Latest news with #LazarusLake
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lazarus Lake, the ‘Leonardo da Vinci of pain' behind the world's cruelest race
For over a century, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary was the end of the line. Built in the shape of a Greek cross, the pale limestone structure had housed the worst of the worst – murderers, madmen, monsters – its bulk hunched beneath a crown of scarred mountains the guards called the fifth wall. Now it sits empty – cracking and molding and dying. But each spring around April Fool's, on a cold, crisp day like today, a retired accountant appears at its gate. He carries a book with an ominous title and plants it against the back wall. Then sometime between midnight and noon the next day, he lights a cigarette, and the world's most grueling footrace begins. Advertisement He came at dawn, in a large U-Haul coughing diesel smoke into the Tennessee frost. After crawling out, he leaned on a cattle prod and lit a cigarette in front of the prison gate. He wore faded flannel, red-and-black checked, and a bright sock hat that said Geezer. The rest of him was almost deceptive: a tangly grey beard, perfectly manicured nails, and eyes like two-way mirrors – they observed everything and revealed nothing. Related: The Barkley Marathons: the hellish 100-mile race with 15 finishers in 36 years To some he is Lazarus Lake. To others 'the Leonardo da Vinci of Pain.' His Social Security comes to Gary Cantrell. Most just call him Laz. A rumor has it he'd been shot in a marathon. Another that he'd pulled his own teeth. Many are convinced he's diabolical, a man who breaks people for the fun of it. Others see a 'bearded saint' who pushes limit-seekers in a way that borders on genius. Advertisement In an already eccentric sport, his ultramarathon creations defy convention: tour buses, ferry rides, conch shells, a chair of honor called a 'thrown,' races with no finish lines, and races where older runners beat the pants off competitors half their age – Lazarus Lake filled a gap few realized needed filling. But it's here, at his Barkley Marathons, that he tests the limits of human endurance – physical, mental, and otherwise. Prospective runners send an application to 'Idiot,' include $1.60, and write an essay on why they should be allowed in. What they endure if accepted is legend. Shredded legs. Separated clavicles. Exposed kneecaps. One runner hopped 20 miles on a broken ankle just to get to a place where he could quit. Over the past five years, no one had even finished the Barkley. In its 36-year history, only 15 ever had. Laz looked on while a grey truck pulled up to the gate and sat gurgling. When I mentioned the polarizing attitudes toward his races, he just shrugged. 'Most people think fair is what's best for them. If you don't fail,' he said on a long sigh of cigarette smoke, 'how will you know how far you can go?' A young man climbed out, gave a nod, and worked the lock with a hoop of keys. They rattled against the metal gate until the whole thing, all two stories of it, screeched and unfolded like a zipper. Advertisement Laz slipped back into his truck without a word and headed toward the prison. I followed. Outside my frosty car window, the mountains loomed up to a series of tall ridges, dull like the color of deer in winter. They were strewn with jeep roads and blown-down timber. You had to think – 40 of the world's toughest trail runners against mountains the Cherokee deemed too inhospitable to mess with. The U-Haul circled a parking lot the size of a football field before lumbering to a halt in a puff of exhaust. Laz leaned against the front fender and began to piss. It steamed and splattered till it formed a dark patch on the concrete. 'I do two things well,' he said. 'I sleep well, and I piss well.' I looked away and thought about how I'd convinced The New York Times to let me profile him, then traveled here on my own dime. Nothing came easy with Laz. For three years, I'd tried to get him on his least favorite subject, himself. Instead, he teased me with small openings, false starts, and strange little trials – one of them, a math problem, nearly broke me: Advertisement ABCDE x A = EEEEEE The equation glared at me from my inbox, haunted a notepad on my desk, and ran on a loop in my head. After a few days of overclocking my brain, I panicked and passed it off to my wife. She solved it in fifteen minutes, and I was saved. Almost … Laz's reply was almost too quick, written in his all-lowercase style. 'did you give it to somebody?' Full of dread, I told him the truth. His response was predictably blunt. 