The Barkley Marathons

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 12 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 12 And we are giving up right out of the gate on our episode about the Barclay Marathon.

Speaker 13 That's right.

Speaker 13 Our friend Chad, we want to shout out our friend Chad Crowley, who we talked about before, who was the producer and director and showrunner of our TV show back in the day.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 13 I got this idea from Chad because we had coffee over the holidays and he is running ultra marathons now.

Speaker 12 Wow.

Speaker 13 Which is a very Chad thing to do. Like he starts running a handful of years ago and now is running ultras.

Speaker 13 And I was like, Chad, how long is that? And he said, 60 miles generally. generally.

Speaker 13 And I said, could you run to Athens? He said, how far is Athens? And I said, I can't remember how far. I said, like 80 miles.
He said, I could run 100 miles.

Speaker 12 Wow. But he'd need to ride back.

Speaker 13 Are you kidding? He said, it might take a while, but I could probably run 100 miles. And I'm just like floored by this idea that people can do this.
And he said, he said, man, you should do a.

Speaker 13 You guys should do an episode on the Barclay marathons, which I had heard of before. Oh, really?

Speaker 13 Which is this, yeah, which is this ultra marathon plus, a trail run plus in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee that is known for just being a crazy race, a crazy hard race, and having a really

Speaker 13 unusual origin story and unusual founder and just how it's all done.

Speaker 15 It's just this remarkable story.

Speaker 13 And I agree.

Speaker 12 Yeah, there's a really great documentary from 2017 called the Barclay Marathon, colon, the race that eats its young, which is a nickname for that race.

Speaker 12 And there's a few people in there who are seasoned trail runners, ultrathoners, like people who know their stuff and have done crazy things as far as running goes, who are like, this is far and away the hardest race on the planet.

Speaker 12 Like, there's nobody who's doing anything like this.

Speaker 12 And if you think you know what you're doing, you're going to be completely amazed at how far off you were and what you thought this is going to be like. It's that hard.

Speaker 13 Yeah, you got a chance to watch it.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it was good. And there was a guy who was a special operations,

Speaker 12 like, I guess a former special ops soldier who was like, I've done crazy stuff with my body. And this, like, that it did nothing to prepare me for this.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it was really well done. It's on YouTube.
Um, and I recommend watching it because it really, uh, there's a, a lot of drama that takes place the year that they uh

Speaker 13 did the documentary. I think they did it on 2012 or 2013, maybe.

Speaker 12 Oh, was it?

Speaker 13 And it came out in 2017, you said?

Speaker 12 Oh, okay. So, yeah, I was confused at what year it was.

Speaker 13 I think it was 2012 or 2013. And it was, uh, there's a lot of good drama, so we don't want to spoil some of the stories that happen.

Speaker 13 But I recommend watching, and here we go with Barclay Marathons.

Speaker 12 Oh, okay. So, uh, the whole thing about Barclay marathons is that you can trace them back.
I mean, you could start at the very beginning.

Speaker 12 We talked about in our, what was the one crazy marathon episode we did not too long ago?

Speaker 13 It was on marathons.

Speaker 12 No, it was on a specific marathon in, I think, Los Angeles.

Speaker 16 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 13 We did one of marathons years ago.

Speaker 12 No, remember the guy who was running the human zoos at the World's Fair came up with like a, he called it the Special Olympics Marathon.

Speaker 12 This was months ago, man.

Speaker 13 Hey, you can't remember it either, buddy.

Speaker 12 All right. Well, I can't remember.

Speaker 13 You remember it existed at at least?

Speaker 12 Yes. Anyway.
Oh, get this. Apparently, we did an entire short stuff on Saturn's rings and didn't mention it because I have no recollection of doing a short stuff on Saturn's rings.
Do you?

Speaker 13 I don't remember that.

Speaker 12 You do remember we did a Saturn episode that came out like a few days back.

Speaker 13 I'm so mad at you right now.

Speaker 12 Don't you?

Speaker 13 We're still getting emails on that one. So yes, I do remember.
Okay, all right.

Speaker 13 What LA marathon are you talking about?

Speaker 12 It might not be LA, but it was, it was like just, you remember like that one Italian guy? I think he was running and like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. He'd stop and eat people's fruit and stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And there were the two guys from Africa who were.
I remember that now. Yeah.
It was, I can't remember where it was or what the name was.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Oh, boy. People are just screaming at their

Speaker 13 pod player. Right.

Speaker 12 The sad thing is the whole reason I brought that up, Chuck, was to say that we went over a lot of the origins of marathons in that episode. So we don't need to do that in this episode.

Speaker 12 And in our marathons. And that we just did all that?

Speaker 13 And in our marathons episode.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Anyway, let's not even do that. Marathons have been along a long time.

Speaker 13 Ultra Marathon started in the 1970s, and that's what we're really talking about.

Speaker 13 And this guy, Gary Kintrell, aka Lazarus Lake, or Laz.

Speaker 13 He's in his 70s now. He is our,

Speaker 13 he is the creator, along with his friend, of the Barkley Marathon, whom D named after his friend, a farmer named Barry Barkley.

Speaker 13 In the documentary, very sweetly over the end credits, they asked him with Barry why he named it after Barry. And he said, Well, he used to help me with a lot of races, and I don't know.
It just fit.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Barkley, he's a farmer. He's like, he's never run anything like that.
And he said, I have no idea why he named it after me.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so there's no real reason, but they're called the Barkley Marathons. And Cantrell has an interesting story in that he is

Speaker 13 a former athlete. He's run supposedly over about 150,000 miles in his life.

Speaker 13 But he smokes camel cigarettes. He just floods his body with Dr.
Pepper.

