I still struggled in the fifth loop to get around and made a lot of mistakes.” “There are some sections that are really difficult to remember and to know perfectly. “You really have to learn the course during the race,” he tells CNN Sport. The race opens out onto the mountains at multiple scales, multiple speeds, and along multiple vectors and in turn, these particular mountains are allowed to have their own specific, non-generic influence on the form and style of the event.Ray traveled only eight miles in just over two days after escaping Brushy before he was recaptured, leading Cantrell, a local long-distance runner, to muse that he could cover 100 miles in the same amount of time.Īnd so the Barkley was born, during which Cantrell sends a group of 40 runners into Frozen Head State Park to battle the woods, hills, and briars without the help of phones, GPS trackers, course markings or aid stations.Ī single map of the route is available at the start line for runners to study and copy down for themselves, and on the way around they must rip a page corresponding to their bib number from a selection of paperback books left on the course.įor first-timers like Sanchez, navigation is the most fiendish part of the Barkley.

Considered as a form of constraint-based endurance performance art (which it is admittedly not), the Barkley Marathons suggest a 'found' approach to performance constraints: an approach that puts performance in a more direct and fine-grained relationship with the details (geological, topological, meteorological, botanical, human-historical, non-human-historical) of the world in which (and with which) the performance occurs. Its rules follow a unique set of constraints specific to the contours of the local topology, to the history of incarceration in the area, and to the idiosyncratic aesthetics and ethics of the race's two founders. It takes place in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee, is approximately 130 miles long, and must be completed in under 60 hours.

The Barkley Marathons is an infamously brutal endurance trail race, having only been completed by 15 runners in its 30-year history.

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