Stuff You Should Know - The Barkley Marathons

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Every Spring in northeastern Tennessee, roughly 40 people compete in a marathon they are very unlikely to finish. This is the Barkley Marathons. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture and everywhere in between. Join us. Listen to Tech Stuff production of iHeartRadio. 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 and we are giving up right out of the gate on our episode about the Barbecue Marathon. That's right. Our friend Chad, we want to shout out our friend Chad Crowley who we talked about before who was the producer, director and showrunner of our TV show back in the day.

I got this idea from Chad because we had coffee over the holidays. And he is running ultra marathons now. Wow. Which is a very Chad thing to do. Like, he starts running a handful of years ago and then now is running ultras. And I was like, Chad, how long is that?

And he said 60 miles, generally. And I said, could you run to Athens? He said how far is Athens and I said I don't know I can't remember how far I said like 80 miles he said I could run a hundred miles. Wow. But he'd need a ride back. Are you kidding? He said it might take a while but I could I could probably run a hundred 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, you guys should do an episode on the Barkley Marathons,

which I'd heard of before. Oh really? 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 unusual origin story, an unusual founder and just how it's all done. It's just this remarkable story and I agree.

Yeah, there's a really great documentary from 2017 called The Barkley Marathon, colon, the race that eats its young, which is a nickname for that race. And there's a few people in there who are seasoned trail runners, ultra thonors, like people who, 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. Like there's nobody who's doing anything like this. And if you think, you know what you're doing, you're going to be completely amazed at how far off you were in what you thought this is going to be like. It's that hard.

Yeah. Did you got a chance to watch it? Yeah, it was good. And there was a guy who was a special operations, like I guess a former, a special ops soldier. Yeah. It was like, I've done crazy stuff with my body and this, like that did nothing to prepare me for this.

Yeah, it was really well done. It's on YouTube and I recommend watching it because it really, there's a lot of drama that takes place the year that they did the documentary. I think they did it on 2012 or 2013 maybe. Oh was it? And it came out in 2017 you said. Okay so yeah I was confused that what year it was. I think it was 2012 or 2013 and it was there's a lot of good drama so we don't want to spoil some of the stories that happen but I recommend

watching and here we go with Barclay Marathons. Oh, okay. So the whole thing about Barkley Marathons is that you can trace them back. I mean, you could start at the very beginning. We talked about in our... What was the one crazy marathon episode we did not too long ago? It was on marathons. No, it was on a specific marathon in, I think, Los Angeles. Oh, I don't know. We did one of marathons years ago. No, remember the guy who was running the human zoos at the World's Fair came up with a,

like he called it the Special Olympics Marathon? This was months ago, man. Hey, you can't remember it either, buddy. All right, well I can't remember. I mean, you remember it existed at least? 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? Uh, I don't remember that. You do remember we did a Saturn episode that came out, like, a few days back? I'm so mad at you right now. Don't you? We're still getting emails on that one, so yes, I do remember.

OK, all right, cool. What LA Marathon are you talking about? It might not be LA, but it was like just, you remember like that one Italian guy? I think he was running in like, he'd stop and eat people's fruit and stuff and chat with everybody. And there were the two guys from Africa who were like... I remember that now.

Yeah, it was, I can't remember where it was or what the name was. I can't remember what it was. Yeah. Oh boy, people are just screaming at their pod player right now. 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. Can you believe that we just did all that? And in our marathons episode. Yeah. Anyway, let's not even do that. Their marathons have been a long, long time. Ultra Marathon started in the 1970s,

and that's what we're really talking about. And this guy, Gary Kentrell, aka Lazarus Lake, or Laz, he's in his 70s now. He is our, he is the creator along with his friend of the Barkley Marathon, whom he named after his friend, a farmer named Barry Barkley. In the documentary, very sweetly over the end credits, they ask 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. Yeah, Barclay, 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. Yeah, so there's no real reason, but they're called the Barclay Marathons. And Cantrell has an interesting story in that he is a former athlete. He's run supposedly over about 150,000 miles in his life, but he smokes Camel cigarettes.