Speaker 13 He's, you know, older gentleman now and has kind of wrecked his legs from all that running. So he hasn't run for a while.

Speaker 13 But he got interested in this as a Boy Scout in Tennessee as a teenager or preteen, I guess, when he was...

Speaker 13 started doing backpacking trips that he hated until he found out there is a great joy in overcoming a hardship and doing something tough physically and completing a goal and got kind of hooked on that feeling.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he also apparently really liked the idea that if he continued to work at something, he would continue to improve.

Speaker 12 And that's a big part of

Speaker 12 running. That's a big part of running.
That's a big part of hiking. That's a big part of doing

Speaker 12 everything

Speaker 12 for a while. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 12 So, yeah, he got the bug pretty early on. He started running marathons.
I think think in 1966, he started running. By high school, he was running marathons.

Speaker 12 And then he started running ultra marathons. And he was there like right at the beginning of the ultra-marathon craze, which I think kicked off in 1974 with California's Western States 100.

Speaker 12 A guy named Gordy Ainslie set that up.

Speaker 12 And so by this time, you know, the ultra marathons were starting to catch on. And Gary Cantrell was enough of a runner that he knew of these things.
But he was also married.

Speaker 12 He was starting to have kids. He had a job as an accountant.

Speaker 12 And he just couldn't travel the country to go participate in ultrathon. So he started setting his own up around Tennessee.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly. They first took the form of what he called journey runs, which is...
This all sounds fun. If I was into running, I would do something like this.

Speaker 13 But he and his friends would get together and be like, all right, let's run from Knoxville to Nashville. Or let's run.
I love the through run.

Speaker 13 Their idea of a through run was either from Alabama or Kentucky running to the other, just straight through Tennessee. Let's run through the state of Tennessee.
Right.

Speaker 13 Pretty fun idea. They were doing these.
They led to some other kind of legit races. I think one of the two is still around.

Speaker 13 He called it, and he's always had a sense of humor. You can tell by the way, he names these things.

Speaker 13 The last annual Vall State, obviously Volunteer State Road Race, which is a 311-mile run from Missouri to Georgia.

Speaker 12 A 10-day to Georgie.

Speaker 12 Exactly.

Speaker 13 A 10-day cutoff time, no comfort stations along the way. You have to source all your own food and water and shelter along the way.
And then

Speaker 13 another one called The Idiot's Run, which I don't think is around 123-mile gravel, all-gravel road run.

Speaker 12 Oh, my God. Yeah.
That's so bad. That's just such a bad idea.
Well, he called it the Idiot's Run for a really really good reason. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And that's the whole, his whole jam is like he loves coming up with a kind of race that

Speaker 12 just is at the border between the possibility and the impossibility of human endurance, of what the human body can actually do.

Speaker 12 Like he wants it just inside of that limit so that you could, if you push yourself enough, complete this race.

Speaker 12 But most people are just not going to be able to because it's so close to impossible.

Speaker 13 Yeah. I mean, many, many years, the Barclay Marathon has no finisher at all.

Speaker 13 Many years, no one makes it to the fifth loop. There are four loops that we'll get into all this in a second.

Speaker 13 It's happening more and more now.

Speaker 13 I think just there are more veterans that come back that once you kind of know the deal, I say it gets a little easier, but you know, a little easier in that it's possible to finish.

Speaker 13 It's never easy, but I think the veterans have an advantage for sure.

Speaker 12 Yeah, because

Speaker 12 I think the astonishment at how difficult it is

Speaker 12 probably takes up a lot of your mental energy and focus while you're doing it for the first time. And that, yeah, once you've even tried it before and even dropped out, you probably are past that.

Speaker 12 And that's got to be a huge leg up.

Speaker 13 Totally.

Speaker 12 So we should talk a little bit about the whole

Speaker 12 basis of all this, right? Or do you want to take a break?

Speaker 13 Yeah, let's talk about where this thing's held, right?

Speaker 12 Okay, well, the whole thing is held at Frozen Head State Park.

Speaker 12 It's named after

Speaker 12 all, huh? Yeah, it's named after the tallest peak in this state park. It's in northeastern Tennessee,

Speaker 12 which is kind of, I guess, where

Speaker 12 northeastern Tennessee is where Virginia and North Carolina come together with Tennessee. It's a beautiful area.
This would be in the Cumberland Mountains.

Speaker 12 And this particular state park is not like the kind you just, you know, go to, everybody goes to on the weekends for a picnic. It's pretty remote.

Speaker 12 It's 330 acres, but this 330 acre state park is surrounded by 24,000 acres of forest land.

Speaker 12 And the whole thing, I guess, started with convict leasing. So this, this area is like really dark.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 12 You know?

Speaker 13 No, totally. And if you look at, you know, they do these aerial shots in the documentary.
of this prison that we're about to talk about.

Speaker 12 And it's just, you know, it's in the middle of nowhere, like like at the bottom of you know a sort of a ravine and very um inhospitable i mean you'd like to think about places like alaska being like you know some of the most inhospitable places in the united states but uh i mean the mountains of northeastern tennessee are no joke no and this area is inhospitable because of its terrain and in part because of the weather and the elevation yeah yeah The whole reason there's a prison there is because back in the 19th century, Tennessee started making money by leasing its prisoners, convicts, to mining companies, coal mining companies.

Speaker 12 Just make it a little extra on the side from forcing your prisoners to engage in hard labor, right?

Speaker 12 Well, I think in our

Speaker 12 man, I need to keep a list of all of our episodes like handy because I can't remember the name of it. But do you remember that one war, the strike war in the 19th century? And I think coal mines in

Speaker 13 Madawan.