'you always let someone else do your homework?' That could have been the end of it. Yet here I was in 2023, possibly on to the next test – trailing him toward the back of the prison, where he limped past a towering wall of sandstone and stopped at a conjunction of metal pipes. He produced the book, Last Will and Testament, and with little fanfare duct-taped it to the center. Advertisement To prove you'd run his Barkley course, he had you bring back a page from each book, 13 this year. The order of the books formed one loop – five loops total – 60 hours to finish. 'Sixty hours of Hell,' wrote one magazine. He added sections every year, mostly off-trail, yet the official distance somehow remained 100 miles. Those in the know say it's nothing short of 125. Not knowing, Laz maintains, is part of the fun. After lighting another cigarette, he moved to a break in the earth where a swollen stream barreled into a tunnel beneath the prison. Naturally, he sent the runners through it. At night, they reported hearing radios, television sets, even voices calling their names. They swore they were being watched, though no one ever mentioned by whom. 'They'll come up through here,' Laz said with some glee and pointed to a shaft lined with slick, glistening stones. Getting up or down would require a chimney climb, wedging feet and arms against opposing walls. 'Then, they'll head up that,' he said and gestured with his cattle prod to a sheer wall of Tennessee jungle. The slope didn't rise, it lunged at the sky – 60 degrees of winter-stripped trees so densely pushed together they seemed to fight each other for air. There was a flare in Laz's eyes as he studied it. 'We call that The Bad Thing.' Advertisement Once, a deer tumbled off the cliffs and into the prison yard. The inmates kept it and named it 'Geronimo.' It became one of the boys, a guide told me, and claimed he could still hear its footsteps. 'The whole place is haunted,' he said, his voice dropping. He described the six-by-six dungeon, the hooks where they'd hang inmates by their thumbs, and the mines in the mountains where hundreds were buried alive. When they collapsed, the guards would just leave them. 'No, no,' he said, shaking his ball-cap-covered head. 'This is not a good place. And I don't do night tours.' 'Jesus, you'd need a rope,' I whispered, craning my neck up at The Bad Thing. Related: 'I don't smoke on the uphills': Lazarus Lake walks across America (again) A thick, congested laugh burrowed up from Laz's chest. 'Aw hell,' he said. 'That's just the first pitch.' Advertisement Most big trail races have a monster, that one signature, gut-sucking climb. At the Barkley, there are a dozen, each loop, and The Bad Thing isn't even one of the worst. The total elevation gain soars over 68,000ft, roughly two Everests and a Kilimanjaro – from sea level. Many of the climbs are littered with long thatches of briars – the kind country people used to call 'wait-a-minutes' because it wasn't until you got a step past them that you realized you'd been snagged. 'God, one wrong move and you'd come down it alright, like a bowling ball,' I thought but actually said out loud. 'Oh, you'd smack into a tree long before you hit the bottom,' said Laz, without a hitch. 'It'd mess you up a bit. But you'd live.' He laughed till he groaned, then stilled for a moment before fixing his eyes on me. 'Failure has to hurt.' I let that roll over in my head for a moment. 'Doesn't it usually?' Advertisement He didn't respond to that but scanned the hillside with his large, green eyes. 'What makes people quit?' he said, blowing a long column of smoke back toward the prison. 'Everybody is born a quitter. It's the default setting. Hell, even fish quit! You can put 'em in an artificial stream with a fake scene, and they'll swim upstream as long as it looks like they're moving. But make it stationary, and they'll quit and go with the water.' He turned to head back to the parking lot but paused. 'Life can be a damn good metaphor for sports,' he said. 'Adapt or die.' *** The U-Haul was moving again, this time along a tight patch of pavement deep inside Frozen Head State Park. The road curved and rolled into a tunnel of trees toward the trailhead. There, the next phase of the Barkley would begin, checking in those Laz had called at various times penitents, fools, and sickos. Advertisement The farther we went, the more the forest seemed to want its space back – dark patches of moss slowly overtook the road and boulders crowded the edges. Laz liked to talk about the park's mercurial microclimate, how the air compressed through the gaps like a thumb held over a garden hose. Temperatures could swing from 80 to 15 degrees in a single loop. 