He just floods his body with Dr. Pepper. He's older gentleman now and has kind of wrecked his legs from all that running. So he hasn't run for a while, but he got interested in this as a Boy Scout in Tennessee as a teenager or preteen, I guess, when he got interested in this as a Boy Scout in Tennessee as a teenager, or preteen I guess, when he was, 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. Yeah, he also apparently really liked the idea that if he continued to work at something, he would continue to improve. Yeah. And that's a big part of running. That's a big part of running. That's a big part of hiking. That's a big part of doing anything worthwhile.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, he got the bug pretty early on. He started running marathons. I think in 1966, he started running. By high school, he started running marathons. I think in 1966 he started running. By high school he was running marathons. 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. Guy named Gordy Ainsley set that up. And so by this time, you know, 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. He was starting to have kids. He had a job as an accountant and he just couldn't travel the country to go participate in ultra thons. So he started setting his own

up around Tennessee. 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. 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 Thru Run. 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. 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, he called it, and he's always had a sense of humor,

you can tell by the way he names these things, the last annual Vol State, obviously volunteer state road race, which is a 311 mile run from Missouri to Georgia in 10 days. Missouri to Georgie. Exactly. 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 another one called the Idiot's Run, which I don't think is around a 123 mile gravel, all gravel road run. 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 good reason. Yeah. And that's the whole, his whole jam is like, he loves coming up with a kind of race that, um, just as at the border between the possibility and the impossibility of human endurance of what the human body can actually do. Like he wants it just inside of that limit so that you could, if you push yourself enough, complete this race. But most people are just not going to be able to because it's so close to impossible.

Yeah. I mean, many, many years, the Barkley Marathon has no finisher at all. Many years, no one makes it to the fifth loop. There are four loops that we'll get into all this in a second. It's happening more and more now. 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. It's never easy, but I think the veterans have an advantage for sure. Yeah, because I think the astonishment at how difficult it is 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 and it's got to be a huge leg up. Totally. So we should talk a little bit about the whole basis of all this, right? Or do you want to take a break? Yeah, let's talk about where this thing's held, right? Okay, well the whole thing is held at Frozen Head State Park. It's named after the tallest peak in this state park.

It's in northeastern Tennessee, which is kind of, I guess, where, um, Northeastern Tennessee is where Virginia and North Carolina come together with Tennessee. It's a beautiful area. And this would be in the Cumberland Mountains. 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. It's 330 acres, but this 330 acre state park is surrounded by 24,000 acres of

forest land and the whole thing, I guess, started with, um, convict leasing. So this, this area is like really dark. Yeah. You know? 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. And it's just, you know, it's in the middle of nowhere, like at the bottom of, you know,

sort of a ravine and very 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 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. But 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. Just make a little extra on the side from forcing your prisoners to engage in hard labor, right? Well, I think in our, 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? Madawan. Madawan, 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. 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. And so Tennessee was like, well, fine, we're not doing that anymore.

But under Turd, they just started setting up their own coal mines and using the prisoners directly instead of leasing them out. Exactly. And they needed somewhere to put those prisoners, or workers, I guess, slash prisoners. So they built a new prison. It is called Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. And in the 1930s, a lot of that land eventually became that great conservation area that we were talking about, those 24,000 acres. And the New Deal era Civilian Conservation Corps built a lot of trails.

It became a natural area, you know, officially in the 1970s. But there are these trails there now, 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. The prison stayed open, but why we're telling you all this is for a couple of reasons. One is at one point in the race, they navigate through a tunnel like a little water channel that goes under the prison, and that's part of the race route where you're definitely going gonna get your feet wet. 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. But the prison remained open, and James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., was sent there with six other men. He escaped in 1977 from Brushing Mountain and spent 54 hours in that rugged terrain, eventually being recaptured about eight miles from the prison.

And 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 a hundred miles through that terrain in 54 hours and he said, man, I could travel 100 miles through that terrain in 54 hours. So he invents this race sort of inspired by this. 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. 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. Right. 130 really. You wanna take a break? 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.