Speaker 12 Mattawan, yes, thank you. In that episode, we talked a lot about what happened also in Tennessee's coal mines where the labor was taking on management and it was resulting in wars.

Speaker 12 Well, one of the things that resulted out of this in Tennessee was that the laborers, the free laborers who worked for the coal mining companies, would frequently help the convicts whose labor was being leased out by the state escape.

Speaker 12 And so Tennessee was like, well, fine, we're not doing that anymore. But undeterred, they just started setting up their own coal mines and using the prisoners directly instead of leasing them out.

Speaker 13 Exactly. And they needed somewhere to put those prisoners,

Speaker 13 or workers, I guess, slash prisoners. So they built a new prison.
It is called Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

Speaker 13 And in the 1930s, a lot of that land eventually became that great conservation area that we were talking about, those 24,000 acres.

Speaker 13 And the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps built a lot of trails.

Speaker 13 It became a natural area, you know, officially in the 1970s, but there are these trails there now.

Speaker 13 Not like, again, like you said, not like a lot of state park trails that you go to. A lot of these trails are still pretty rough.

Speaker 13 The prison stayed open, but why we're telling you all this is for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 13 One is at one point in the race, they navigate through a tunnel, like a little water channel that goes under the prison.

Speaker 13 And that's part of the race route where you're definitely going to get your feet wet.

Speaker 13 I don't think we mentioned you're running through rivers and things, so like wet feet, and it's just a part of the challenge of this race.

Speaker 13 But the prison remained open, and James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.,

Speaker 13 was sent there with six other men. He escaped in 1977 from Brushy Mountain and spent 54 hours in that rugged terrain,

Speaker 13 eventually being recaptured about eight miles from the prison.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 Lazarus, Lake, old Laz, Cantrell, heard this story, heard they made it only eight miles in that 54 hours. And he said, man, I could travel 100 miles through that terrain in 54 hours.

Speaker 13 So he invents this race, sort of inspired by this.

Speaker 13 He said that he still gets hate mail every year and angry letters for people that think it's some sort of tribute to James Earl Ray. And he's like, no, it's the opposite.

Speaker 13 Like it was started because I'm making fun of the fact that this guy only made it eight miles and we're doing 100.

Speaker 12 Right, right.

Speaker 13 130, really.

Speaker 12 Uh, you want to take a break?

Speaker 13 Yeah, let's take a break. We know the name of the marathon, we know where it takes place, we know who started it and where it came from.

Speaker 13 And we'll be back with more of the Barclay Marathons right after this.

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Speaker 12 So, like you said, I think in 1977, James O'Reilly escapes, and Cantrell lived in the area. He said it was big news at the time.
So, he was aware of this.

Speaker 12 And a few years later, he and his friend Carl Henn, known as Raw Dog, for reasons that I don't want to ask about,

Speaker 12 they decided

Speaker 13 in 1985, I don't think it was.

Speaker 12 You don't know.

Speaker 13 All right. Good point.

Speaker 12 So they decided to hike into the state park.

Speaker 12 This is a place where he's like, okay, like we could totally do so many more than eight miles in 54 hours. Let's go check this out and have fun.

Speaker 12 like you said most of this area are not

Speaker 12 nature trails where like there are signs posted there's a path you can look down and follow like these are hard to find trails that you need to know how to use a compass a contour map like all you have to you have to be good at orienteering is what it's called

Speaker 12 in addition to hiking and putting up with all sorts of terrible, uncomfortable stuff and pushing your limits. So these guys were like, let's just go for a fun hike for a day.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And they showed up there.

Speaker 13 there was a park uh ranger that was like you guys should leave like you shouldn't be out there it's like it's not like you think you're gonna get lost you're gonna get hurt you're gonna need rescue uh they ignored him they did make it through they did an eight mile

Speaker 12 they didn't even like yeah note his his existence yeah they just walked right by

Speaker 13 They made this eight mile hike, this loop, but it took him a full day, which is, you know, you should be able to hike much more than eight miles in a day.

Speaker 13 And it required a lot of orienteering, like you said, and paying attention to that kind of thing. And he said, all right, I think I have an idea here for a race.

Speaker 13 Let's make a nearly impossible to finish race.

Speaker 13 I think it's kind of hard to tell because there's not a website for this. You can't get like historical, I mean, people have written about it since then,

Speaker 13 but you can't get like the official website documentation on this race in history because it doesn't exist. They keep it very much under wraps.

Speaker 13 So, uh, the way he tells it on the documentary, it was always supposed to be 100 miles, but no one ever did more than the first three loops out of the five. Yeah.

Speaker 13 I think, though, maybe this first version was shorter. It was about a 50 to 55 mile course.
It was held over April Fool's Day, weekend, 1986.

Speaker 13 And the initial cutoff was 24 hours with 13 participants and zero people finishing.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and this is just a 50 to 55 mile version.

Speaker 12 Like you said, officially, the current Barclay marathon is 100 mile, when in reality, it's also like 120 to 130 miles based on reports from people who've actually run it, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah, I mean, he changes the route every year a little bit. That's why it varies.
But the year they did the documentary, it was documented at 130, and everybody is like, it's not 100.

Speaker 13 Just stop saying that.

Speaker 12 So the first version, like you said, is three loops.

Speaker 12 And it wasn't until two years after the first one that somebody completed it. And I mean, we're talking like dozens of people attempting this.
And it took three times before one person finished.

Speaker 12 And there was

Speaker 12 something about this that I don't know if we've mentioned yet. Just this first version, there was an elevation gain of 24,000 feet.

