“The entry process is not actually published, and we still get thousands of applicants,” Lake said. Gary said ‘in that amount of time, I could’ve done 100 miles,’ because he was already an ultra-runner in the late 1970′s.” Gary and his friend were familiar with the mountains here they camped and hiked here. Ray was out there in the mountains for 54 hours and when they tracked him down with bloodhounds, he was only about eight miles from the prison.
“In 1977 Ray and several others escaped from Brushy Mountain. He was incarcerated at the Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, which is located on the perimeter of the park,” Furtaw said.
“He created this race in part because of the famous prison escape of James Earl Ray, who was the scoundrel who assassinated Martin Luther King. Read More: ‘Frozen Ed’ | The first man to finish the hardest hike in East Tennessee: The Barkley Marathons While those trips into the wilderness partly inspired the race, Edwin “Frozen Ed” Furtaw, the first person to ever finish the Barkley, said history helped inspire it as well. At the time of writing, runners still have about nineteen hours to complete the 160 kilometers.Lake and his friend Karl Henn created the race in 1985 after backpacking in Frozen Head. For each loop, participants have 12 hours to complete the lap otherwise, they are eliminated from the race. Among the seven runners still in the race is Jasmin Paris, the second woman ever to start the fourth loop at all.įor the past seven years, no one has crossed the finish line of the Barkley Marathons: five 32-kilometer loops – 160 kilometers in total – through inhospitable terrain and with a basically countless amount of elevation gain. This year the participants are lucky with good conditions: it is cold, but sunny. This year’s Barkley Marathons looks set to be a very special edition: no fewer than seven runners have started the fourth of five loops, making more runners than ever in the race to cross the coveted finish line after 160 kilometers.Ĭompleting three loops, in which the seven runners thus succeeded, is known as completing the “Fun Run” and thus already constitutes a first goal in itself.
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