And we'll be back with more of the Barclay Marathons right after this. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups,

this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, like you said, I think in 1977 James O'Rae escapes and Cantrell lived in the area. He said it was big news at the time. So he was aware of this. And a few years later, he and his friend Carl Hinn, known as Raw Dog, for reasons that I don't want to ask about, they decided-

I don't think it was in 1985, I don't think it was. You don't know? All right, you're a good point. So they decided to hike into the state park. This is a place where he's like, okay, we could totally do so many more than eight miles in 54 hours, let's go check this out and have fun. And, um, like you said, most of this area are not 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. Like a contour map, like all you have to, you have to be good at orienteering is what it's called. In addition to hiking and putting up with all sorts of terrible, just uncomfortable stuff and pushing your limits. So these guys were like,

let's just go for a fun hike for a day. Yeah, and they showed up there. There was a park 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. They ignored him, they did make it through, they did an eight mile.

They didn't even like note his existence. Yeah, they just walked right by. They made this eight mile hike, this loop, but it took them a full day, which is, you should be able to hike much more than eight miles in a day. 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. Let's make a nearly impossible to finish race. I think it's

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

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. And the initial cutoff was 24 hours with 13 participants and zero people finishing. Yeah, and this is just a 50 to 55 mile version. Like you said, officially the current Barclay Marathon is 100 mile, and in reality it's also like 120 to 130 miles based on reports from people who've actually run it, right?

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. Just stop saying that. So the first version, like you said, is three loops. 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. And there was 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.

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. Um, and that is a lot. And in fact, the guy who finished, frozen Ed Furtaugh... Yeah. He was just Ed Furtaugh until he won, and Furtaw, he was just Ed Furtaw until he won. And from then on, he was frozen Ed Furtaw.

He thought that there was a misprint in Ultra Running Magazine that the elevation was actually 2,400 feet, not 2,400. Yeah. And I guess we can go ahead and tell everybody the current iteration, like we said, is supposedly 100, but it's really more like 130 miles. It's got a 60-hour time limit. And the elevation is the total elevation climb over that race, if you finish it, is 60,000 feet, which is equivalent to walking up and back down Mount Everest twice.

Yes. yeah. So yeah, the total elevation's 120,000, because yeah, if you go up 60,000 feet and you're coming back down, you gotta come down 60,000 feet. 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 it's rough. Just watching the effects on some of the runners' bodies and what they were coming back to camp looking like was pretty bad. Some guy had a head wound and they show him slipping on rocks and hitting his forehead. 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. Mm-hmm, but every single person's legs are just thrashed Like looks like ground meat. Oh, yeah, like disgusting bleeding their feet are

disgusting and blistered and and justdled with, I think the one guy that, 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 can't, you're not going to get dry feet, which is a big problem. And they're basically not sleeping. 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, you can get first aid, you can eat, you

can drink, you can rest, you can change your clothes and socks. You can take a nap if you want, but that clock is still running. So how long you wait is up to you. 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. Without drugs. 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.

So it's not like they're running the whole time, but it's just brutal. Yeah, it really is. One of the other things that really kind of gets us 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. But you're going 130 miles. So if you do the math, Olivia helps us with this, and she pointed out that... Thank goodness.

Yeah. You could sleep for two eight-hour nights and still finish this course at a 20-minute mile pace, which you can basically do on your hands and knees, and still complete it within the 60-hour cutoff. 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 those same limits, the time limit and the length, put on this particular terrain or in this topography

is just, it changes absolutely everything. Oh yeah. This 12-hour time limit per loop must have come in after the documentary, right? Yeah, that confused me too because they were finishing in like 13 hours and something like that. I didn't get that, so yeah, I think it must have been a new one. Yeah, I think so. So, finishing the three loops, if you finish three loops, that is considered a fun run. And that is a designation, and that is a huge accomplishment just to finish the fun run. We should add, he also has a Baby Barclay in the fall, the Barclay 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 of, 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. 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, because they just can't run rough shot over the area. But they have the 60 hours to complete, now 12 hours per loop. The first loop is run clockwise.