Speaker 12 So all of the times you went up and down, if you count all the ups, it would equal 24,000 feet in elevation that you've climbed over these three loops.

Speaker 12 And that is a lot. And in fact, the guy who finished Frozen Ed Furtaw,

Speaker 12 he was just Ed Furtaw until he won. And from then on, he was Frozen Ed Furtaw.

Speaker 12 He thought that there was a misprint in Ultra Running magazine that the elevation was actually 2,400 feet, not 24,000.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And I guess we can go ahead and tell everybody the current iteration, uh like we said is supposedly a hundred but it's really more like 130 miles it's got a 60 hour time limit

Speaker 13 uh and the elevation is the total elevation climb over that race if you finish it is 60 000 feet which is equivalent to hawking to walking up and back down mount everest twice yes yeah so yeah the total elevation is 120 000 because yeah if you go up 60 000 feet and you're coming back down you got to come down 60,000 feet.

Speaker 12 Yes, it's harder to climb up, but it's not that easy to go down too, especially if you're on an incline. And that's a big part of it, too, is sliding into things like briars and saplings.
And

Speaker 12 it's, it's rough. Like just watching like the effects on some of the runners' bodies and like what they were coming back to camp looking like was

Speaker 12 pretty bad. Some guy had like a head wound and they show him like slipping on rocks and hitting his forehead.

Speaker 13 It was really, it's nuts what these people are doing to themselves yeah i mean their legs are all just because these briars they have to go through one part which is a really heavy briar area

Speaker 13 but every single person's legs are just thrashed like looks like ground meat oh yeah like disgusting bleeding their feet are disgusting and and blistered and and just riddled with i think the one guy that um and we'll get to the stops but the one guy they were like it would take you eight hours to fully dry your feet out so you know you can't you're not going to get dry feet right which which is a big problem uh and and

Speaker 13 they're basically not sleeping right uh when you when you complete a loop you have what's called an interlooper period where you can do whatever you want you can take however much time you want to get uh you can get first aid you can eat you can drink you can rest you can change your clothes and socks uh you can take a nap if you want but that clock is still running so how long you wait is is up to you.

Speaker 13 I think the winner that year said he slept about an hour total. So just try staying up and awake for 60 hours in a chair.

Speaker 12 Without drugs.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly. These people are doing this.
And, you know, we say it's a run. Like a lot of this is.
hiking and bouldering and walking and crawling.

Speaker 13 So it's not like they're running the whole time, but it's just brutal.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it really is. One of the other things that really kind of gets this across too is in what you said.
So you've got 60 hours to finish. And from the start, the clock's always ticking, right? Yeah.

Speaker 12 But you're going 130 miles. So if you do the math, Olivia helps us with this.
And she pointed out that

Speaker 12 you could sleep for two eight-hour nights and still finish this course at a 20-minute mile pace, which you you can basically do on your hands and knees and still complete it within the 60-hour cutoff.

Speaker 12 So the fact that some people can't even finish the first loop goes to show you how difficult this is. That if it were flat, it would be beyond easy.
But

Speaker 12 those same limits, the time limit and the length

Speaker 12 put on this particular terrain or in this topography is just, it changes absolutely everything.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 This 12-hour time limit per loop must have come in after the documentary, right?

Speaker 12 Yeah, that confused me too, because they they were finishing in like 13 hours and something like that i i didn't get that so yeah i think it must have been a new one yeah i think so so finishing uh the three loops if you finish three loops that is considered a fun run

Speaker 13 and that is a designation and that is a huge accomplishment yeah just to finish the fun run uh we should add he also has a uh a baby barkley in the fall the berkeley uh barkley fall classic which is a 50k so 31 miles and that has about 400 runners But only about 35 to 40 participants are allowed per year to compete in this thing because

Speaker 13 of,

Speaker 13 you know, it's out in nature, so that the state won't let them have like hundreds of people. Like, not a ton of people can go watch.

Speaker 13 It's just like family, and I think some, you know, former winners can be there. And it's, you know, it's a pretty small operation because they just can't, you know, run roughshod over the area.

Speaker 13 But they have the 60 hours to complete. Now, 12 hours per loop.
The first loop is run clockwise.

Speaker 13 The second loop, which is at night,

Speaker 13 will go counterclockwise. And then again, day, night, clockwise, counterclockwise.
And then this is pretty devious.

Speaker 13 The final fifth loop, if you get there, the first person to finish the fourth gets a choice which way they want to run.

Speaker 13 And then they start splitting people up because almost everybody runs with a buddy or two.

Speaker 13 It really, really helps to have someone out there and they're really helping each other. But at the end, he's like, you're going to lose your buddy.
Which way do you want to run?

Speaker 13 And the first person will say, I'll go clockwise. The next person has to go counterclockwise.
And then they alternate.

Speaker 13 So at some point, if they finish that fifth loop, they're going to pass their former buddy going in the opposite direction.

Speaker 12 Right. Yeah.
And in the documentary, Ken Trubb points out, like, these. By this time, these people who had like formed serious bonds by running together in these loops are now direct competitors.

Speaker 12 Like now it's a race because they're in the fifth loop and whoever's going to finish and what time they finish at is going to determine the actual winner. Like now there's a possible winner

Speaker 12 and everything changes. So I don't, they probably don't like clasp hands and then, you know, they're, they're pulled apart, you know, sadly when they have to go in different directions at that point.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I think it's probably it makes it a lot tougher, but I get the idea that if you make it, if you're one of the maybe

Speaker 13 two, maybe three, maximum four people that are even on the fifth loop,

Speaker 13 then that's when things get serious. That's when it turns into an actual race.