'First-timers think it's hyperbole,' he said, 'but you only have to get caught by it once.' Soon, the bars on my phone dwindled to an 'x,' and the road began to climb. Finally, a smudge of yellow appeared ahead and became a gate. Set between two stone pillars, this flaking pole was where the ordeal would begin and end. Here, Taps would play on a squeaky bugle for the fallen. Like most things in Frozen Head, one got the sense it was sentient. A cracked sign adorned its middle: 'Do Not Block Gate.' By early afternoon, the ritual check-in was underway. A line of 40 trail runners twisted up to a large, white tarp, a virtual who's who of ultrarunning. The veterans carried items for Laz that he was in need of: cigarettes, socks, shirts. The virgins (first-timers) produced license plates from their home states and countries. Hundreds of these plates hung from yellow ropes strung between the trees – a dangling gallery of far-flung places like Liberia, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica. There were also unfamiliar faces in line, wide-eyed and wrapped in weather-faded gear. They stood quietly, taking it all in. Every so often, one would lean forward for a glimpse of Laz. You got the sense they weren't here for the mountains. Not even the pain. They were here for him – for Laz and his gate and his cigarette, daring them to come undone. Advertisement His gravelly laugh echoed through the trees from behind a picnic table, where he greeted the entrants. 'We look forward to seeing you suffer,' he said to one, before 'You might as well go ahead and hit your head on a rock' to another. The runners and crews got green and blue wristbands. The media got pink. 'Any advice?' a runner asked. 'Go home,' Laz laughed and handed him his complimentary shirt. On it was an illustration of a runner, terror etched across his face as he dashed up a tree. A monstrous black bear charged him from behind, while above, a cougar crouched on a limb, ready to pounce. At the bottom was this year's theme – The worst-case scenario is just the starting point! After the last runner checked in, they studied the master map. Laz made one of the course each year, and once it was set out, the runners and crews did their best to copy it by hand. They were also given a creatively useless set of instructions. Even the veterans got lost. One runner was heard to say, 'I'm not sure where I was, but it was hard as hell to get to.' Advertisement No one knew the start time, only Laz, and at some point in the next 12 hours, he'd blow a conch shell. If you heard it, you had one hour to get to the gate, where he'd start the ordeal by lighting a cigarette. Secrecy in all things; no one outside the camp – save close family members – even knew we were here. A clammy breeze stirred the air and made me glance back toward my SUV. A laminated sign caught my eye –one I could've sworn wasn't there before. It was taped to a pole with words written in black magic marker. MEDICAL, it read, for instances of DEATH, near-dying, and other assorted life-threatening injuries. Below was a phone number. Why do they do it? I thought, as I revved the engine of my rental and held my numbed hands over the vents. Why does he do it? I remembered something ultra-phenom Courtney Dauwalter had told me. One of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, she'd managed only one loop here but insisted Laz didn't want to torture people. 'He makes these crazy-hard events,' she said, 'because he thinks we all have more than we think is possible.' I was just beginning to feel my fingers again, when the weather shifted. The clouds darkened, and a blistering wind came barreling off the mountains. It whipped and tossed the trees. It was like an unseen hand had pulled a lever. The temperature plummeted, then sleet began to thud off the tarps, tents, and scrambling runners. Advertisement I spotted Laz by the license plates, gazing up at the sky and sipping a chilled can of Dr. Pepper, a Tennessee license plate swinging in the wind beside him. Its bolded letters read, SURVIVE.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lazarus Lake, the ‘Leonardo da Vinci of pain' behind the world's cruelest race