The second loop, which is at night, will go counterclockwise, and then again, day, night, clockwise, counterclockwise. And then this is pretty devious. The final fifth loop, if you get there, the first person to finish the fourth gets a choice which way they want to run. And then they start splitting people up because almost everybody runs with a buddy or two. 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 gonna lose your buddy, which way do you wanna run? And the first person will say, I'll go clockwise. The next person has to go counterclockwise, and then they alternate. So at some point, if they finish that fifth loop, they're gonna pass their former buddy going in the opposite direction. Right.

Yeah, and in the documentary, Cantrell points out like these, by this time, these people who had like formed serious bonds by running together on these loops are now direct competitors. Like now it's a race because they're in the fifth loop and whoever's gonna finish in what time they finish at is going to determine the actual winner.

Like now there's a possible winner and everything changes. So I don't, they probably don't like class pans and then, you know, they're pulled apart, you know, sadly when they have to go in different directions at that point. 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 two, maybe three, maximum four people that are even on the fifth loop,

then that's when things get serious. That's when it turns into an actual race. Yeah, that's what I took it as too. 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. 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, so that you can't just be like,

yeah, I remember this, this is nothing. Now I remember exactly what the trail is. You're super disoriented the first time, but it's not like you have it down pat after that first loop necessarily. 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, and then those fastest people were doing like 12 and 13 hours on the next loop. Through the darkness, and we should mention the weather, you know, with these huge elevation changes, you're gonna go from temperatures sometimes in April in the 80s where it's low to like 10 degrees

at night. 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 Laz said that, you know, one year, there were 108-pound blocks of ice because it was 10 degrees at elevation. Yeah. It's just crazy. 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. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. John Stewart is back at the daily show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with the daily show years edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the shows,

correspondents, and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we're back. The race is about to begin. We should point out, too, the other thing to keep in mind is if you quit, quit near

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

Cause 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. 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. Right, yeah. So going even back before the the start of the race, you said that the Barclay Marathon has no website and that is intentional. The whole thing is meant to be kept largely a secret. There's not a website, there's not like some

information on this is how you apply. You have to use, um, basically your investigative skills just to figure out Gary Cantrell's email to email to ask to apply and they make it really, really hard to apply for this because in part, um, they're just weeding out people who don't have even the beginning of the motivation and dedication to complete this race. Like if you can't even go to this trouble to like really do your research to figure out how to apply, then don't even bother trying to apply. There's no website, no thanks.

Exactly. And if you do want to apply, you have to cough up $1.60. Yeah, that's a non-refundable application fee. I think most people send in two single dollar bills because he says they don't give change. And he every year chooses, you know, he chooses a range of people. Some of them are very experienced,

some of them are random. 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. In the year of the documentary, that poor guy made it six hours. And I knew as soon as that guy headed out in his camouflage cargo pants, I was like, this guy, what is he doing?

What's he wearing? So he didn't make it very far. 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 way more qualified to do it than like the average person. 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 he went and plopped the guy out of McDonald's,

like, mid-bite of a Big Mac and threw him on the trail. 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 gonna go be the sacrificial human. 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? No, I don't think so. No, it was pretty funny and sad. He took it on the chin like a big boy though.

Yeah. Imagine if he'd started like yelling. Right. You just brought me out here to make fun of me. A little bit more about the application process. Everyone knows it takes place generally around April Fool's Day. They send in an essay to get in with weird prompts. Like one year it was what's the most important vegetable group.

One of the women, I think she was in the documentary that year, Beverly Abbs, who by the way that year completed the fun run, so quite an achievement. She said 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. 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. Basically, misery awaits you.

Yeah, that's the whole jam. The way that it's treated is like, you're not going to finish. You're a dummy for even trying. There's this weird kind of push-pull going on that Gary Cantrell established basically out of the gate that's based on his kind of impish sense of humor. Yeah.

And 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. If you're not tuned into his sense of humor,

you're probably not gonna like him. You might find him obnoxious or might find him just mean. But if you are tuned into it, I think he's pretty funny. Reading about him on paper and reading interviews with him, I was like, I don't really like this guy. And then I saw him in the documentary and I'm like, oh, okay. He's just hard to translate into a description. When you see him talk to yourself, you're like, oh, yeah, he's fine.