Speaker 12 Yeah,

Speaker 12 that's what I took it as too. And one thing that I didn't get, I got from context.
I didn't see it anywhere because I guess it's so obvious no one thought it needed to be spelled out except me.

Speaker 12 But it's the same loop, right? Yeah. Okay, so they're doing the same loop five times, which is why they do it clockwise and counterclockwise and different ones at day and night.

Speaker 12 So that you can't just be like, yep, I remember this. This is nothing.
Now I remember exactly what the trail is.

Speaker 12 You're super disoriented the first time, but it's not like you have it down pat after that first loop necessarily.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and it definitely doesn't seem like it gets easier because they were finishing when they were fresh-legged at loop one, they were finishing in about eight or nine hours for the fastest times.

Speaker 13 And then those fastest people were doing like 12 and 13 hours on the next loop through the darkness.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And we should mention the weather, you know, it's with these huge elevation changes, you're going to go from temperatures sometimes in April in the 80s where it's low

Speaker 13 to like 10 degrees at night.

Speaker 13 They have about 100 gallons of water they put out randomly on the course. Like there are no technical water stations, but you'll just happen upon a jug of water.
And

Speaker 13 Laz said that, you know, one year they were.

Speaker 13 108 pound blocks of ice because it was 10 degrees at elevation. Yeah.
It's just crazy.

Speaker 12 I say we take a break and talk about how you would get into this race and then what it's actually like running it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 12 Okay.

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Speaker 13 All right, so we're back.

Speaker 13 The race is about to begin. We should point out, too, the other thing to keep in mind is if you quit,

Speaker 13 quit near the start-finish line. Right.
Because like a lot of people finish like a loop and they're like, I'm out.

Speaker 13 Or maybe the two or a lot of people get to that third fun run and they say, that's good enough for me. the one guy in the documentary quit and it took him 10 hours to navigate back

Speaker 13 because it's not like they send somebody out you don't tap out on radio and they come and get you yeah you just decide i can't do this anymore and then you very slowly walk back to the finish line yeah and at some point you might as well be like well at least i guess i'm gonna have to finish the first loop i might as well keep going that direction yeah No, totally.

Speaker 13 Or if they're, I mean, it depends on where you are. If you're below the halfway point, a lot of people come back the way they came.

Speaker 12 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 12 So going even back before the start of the race,

Speaker 12 you said that the Barclay Marathon has no website, and that is intentional. The whole thing is meant to be kept largely a secret.

Speaker 12 There's not a website. There's not like some information on this is how you apply.
You have to use

Speaker 12 basically your investigative skills just to figure out Gary Cantrell's email to email to ask to

Speaker 12 And they make it really, really hard to apply for this because, in part,

Speaker 12 they're just weeding out people who don't have even the beginning of the motivation and dedication

Speaker 12 to complete this race. Like, if you can't even go to this trouble to really do your research to figure out how to apply, then don't even bother trying to apply.

Speaker 13 There's no website, no thanks.

Speaker 12 Exactly.

Speaker 12 And if you do want to apply, you have to cough up $1.60.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's a non-refundable application fee.

Speaker 13 I think most people send in two single-dollar bills because he says they don't give change.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 he every year chooses, you know, he chooses a range of people.

Speaker 13 Some of them are very experienced. Some of them are random.

Speaker 13 Every year, he chooses one human sacrifice that he said the runners even appreciate, even at the expense of not getting in themselves. He chooses one person that has no business being there.

Speaker 13 In the year of the documentary, that poor guy made it six hours.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And I knew as soon as that guy headed out in his

Speaker 13 camouflage

Speaker 13 cargo pants. Right.
I was like, this guy, what is he doing? What's he wearing?

Speaker 13 So he didn't make it very far.

Speaker 12 No, he didn't. And he was like, this is six hours, man.
Like, he didn't make it very far at all. No.
And this guy was.

Speaker 12 way more qualified to do it than like the average person.

Speaker 12 Like it wasn't like he was just some like, he went and plopped the guy out of McDonald's, like, mid-bite of a Big Mac and threw him on the trail.

Speaker 12 Like, this guy was in pretty decent shape, and he thought that he had a chance. It's not like he's like, Yeah, I'm going to go be the sacrificial human.
Right.

Speaker 12 He thought like he was going to try to complete it. He didn't even, I don't even think he made it halfway through the first loop, did he?

Speaker 13 Uh, no, I don't think so. Um,

Speaker 13 no, it was pretty funny and sad. He took it on the chin, like a, like a, like a big boy, though.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah, imagine if he'd started like yelling.

Speaker 12 You just brought me out here to make fun of me.

Speaker 13 A little bit more about the application process. Everyone knows it takes place generally around April Fool's Day.

Speaker 13 They send in an essay to get in with weird prompts.

Speaker 13 Like one year it was what's the most important vegetable group.

Speaker 13 One of the women, I think she was in the documentary that year, Beverly Abs,

Speaker 13 who, by the way, that year completed the fun run, so quite an achievement.

Speaker 13 She said

Speaker 13 she was told to send the application in exactly at midnight on Christmas Day in the time zone where Lazarus Lake was. So she had to figure out where he was at the time.

Speaker 13 And then she wrote a poem as her essay and she got in. Right.
And then once you get in, you get a letter that says, I'm sorry to inform you that you have been accepted.

Speaker 13 And basically misery awaits you.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's the whole, the whole jam, the way that it's treated is like you're, like you're not going to finish um you're a dummy for even trying there's this weird kind of push-pull

Speaker 12 going on that um that gary cantrell established basically out of the gate that's based on his kind of impish sense of humor yeah and um so that means that like you're just as likely to be abused or mocked when you like quit as you are to be told like hey you completed one loop that's pretty good just in and of itself it just i guess depends on what his mood is right then And a lot of people like, aren't, don't really like this guy that much.