For over a century, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary was the end of the line. Built in the shape of a Greek cross, the pale limestone structure had housed the worst of the worst – murderers, madmen, monsters – its bulk hunched beneath a crown of scarred mountains the guards called the fifth wall. Now it sits empty – cracking and molding and dying. But each spring around April Fool's, on a cold, crisp day like today, a retired accountant appears at its gate. He carries a book with an ominous title and plants it against the back wall. Then sometime between midnight and noon the next day, he lights a cigarette, and the world's most grueling footrace begins. He came at dawn, in a large U-Haul coughing diesel smoke into the Tennessee frost. After crawling out, he leaned on a cattle prod and lit a cigarette in front of the prison gate. He wore faded flannel, red-and-black checked, and a bright sock hat that said Geezer. The rest of him was almost deceptive: a tangly grey beard, perfectly manicured nails, and eyes like two-way mirrors – they observed everything and revealed nothing. To some he is Lazarus Lake. To others 'the Leonardo da Vinci of Pain.' His Social Security comes to Gary Cantrell. Most just call him Laz. A rumor has it he'd been shot in a marathon. Another that he'd pulled his own teeth. Many are convinced he's diabolical, a man who breaks people for the fun of it. Others see a 'bearded saint' who pushes limit-seekers in a way that borders on genius. In an already eccentric sport, his ultramarathon creations defy convention: tour buses, ferry rides, conch shells, a chair of honor called a 'thrown,' races with no finish lines, and races where older runners beat the pants off competitors half their age – Lazarus Lake filled a gap few realized needed filling. But it's here, at his Barkley Marathons, that he tests the limits of human endurance – physical, mental, and otherwise. Prospective runners send an application to 'Idiot,' include $1.60, and write an essay on why they should be allowed in. What they endure if accepted is legend. Shredded legs. Separated clavicles. Exposed kneecaps. One runner hopped 20 miles on a broken ankle just to get to a place where he could quit. Over the past five years, no one had even finished the Barkley. In its 36-year history, only 15 ever had. Laz looked on while a grey truck pulled up to the gate and sat gurgling. When I mentioned the polarizing attitudes toward his races, he just shrugged. 'Most people think fair is what's best for them. If you don't fail,' he said on a long sigh of cigarette smoke, 'how will you know how far you can go?' A young man climbed out, gave a nod, and worked the lock with a hoop of keys. They rattled against the metal gate until the whole thing, all two stories of it, screeched and unfolded like a zipper. Laz slipped back into his truck without a word and headed toward the prison. I followed. Outside my frosty car window, the mountains loomed up to a series of tall ridges, dull like the color of deer in winter. They were strewn with jeep roads and blown-down timber. You had to think – 40 of the world's toughest trail runners against mountains the Cherokee deemed too inhospitable to mess with. The U-Haul circled a parking lot the size of a football field before lumbering to a halt in a puff of exhaust. Laz leaned against the front fender and began to piss. It steamed and splattered till it formed a dark patch on the concrete. 'I do two things well,' he said. 'I sleep well, and I piss well.' I looked away and thought about how I'd convinced The New York Times to let me profile him, then traveled here on my own dime. Nothing came easy with Laz. For three years, I'd tried to get him on his least favorite subject, himself. Instead, he teased me with small openings, false starts, and strange little trials – one of them, a math problem, nearly broke me: ABCDE x A = EEEEEE The equation glared at me from my inbox, haunted a notepad on my desk, and ran on a loop in my head. After a few days of overclocking my brain, I panicked and passed it off to my wife. She solved it in fifteen minutes, and I was saved. Almost … Laz's reply was almost too quick, written in his all-lowercase style. 'did you give it to somebody?' Full of dread, I told him the truth. His response was predictably blunt. 'you always let someone else do your homework?' That could have been the end of it. Yet here I was in 2023, possibly on to the next test – trailing him toward the back of the prison, where he limped past a towering wall of sandstone and stopped at a conjunction of metal pipes. He produced the book, Last Will and Testament, and with little fanfare duct-taped it to the center. To prove you'd run his Barkley course, he had you bring back a page from each book, 13 this year. The order of the books formed one loop – five loops total – 60 hours to finish. 'Sixty hours of Hell,' wrote one magazine. He added sections every year, mostly off-trail, yet the official distance somehow remained 100 miles. Those in the know say it's nothing short of 125. Not knowing, Laz maintains, is part of the fun. After lighting another cigarette, he moved to a break in the earth where a swollen stream barreled into a tunnel beneath the prison. Naturally, he sent the runners through it. At night, they reported hearing radios, television sets, even voices calling their names. They swore they were being watched, though no one ever mentioned by whom. 