THE HELL RACE

THE HELL RACE

If you are looking to experience one of the most extreme events and see how far you can go, start by finding the mysterious email to sign up for the Barkley Marathon. This is the hardest race in the world and has only been completed by 15 people in its more than 30 editions. Its origins lie in a historical event in 1968; when James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, escaped from a prison in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee. The search for James Earl went on for 60 hours before finally finding him only eight miles from the prison, which shows just how confusing the terrain is.

This event inspired Karl Henn and Gary Cantrell, known as Lazarus Lake, who founded the race in 1986 in the Cumberland Range in Tennessee. Thus, it consists of completing a course of five laps for a total of 160 kilometers, with 20,000 meters of elevation gain and a time limit of sixty hours. In addition, the race route is not signposted, and runners are only allowed to use a compass to orient themselves in a terrain of abundant trees, undergrowth, and fog.

During the course, the runners have to find some hidden books and tear out some pages, to give them to Lazarus after completing each lap, and thus provide evidence that they have passed through the checkpoints. On the other hand, towards the middle of each lap, the runners pass through the campsite where the race starts because Lazarus makes them touch a yellow fence and asks them if they want to continue. If the answer is no, a funeral march is played with a bugle while the spectators accompany it with their hands on their chests.

To make the race as mysterious as possible, almost no information is provided about the route and the runners who will participate. Also, it doesn't have a website, just an email address, which almost nobody knows and to which an email must be sent on a specific day at a specific time. In the mail, the runners must specify in an essay their motivations to run such a hell, and a resume of all the long-distance races they have run. From all the applications Lazarus selects the 40 candidates he considers appropriate.

The last edition held, i.e., the 2020 edition due to Covid-19, started in the middle of the night and amid heavy rain and thick fog. In the second loop of the race, in which many runners were already on the verge of withdrawing, the rain and fog were still present, and the temperatures dropped even further. Of all the runners who participated, only two made it to the third lap, as most of them dropped out and the others failed to make the cut-off time of the second loop. These two also failed to make the time cut in the third loop, so the 2021 edition did not have a fourth or fifth loop. The last time a runner managed to finish the race in the preset time was John Kelly in 2017.

oxigeno, m., 2021. BARKLEY MARATHONS 2021 TAMPOCO TENDRÁ FINALISTAS. Mayayo. [online] CARRERAS DE MONTAÑA, POR MAYAYO. Available at: <https://carrerasdemontana.com/2021/03/20/barkley-marathon-2021/> [Accessed 19 November 2021].

MARCA. 2021. Ning�n corredor logra ganar en el infierno de The Barkley Marathons. [online] Available at: <https://www.marca.com/deportes-aventura/2021/03/21/60575f26268e3ea9478b45de.html> [Accessed 18 November 2021].