Speaker 12 Like, if you don't, if you're not tuned into his sense of humor, you're, you're probably not going to like him. You might find him obnoxious or, you know, might find him just mean.

Speaker 12 But if you are tuned into it, I think he's, he's pretty funny. Like reading about him on paper and reading interviews with him, I was like, I don't really like this guy.

Speaker 12 And then I saw him in the documentary. I'm like, oh, okay.
Same.

Speaker 12 He's just hard to translate into a description. And when you see him talk yourself, yourself, you're like, oh, yeah, he's fine.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he's one of the great eccentrics of the world. And sometimes those people are hard to pin down, you know, because they don't fit into a box.

Speaker 12 I know, but he has to. Right.

Speaker 13 Some other fun things. If you're a first-time runner, you bring a license plate from your home state or home country.
And he makes these cool signs out of them and hangs them up.

Speaker 13 If you have to bring a gift as well, if you were part of the race. If you are

Speaker 13 a first-time runner, you have to bring an article of clothing. In the documentary, it was very funny.
He said it kind of depends what he needs.

Speaker 13 One year it was a bunch of white Oxford shirts, another year it was socks, another year it was flannel shirts.

Speaker 13 And then if you have finished the race and you come back to race again, you have to bring him a pack of camel cigarettes.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and the camel cigarettes play a big role because the start of the race is marked officially by him lighting a cigarette. So everybody's standing there at this gate.

Speaker 12 That's the official starting line for the race and um just standing there waiting for him to light the cigarette. And he finally does and it's like a random time.
I think it was like 8, 11 a.m.

Speaker 12 when the whole thing started. And he lights a cigarette and soon everybody takes off.

Speaker 13 Yeah, when you get accepted, you know what day it's going to be on. You go, you camp out in the campground and you're just sort of waiting for him to blow the conch.
He blows a conch.

Speaker 13 Sometime between midnight and noon on the Saturday of that weekend, you don't know when it's coming. So if he blows it at, you know, 7 a.m.
or sometime in the morning, you're up all night.

Speaker 13 You're not getting sleep because you're so amped up and ready for this and apprehensive because you don't know when it starts. Again, he's just sort of messing with people.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And so when he decides to blow the conch, he blows the conch. That means you have one hour and everybody, you know, starts getting ready to go at that point.

Speaker 13 There is no prize, we should also mention. Yeah.
The prize is just finishing this thing.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I mean, there's bragging rights for sure.
Like if you, if you told any ultra marathon runner or

Speaker 12 trail runner that you completed the Barclay marathon, like they would drop to their knees and start kissing your rings. Yeah.
Like it's a big deal to have finished this.

Speaker 12 And yet there's also like, from Gary Cantrell's perspective, from everything that I've read,

Speaker 12 the way that he describes it is like, he's giving people an opportunity to push themselves to their maximum possible limits. Because remember, this race is intended to be just inside the possible

Speaker 12 human, the possibility of the human body, right? Yeah. So if you can complete it, like you're doing all sorts of things that you never thought you were capable of doing.

Speaker 12 Like your mental endurance is among the greatest of people walking around. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And so yeah, it's way more than just bragging rights. Like if you're, if you're into bragging rights, you're probably not even going to finish the first loop.

Speaker 12 Like if that's why you're doing it and you somehow got accepted, it's not going to translate. So these people don't care about bragging rights, even though they would have bragging rights for life.

Speaker 13 Totally. I like that one dude, the long-haired guy from Arizona in the documentary that that was his first one.

Speaker 13 He just had a cool vibe. Like everyone had a pretty cool vibe.
Like it's a really,

Speaker 13 it has a great spirit of

Speaker 13 helping one another out. And during the interloper periods where they're, which is, by the way, the only time they're allowed to have their sort of of aid crew with them.

Speaker 13 Like they don't, you know, they can't get helps along the way. Right.
So this is when they see other people and there's other former winners there.

Speaker 13 And when people drop out, they stick around and they're really helping people get their feet together and they're giving them dry socks and

Speaker 13 feeding them. And it's just a real great spirit of sort of camaraderie and helping one another out, it feels like.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, because as people get pared down, the people around them are like, they want to see somebody succeed.

Speaker 13 Then, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 12 Pretty cool.

Speaker 13 Real quick, what else as far as housekeeping? No GPS?

Speaker 12 That's a big one.

Speaker 13 They can wear a little cheap, or they're given a little cheap watch. And I think they banned altimeters in 2014

Speaker 13 or 12 or something.

Speaker 12 Something like that. Either way, you're stripped down to like the bare essentials.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 And you have a map, but you don't have a copy of their map.

Speaker 12 They give you the master map to use to trace the route onto your own map right and if you trace it incorrectly well that's ts for you and people do get lost like a lot there was one guy who um oh man don't remember what year it was oh in 2006 yeah

Speaker 12 this guy wandered off the course and spent 32 hours trying to get back oh man and in the end he only was he only did like two miles of the actual course. He wandered so far off course.

Speaker 13 So the way he put it, he did 16 hour miles in this race god i felt so bad for that guy yeah for sure yeah and then what else chuck uh this is another and to me this is kind of one of the coolest things because the whole time until we had gotten to this part i was like well how do they know that people are running that route because they're not staked out along the way uh in the documentary they had some people staked out a little bit just to get some footage but it's not like they have people at checkpoints that are making sure they're on the route and all that he did something pretty lo-fi and genius which was he puts 10 books out, 10 to 12 depending on the year, at different points along the way.