'They'll come up through here,' Laz said with some glee and pointed to a shaft lined with slick, glistening stones. Getting up or down would require a chimney climb, wedging feet and arms against opposing walls. 'Then, they'll head up that,' he said and gestured with his cattle prod to a sheer wall of Tennessee jungle. The slope didn't rise, it lunged at the sky – 60 degrees of winter-stripped trees so densely pushed together they seemed to fight each other for air. There was a flare in Laz's eyes as he studied it. 'We call that The Bad Thing.' Once, a deer tumbled off the cliffs and into the prison yard. The inmates kept it and named it 'Geronimo.' It became one of the boys, a guide told me, and claimed he could still hear its footsteps. 'The whole place is haunted,' he said, his voice dropping. He described the six-by-six dungeon, the hooks where they'd hang inmates by their thumbs, and the mines in the mountains where hundreds were buried alive. When they collapsed, the guards would just leave them. 'No, no,' he said, shaking his ball-cap-covered head. 'This is not a good place. And I don't do night tours.' 'Jesus, you'd need a rope,' I whispered, craning my neck up at The Bad Thing. A thick, congested laugh burrowed up from Laz's chest. 'Aw hell,' he said. 'That's just the first pitch.' Most big trail races have a monster, that one signature, gut-sucking climb. At the Barkley, there are a dozen, each loop, and The Bad Thing isn't even one of the worst. The total elevation gain soars over 68,000ft, roughly two Everests and a Kilimanjaro – from sea level. Many of the climbs are littered with long thatches of briars – the kind country people used to call 'wait-a-minutes' because it wasn't until you got a step past them that you realized you'd been snagged. 'God, one wrong move and you'd come down it alright, like a bowling ball,' I thought but actually said out loud. 'Oh, you'd smack into a tree long before you hit the bottom,' said Laz, without a hitch. 'It'd mess you up a bit. But you'd live.' He laughed till he groaned, then stilled for a moment before fixing his eyes on me. 'Failure has to hurt.' I let that roll over in my head for a moment. 'Doesn't it usually?' He didn't respond to that but scanned the hillside with his large, green eyes. 'What makes people quit?' he said, blowing a long column of smoke back toward the prison. 'Everybody is born a quitter. It's the default setting. Hell, even fish quit! You can put 'em in an artificial stream with a fake scene, and they'll swim upstream as long as it looks like they're moving. But make it stationary, and they'll quit and go with the water.' He turned to head back to the parking lot but paused. 'Life can be a damn good metaphor for sports,' he said. 'Adapt or die.' The U-Haul was moving again, this time along a tight patch of pavement deep inside Frozen Head State Park. The road curved and rolled into a tunnel of trees toward the trailhead. There, the next phase of the Barkley would begin, checking in those Laz had called at various times penitents, fools, and sickos. The farther we went, the more the forest seemed to want its space back – dark patches of moss slowly overtook the road and boulders crowded the edges. Laz liked to talk about the park's mercurial microclimate, how the air compressed through the gaps like a thumb held over a garden hose. Temperatures could swing from 80 to 15 degrees in a single loop. 'First-timers think it's hyperbole,' he said, 'but you only have to get caught by it once.' Soon, the bars on my phone dwindled to an 'x,' and the road began to climb. Finally, a smudge of yellow appeared ahead and became a gate. Set between two stone pillars, this flaking pole was where the ordeal would begin and end. Here, Taps would play on a squeaky bugle for the fallen. Like most things in Frozen Head, one got the sense it was sentient. A cracked sign adorned its middle: 'Do Not Block Gate.' By early afternoon, the ritual check-in was underway. A line of 40 trail runners twisted up to a large, white tarp, a virtual who's who of ultrarunning. The veterans carried items for Laz that he was in need of: cigarettes, socks, shirts. The virgins (first-timers) produced license plates from their home states and countries. Hundreds of these plates hung from yellow ropes strung between the trees – a dangling gallery of far-flung places like Liberia, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica. There were also unfamiliar faces in line, wide-eyed and wrapped in weather-faded gear. They stood quietly, taking it all in. Every so often, one would lean forward for a glimpse of Laz. You got the sense they weren't here for the mountains. Not even the pain. They were here for him – for Laz and his gate and his cigarette, daring them to come undone. His gravelly laugh echoed through the trees from behind a picnic table, where he greeted the entrants. 