some character studies on them, and then I'm going to scrap it trying to get 10,000 words.

Fuck.

Now everyone goes home.

Carl will go back to his machine shop in Atlanta.

Blake will help his daughter train for the trials.

John Price will return to his retirement in his man wagon.

Les, I discover, will return to his position as assistant coach for the boys basketball team at Cascade High School

down the highway in War Trace.

All right, kids, today we're going to practice free throws while the court's on fire.

This is why you got to Google your kids' teachers, people, okay?

Because sometimes, sometimes they spend their summer doing a racism-themed death race.

You know what I'm saying?

I think you can handle it solo this year, coach.

You're a one-man army.

I'm going to hit your assistant with my car.

And he's actually going to be into it, strangely.

Okay.

One of you more times.

One of the most compelling inquiries into the question of why, to my mind at least, is really an inquiry around the question.

And it lies in a tale of temporary madness.

A.T.'s frightening account of his fifth loop, Crisis of Purpose, back in 2004.

By crisis of purpose, he means losing my mind in the fullest definition of the phrase, a relatively unsurprising condition given the circumstances.

And the head starts.

He's not alone in this experience.

Another ultra runner named Brett Mond describes hallucinating a band of helpful Indians at the end of his three-day run of the John Moore Trail.

They were really helpful, but they kept telling me to call them Native Americans.

And that's a helpful thing, actually, as they kept corrupting my...

So I did that.

But then one guy was like, no, I'm from the country of India, you fucking racist.

I'm wearing the village people costume for pride.

And I didn't know what to do there because it felt still problematic that he was wearing the thing, but it was pride.

So, I don't lots of my hallucinations are guilt-based.

You know what I mean?

Like, white guilt and heterogilt.

They watched over me while I slept, and I would chat with them briefly every time I awoke.

They were very considerate and even helped me pack everything when I was ready to resume hiking.

I hope this does not count as aid.

Don't worry, man.

It does not.

It doesn't.

AT describes wandering without any clear sense of how he'd gotten to the trail or what he was meant to be doing there.

The Barclay would be forgotten for minutes on end, although the premise lingered.

I had to get to the garden spot.

For why?

Was there someone there?

His amnesia captures the endeavor in its starkest terms.

Premise without motivation.

Hardship without context, but his account offers flashes of wonder.

Flashes?

I mean, I'm sorry.

I feel like if I'm just standing on the side of a briar-filled mountain, soaking wet and half-starving, going like, what was I looking for here?

I feel like I, like, the wonder would come in more than flashes.

I stood in a shin-deep puddle for about an hour, squishing the mud in and out of my shoes.

I walked down to Coffin Springs, the first water drop.

I sat and poured gallon after gallon of fresh water into my shoes.

I inspected the painted trees marking the park boundary, sometimes walking well into the woods just to look at some paint on a tree.

Okay, just take some acid and go for a walk in the woods.

There you go, whatever you want.

But yeah, I get the mud thing with the squishy feet.

Either way, like faster than getting there.

In a sense, Barclay does precisely this.

forces its runners into an appreciation of what they might not otherwise have known or noticed.

The ache in their quads when they have been punished beyond all reasonable measure, fatigue pulling the body's puppet strings inexorably downward, the mind gone numb and glassy from pain.

Barkley's real gift is potential, life-altering, incredibly dangerous exhaustion-induced dementia.

You can't get PTSD from your average foot race, folks.

Right?

I feel like somehow she missed that.

She just said the point of all the pain was being in pain.

Yes.

By the end of AT's account, the facet of Barclay deemed most brutally taxing, that sinister and sacred self-sufficiency has become an inexplicable miracle.

When it cooled off, I had a long-sleeve shirt.

When I got hungry, I had food.

When it got dark, I had a light.

I thought,

wow, isn't it strange that I have all of this perfect stuff just when I need it?

And that's

God right there.

That's God.

I'm a Christian dualist, also a Zen Buddhist.

This is benevolence as surprise, evidence of a grace beyond the self that has, of course, come from the self, the same self that loaded the fanny pack hours before, whose role has been obscured by bone-wear delusion, turned over by the sheer fact of the body losing its own mind.

So it goes.

One morning a man blows a conch shell, and two days later, still answering answering the call of that conk, another man finds all he needs strapped to his own body where he can neither expect nor explain it.

Okay, do we know for sure that Leslie's not related to Peter Thiel?

Yeah, do we know for sure?

No, we don't.

No, we don't.

We don't know that she's not Peter Thial.

I feel like with good evidence that she might be Peter Thial.

Yeah.

And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, Tom, what would it be?

Running is stupid and you don't have to do it.

Oh, okay.

Go with your bicycle.

Are you ready for the quiz?

I am.

Let's do it.

All right.

Tom, we learned about a 100-mile torture race inspired by James Earl Ray that makes people hallucinate.

What should it be called instead of the Barkley?

A,

the MLK Ultra Marathon.

Fantastic.

Wow.

Nicely.

That's so good.

Nicely.

Just leave it there.

That's amazing.

You can't follow up that.

All right.

Tom, to beat a dead horse one more time.

What's a better name for this race?

A, the 5k.

B,

as the Jim Crow flies.

C,

the segregate.

Or D,

the Dred Scott Trot.

Jesus Christ.

The Dred Scott Trot is so good.

It's the Dred Scott Trot.

It's so fungal.

Yes, absolutely.

All right, Tom.

Who were you rooting for in this particular edition of the Barclay Marathon?

A,

the guy with the white guy name who was running to see if he could.

B, the other guy with the white guy name who was running something, something the self.

Or C,

a mudslide.

Always mudslide.

I'm going always mudslide.

That is correct.

You made yours too easy.

Eli, okay, I've got one for you, Tom.

All right.

What's What's the most popular sport for these athletes to compete in during the offseason?

A, the javelin catch.

B,

involuntary gymnastics.

C,

full contact bowling.

Or D, the reverse biathlon where you ski 20 kilometers and then five targets shoot you.

Ooh.

Okay.

First, I would watch all of these events.

I would watch all of them.

I'm just saying.

Jadwin catches just laundry.

That's jarts, right?

That's jarts.

That's jarts.

They don't let you do that anymore.

That's involuntary gymnastics.

I just, I want to see somebody hurled at the at the pomo.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

It was the reverse by.

Oh, no, actually, no, you're right.

I guess Heath won.

That's right.

I mean, Heath had like five puns in his one answer.

So

most of the time, like when we're doing like only one answer, it's because we can only come up with one pun.

But Heath did it because there are so many puns in the fucking single answer that you couldn't fit any more into the show.

Pun per word, that's right.

And Heath, you smushed the most puns, so you win this week.

Fantastic.

All right, next week, let's hear from Noah.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnick.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, Noah will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to our podcasts while you run on the open trails until the madness overtakes you.

And then our voices will transform into your helpful Native American guides.

And if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

Okay, and then after your favorite restaurants in Asia,

what would you talk about then?

I don't know.

Maybe some recipes, some

unique kitchen tools, non-units.

Okay, that's all the continents, Cecil.

What would you talk about next?

I would talk about.

No, I did that.

I'd talk about how hard it is to be white.

See?

God damn it.

Every time.

Yep.

I guess you were right.

100% of the white guys.

Yeah.

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