Speaker 13 And you have to rip the page out corresponding to your bib number.

Speaker 13 And that is the proof that you ran the real route.

Speaker 13 You have to show up with, depending on how many books, 10 or 11 pages when you touch that start finish line and you have to turn them over to Cantrell and he has to look them over and verify it.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And I'm guessing that they, they, are the books in the same place every time?

Speaker 13 Ah, That I'm not sure about.

Speaker 12 But I do know that they hide them. They're not just always out in plain sight.
Like one of the things, you're having to stay oriented. You're having to push your body and endure.

Speaker 12 And then you're also at the same time having to make sure you don't trot past one of the books. So you have to backtrack and get the page out.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I mean, the one guy, the year of the documentary that won and set the record, I think he said he spent a couple of hours looking for the book.

Speaker 12 I would lose my mind, man. Oh, yeah.
And also, if you're like, well, how do you get the same page 11 times? You get a different bib number for each loop.

Speaker 12 So you would be tearing out a different page each time.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And I think there was a story just last year, in fact, there was a French runner who got to the final loop

Speaker 13 to find that a book was gone. There was a day hiker that thought the race was over and took the book as a memento.
So he's like, what do I do? He completed the race.

Speaker 13 And when he got back to the gate, they had turned the book in. So they counted that.

Speaker 12 That's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I've read about one runner too who I think this, I don't remember what year it was, maybe 2016 or 17.

Speaker 12 He made it, he showed up six seconds after time. Oh my God.

Speaker 12 But he had all his pages and they said like he was just collapsed on the ground. And he said, I have all my pages, but he didn't make it by six seconds.

Speaker 13 You know, I bet that he feels a great sense of accomplishment, though.

Speaker 12 I would think so, sure.

Speaker 13 Like, he finished that thing. Six seconds, be damned, you know.

Speaker 12 You'd have to be one hell of a perfectionist to be like, well, I failed.

Speaker 13 Technically.

Speaker 12 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 13 I think there was one more piece of housekeeping here.

Speaker 12 Housekeeping? Oh, that's right.

Speaker 13 When a runner gives up,

Speaker 13 a guy named Dave Henn, who is a race volunteer, plays taps on a bugle.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And that's Carl Rawdog Hen's son.

Speaker 13 Oh, is it?

Speaker 12 It is. Rawdog Jr.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Lil Rawdog.

Speaker 13 Or the third. Yeah.

Speaker 12 He said that he thinks the reason why is because it's just one final punishment for you

Speaker 12 from Gary Cantrell to basically be humiliated with taps. And on the other side.

Speaker 12 Some runners, when they finish, especially when they actually complete the race, he has one of those Staples easy buttons that they press. And when you you press it a voice goes that was easy yeah

Speaker 13 it's really fun to watch it was someone just like

Speaker 12 on their last leg literally like you're bleeding at the legs and he's like hit the button right because that was easy yeah the the guy who was on the documentary was i think his name was john kelly he finished second of two i think that year or maybe three and he um they show him and he's just totally out of it.

Speaker 12 Like he's sitting on a chair with people surrounded surrounding him talking and yeah yeah he's just in another world like totally out of his skull because he hadn't slept at all like that whole time yeah 60 hours it's crazy oh man the one guy that couldn't in the document that that uh tapped out and was just like crying

Speaker 13 oh i don't remember him which one oh boy that was tough he had kind of dark curly hair and he was pretty pumped up going into it about his chances and

Speaker 13 uh yeah i mean what can you say about a race where like whatever probably 98% of the people never finish it.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 13 Maybe more. Maybe 99.

Speaker 12 That was a, well, yeah. So I think officially 20 out of 1,000 plus people have finished.
So I'm sure we have some

Speaker 12 sixth graders who can calculate that for us and send it in.

Speaker 13 Let me see. Last, I'm sorry, this year, there were a record five people completed it.

Speaker 13 And that is, I think the maximum before that may have been three, maybe four, but usually it's one, maybe two, or zero.

Speaker 13 Last, I'm sorry, this year, a woman was a finisher for the first time, Yasmine Paris or Perry. I don't know how she pronounces it.

Speaker 13 She came in two minutes short of the deadline to finish that race.

Speaker 12 Yeah, so she finished with two minutes left, right?

Speaker 13 That's incredible.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it really is. And one of the reasons it's incredible is because Gary Cantrell, this is another reason a lot of people don't like him.

Speaker 12 For years and years and years, he would say publicly, there's no woman out there who could possibly finish this race and um you know he was criticized uh for saying that kind of thing because there's plenty of amazing women marathoners and ultrathoners and trail runners and he defended it by basically saying if a woman could defeat this it would be exactly the kind of woman who would need to hear somebody say something like a woman would never be able to complete this yeah i got the and i don't know if i'm being an apologist but i got the idea that a lot of that was sort of goading

Speaker 13 someone to finish.

Speaker 12 That's how I took it too.

Speaker 13 Yeah, like deep down, he's like, there's going to be a woman that's going to do this, and maybe I need to stoke the fire a little bit.

Speaker 12 Right. So finally, yeah, I think Jasmine Paris.

Speaker 12 She's a Brit who teaches at the University of Scotland. Did you say that part?

Speaker 13 No, I also said Yasmine Piri. I know.

Speaker 12 I was just gently correcting you.

Speaker 13 Oh, I'm sure it was Jasmine Paris.

Speaker 12 Yasmin Piri.

Speaker 13 Who else? In 2024, a mechanical engineer named Jared Campbell became the first four-time finisher. He's in the documentary.