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

If you have to bring a gift as well, if you were part of the race, if you are 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. One year was a bunch of white Oxford shirts, another year was socks, another year was flannel shirts. 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. 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, that's the the official starting line for the race and 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 When when the whole thing started and he lights lights a cigarette and everybody takes off. Yeah, when you get accepted, you know what day it's gonna be on. You go, you camp out in the campground,

and you're just sort of waiting for him to blow the conk. He blows a conk 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, you're not getting sleep because you're so amped up and ready for this. Right.

And apprehensive because you don't know when it starts. Again, he's just sort of messing with people. Yeah. And so when he decides to blow the conk, he blows the conk, that means you have one hour and everybody, you know, starts getting ready to go at that point. There is no prize, we should also mention. The prize is just finishing this thing. Yeah, I mean, there's bragging rights for sure. Like, if you told any ultra marathon runner,

you know, trail runner, that you completed the Barkley Marathon, like, they would drop to their knees and start kissing your rings. Yeah. It gets a big deal to have finished this. And yet there's also like, from Gary Cantrell's perspective, from everything that I've read, the way that he describes it is like, he's giving people an opportunity to push themselves to

the their maximum possible limits. Because remember, this race is intended to be just inside the possible, the human, the possibility of the human body, right? So if you can complete it, like you're doing all sorts of things that you never thought you were capable of doing. Like your mental endurance is among the greatest of people walking around.

And so yeah, it's way more than just bragging rights. Like if you're into bragging rights, you're probably not even gonna finish the first loop. Like if that's why you're doing it and you somehow got accepted, it's not gonna translate. So these people don't care about bragging rights even though they would have bragging rights for life. Totally.

I like that one dude, the long hair guy from Arizona in the documentary that was his first one. He just had a cool vibe. Like everyone had a pretty cool vibe. Like it's a really, it has a great spirit of 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 aid crew with them, like they don't, you know, they can't get help along the way. Right. So this is when they see other people and there's other former winners there. 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 feeding them. And it's just a real great spirit of sort of camaraderie and helping one another out, it feels like. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, because as people get paired down, the people around them are like, they want to see somebody succeed then. Yeah, for sure. Pretty cool. Real quick, what else as far as housekeeping? No GPS? That's a big one.

They can wear a little cheap or they're given a little cheap watch. And I think they banned altimeters in 2014 or 12 or something. Something like that. Either way, you're stripped down to like the bare essentials. Yeah. And you have a map, but you don't have a copy of their map. They give you the master map to use to trace the route onto your own map. 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- Oh man. Don't remember what year it was. Oh, in 2006. Yeah. This guy wandered off the course and spent 32 hours trying to get back. And in the end, he only did like two miles

of the actual course. He wandered so far off course. 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. And then what else, Chuck? 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. 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, and you have to rip the page out corresponding to your bib number, and that is the proof that you ran the real route. 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. Yeah.

And I'm guessing are the books in the same place every time? Ah, that I'm not sure about. 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, 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. 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. Oh, my God. 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,

so you would be tearing out a different bib number for each loop? So you would be tearing out a different page each time. Yeah, and I think there was a story just last year, in fact, there was a French runner who got to the final loop 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 and when he got back to the gate they had turned the book in. So they counted that.

That's awesome. I've read about one runner too who I think this I don't remember what year was maybe 2016 or 17. He made it he showed up six seconds after time. Oh my God. 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. You know, I bet that he feels a great sense of accomplishment though.

I would think so, sure. Like he finished that thing six seconds be damned, you know? You'd have to be one hell of a perfectionist to be like, well I failed. Technically, yeah, for sure. I think there was one more piece of housekeeping here. Housekeeping? Oh, that's right.

When a runner gives up, a guy named Dave Hen, who is a race volunteer, plays taps on a bugle. Yeah, and that's Carl Rawdog Hen's son. Oh, is it? It is. Rawdog Jr.? Yeah, Lil Rawdog. Or the third, yeah.