Speaker 13 And an interesting just sort of side note in this, and Livia pointed out, but then when you watch the documentary, it really hits home is that it seems like this race and ultra-marathoning and this sort of endurance thing attracts people of very, very high intelligence.

Speaker 13 I felt like every person they interviewed were like, I'm an engineer.

Speaker 13 I'm a scientist.

Speaker 13 And they talked to,

Speaker 13 I almost called him Barkley, to Lazarus about this, to Cantrell in the documentary. And he said, yeah, he said, those are the achievers in life.

Speaker 13 Those are the people that go to graduate school and go to get their doctorial thesis. And people who set hard goals and accomplish them, it just sort of fits.

Speaker 13 And I never really thought about that tie, but I don't think there's a lot of dumb-dumbs that do stuff like this.

Speaker 12 No, although

Speaker 12 it's not going to be a dum-dum to do it.

Speaker 13 It's a weird dichotomy. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I say we finish on the story of John Fega-Varesi.

Speaker 13 All right, let's hear it.

Speaker 12 He was a runner in,

Speaker 12 oh, I don't know what year he ran, but he was an experienced ultra-marathon runner.

Speaker 12 He participated in the Bad Water Ultra Marathon, which runs through Death Valley 135 miles. Yeah.
And he was like, this is, that's nothing.

Speaker 12 I'm paraphrasing. Yeah.
I'm sure he wouldn't say this, but he was basically like,

Speaker 12 you can't even really compare the two.

Speaker 12 And he completed it.

Speaker 12 And he was so incoherent from sleep deprivation that he apparently didn't remember like downing a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream like at the finish line. He had no idea that he'd done that.

Speaker 12 And he spent the next day and a half just laying around the campground recovering. So after that time, he's like, all right, I guess I'll drive home.
And he started falling asleep on the way home.

Speaker 12 So he had to stop and check himself into a hotel where he slept for another 16 hours.

Speaker 13 Oh man, that's called human exhaustion. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And I say we quietly close the door and leave John to his slumber and go on to listener mail.

Speaker 13 I do want to shout out the record, though. Brett Mon,

Speaker 13 who is

Speaker 13 won it a few times now, I think. He's a physicist.
The record, current record right now lies with Brett at 52 hours, 3 minutes, and 8 seconds.

Speaker 12 Very nice. Just incredible.
You woke John up, though.

Speaker 13 That's right. Sorry, John.
Go back to sleep. Here's your chubby hubby.

Speaker 12 That's the best.

Speaker 13 I can't find it anymore.

Speaker 12 I can't either.

Speaker 13 People say it exists. I get pictures occasionally, emails, but it doesn't exist in Atlanta.

Speaker 12 That's sad.

Speaker 13 what did atlanta do to be so punished i don't know i don't need ice cream anymore anyway which is the saddest part of this story

Speaker 13 all right i'm gonna call this a lake versus pond uh we got a quite a few emails uh i by the way i want to mention one differentiator we saw uh said that the difference they heard between lake versus pond is if sunlight can reach the bottom If it can, then it's a pond.

Speaker 13 If it can't, then it's a lake. But this comes from Mark.

Speaker 13 Hey guys, the answer I think depends on who you ask, but as an ambassador from the land of 10,000 lakes, Minnesota, which is technically 11,842 lakes, perhaps I have a bit of clout.

Speaker 13 Most folks would assume the difference has something to do with size and depth. It's not quite that simple, though.

Speaker 13 According to a 2012 CBS News article, retired DNR water supervisor Glenn Yackel suggests that a lake needs to be large enough and deep enough to allow for wave action to be considered a lake that can clear vegetation from from its shoreline.

Speaker 13 The pond, on the other hand, lacks this wave action, meaning its shoreline is typically surrounded by vegetation without clear boundaries. But guys, it gets even more complicated.

Speaker 13 Government agencies often have regulatory thresholds that lead to discrepancies per state. For example, here in Minnesota, with our 11,842 lakes, has fewer lakes than Wisconsin.

Speaker 13 And any Wisconsinite will gleefully point out that they have 15,000. But here's where the differences come into play.

Speaker 13 While they do have 15,000 lakes, their definition includes a body of water with an area of at least 2.5 acres. In Minnesota, our standards are higher.

Speaker 13 And to qualify as a lake here, we must cover at least 10 acres. If we lowered our threshold to match Wisconsin's, we wouldn't dare dream of it, though, we'd have over 20,000 lakes.

Speaker 12 Wow, Chuck, I feel more lake-informed than I ever have been in my entire life.

Speaker 13 For real. That is from Mark.
Mark said, always a pleasure to listen to you guys with my boys, who are six and seven and big fans. And Mark had replied with their names.

Speaker 13 And I'm very frustrated because I cannot find that reply. So let me just say, Mark and sons of Mark, thank you for the support.

Speaker 12 Yes. And I can vouch for Chuck Mark.
We just edited out many minutes of him searching for that email. So he really did give it a try.

Speaker 13 Sorry, guys, but they're six and seven. So maybe that's for the best.

Speaker 12 Right. If you want to be like Mark and his unnamed sons, you can write to us as well.
Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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Speaker 33 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 33 Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Speaker 34 And now, superhuman Shaq.

Speaker 35 I keep telling them not to say that. I'm no superhuman.
Believe it or not, I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA.

Speaker 35 In adults with obesity, moderate to severe OSA is a condition where breathing is interrupted during sleep with loud snoring, choking, gasping for air, and even daytime fatigue.

Speaker 35 Let's just say it can sound a lot like this.

Speaker 35 Sound familiar? Learn more at don't sleep on OSA.com.

Speaker 34 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.