He said that he thinks the reason why is because it's just one final punishment for you from Gary Cantrell to basically be humiliated with taps. Then on the other side, 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 press it, a voice goes, that was easy. Yeah. It was really fun to watch. It was. easy buttons that they press. And when you press it, a voice goes, that was easy. Yeah. It was really fun to watch. It was. Someone just like on their last leg,

literally like you bleeding at the legs and he's like, hit the button. Right. Because that was easy. Yeah, 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 they show him, and he's just totally out of it. Like, he's sitting on a chair with people surrounding him talking, and 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 documentary that tapped out and was just like crying. 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 yeah. I mean, what can you say about a race where like,

whatever, probably 98% of the people never finish it? Right. Maybe more, maybe 99. That was a, well yeah, so I think officially 20 out of a thousand plus people have finished. So I'm sure we have some six graders who can calculate that for us and send it in. Let me see, last, I'm sorry, this year there were a record five people completed it and

that is, I think the maximum before that may have been three, maybe four, but usually it's one, maybe two, or zero. Last, I'm sorry, this year a woman was a finisher for the first time, Yasmin Paris, or Perry, I don't know how she pronounces it. She came in two minutes short of the deadline to finish that race. Yeah, so she finished with two minutes left, right? That's incredible.

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. 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 idea.

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... Yes. ...someone to finish. That's how I took it, too. Yeah, like deep down, he's like, there's gonna be a woman that's gonna do this, and maybe I need to stoke the fire a little bit.

Right. So finally, yeah, I think Jasmine Parris. She's a Brit who teaches at the University of Scotland. Did you say that part? No, I also said Yasmine Piri. I know. I was just generally correcting you. Oh, I'm sure it was Jasmine Piri. Yasmine Piri. Who else? In 2024, a mechanical engineer named Jared Campbell became the first four-time finisher. He's in the documentary. And an interesting just sort of side note in this, and Livia pointed it 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. I felt like every person they interviewed were like, I'm an engineer, I'm a scientist.

And they talked to, almost called him Barclay, to Lazarus about this, to Cantrell in the documentary, and he said, yeah, he said those are the achievers in life. Those are the people that go to graduate school and go to get their doctoral thesis and people who set hard goals and accomplish them, it just sort of fits. And I never really thought about that tie, but I don't think there's a lot of dumb-dums that do stuff like this.

No, although even though it's a dumb thing to do. It's a weird dichotomy. Yeah. I say we finish on the story of John Fegevoresi. All right. Let's hear it. He was a runner in, oh, I don't know what year he ran, but he was an experienced ultra-marathon runner.

He participated in the Badwater Ultra-marathon, which runs through Death Valley, 135 miles. Yeah. And he was like, this is, that's nothing. I'm paraphrasing. Yeah. marathon, which runs through Death Valley, 135 miles. And he was like, that's nothing, I'm paraphrasing. I'm sure he wouldn't say this, but he was basically like, you can't even really compare the two. And he completed it. And he was so incoherent from sleep deprivation that he apparently didn't remember downing a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream

like at the finish line. He had no idea that he'd done that. 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. So he had to stop and check himself into a hotel

where he slept for another 16 hours That's called human exhaustion Yeah, and I say we quietly closed the door and leave John to his slumber and go on to listener mail I do want to shout out the record though. Brett Maughan, who has 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. Very nice. Just incredible. You woke John up. That's right. Sorry John. Go back to sleep. Here's your chubby hubby That's the best. I can't find it anymore. I can't either it's People say it exists. I get pictures occasionally emails

But it doesn't exist in Atlanta that said what did Atlanta do to be so punished? No, I don't know. I don't need ice cream anymore anyway, which is the saddest part of this story. Alright, I'm going to call this Lake versus Pond. We got quite a few emails. By the way, I want to mention one differentiator we saw 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. If it can't, then it's a lake, but this comes from Mark.

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. Most folks would assume the difference has something to do with size and depth. It's not quite that simple though, 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 its shoreline. The pond on the other hand lacks this wave clear vegetation from its shoreline. A 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. 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. And any Wisconsinite will gleefully point out that they have 15,000. But here's where the differences come into play.

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. 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. Wow Chuck I feel more lake informed than I ever have been in my entire life. For real. That is for Mark. Mark said always pleasure to listen to you guys with my boys who are six and seven and big fans

and Mark had replied with their names 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. 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. Sorry guys but they're six and seven so maybe that's for the best. 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. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.

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