'We look forward to seeing you suffer,' he said to one, before 'You might as well go ahead and hit your head on a rock' to another. The runners and crews got green and blue wristbands. The media got pink. 'Any advice?' a runner asked. 'Go home,' Laz laughed and handed him his complimentary shirt. On it was an illustration of a runner, terror etched across his face as he dashed up a tree. A monstrous black bear charged him from behind, while above, a cougar crouched on a limb, ready to pounce. At the bottom was this year's theme – The worst-case scenario is just the starting point! After the last runner checked in, they studied the master map. Laz made one of the course each year, and once it was set out, the runners and crews did their best to copy it by hand. They were also given a creatively useless set of instructions. Even the veterans got lost. One runner was heard to say, 'I'm not sure where I was, but it was hard as hell to get to.' No one knew the start time, only Laz, and at some point in the next 12 hours, he'd blow a conch shell. If you heard it, you had one hour to get to the gate, where he'd start the ordeal by lighting a cigarette. Secrecy in all things; no one outside the camp – save close family members – even knew we were here. A clammy breeze stirred the air and made me glance back toward my SUV. A laminated sign caught my eye –one I could've sworn wasn't there before. It was taped to a pole with words written in black magic marker. MEDICAL, it read, for instances of DEATH, near-dying, and other assorted life-threatening injuries. Below was a phone number. Why do they do it? I thought, as I revved the engine of my rental and held my numbed hands over the vents. Why does he do it? I remembered something ultra-phenom Courtney Dauwalter had told me. One of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, she'd managed only one loop here but insisted Laz didn't want to torture people. 'He makes these crazy-hard events,' she said, 'because he thinks we all have more than we think is possible.' I was just beginning to feel my fingers again, when the weather shifted. The clouds darkened, and a blistering wind came barreling off the mountains. It whipped and tossed the trees. It was like an unseen hand had pulled a lever. The temperature plummeted, then sleet began to thud off the tarps, tents, and scrambling runners. I spotted Laz by the license plates, gazing up at the sky and sipping a chilled can of Dr. Pepper, a Tennessee license plate swinging in the wind beside him. Its bolded letters read, SURVIVE. The Endurance Artist by Jared Beasley will be out September 16th and is currently available for preorder at Simon & Schuster.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dogwood Arts Festival to feature K-pop, steel bands, and Appalachian clogging
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — The lineup for the annual Dogwood Arts Festival has been released. Artists from across the region are set to perform, including everything from K-pop and steel bands to Appalachian clogging. The free festival returns to World's Fair Park on April 25-27 for its 64th year. The festival will run from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. It will feature 31 live performances across two stages, a local maker market, and interactive workshops. Design plans approved for new parking garage, apartments near Covenant Health Park 'From high-energy K-pop routines and Caribbean steelbands to traditional Appalachian clogging and award-winning Americana acts, the entertainment schedule offers something for every music and dance enthusiast,' wrote Dogwood Arts. Pistol Creek Catch of the Day kicks off the festival at noon on Friday on the performance lawn. Soul House and Déja Imani are also set to perform on Friday. Rachel McIntyre Smith kicks off Saturday on the performance lawn at 10 a.m., while School of Rock starts the line-up at 10 a.m. in the amphitheater. Lazarus Lake, and the Knox Kpop Galz will also take the stage on Saturday. Dogwood Trails celebrates 70 years of showcasing Knoxville's natural beauty Finally, Natti Love Joys kicks off Sunday's line-up at 12 p.m. on the performance lawn. The Bobby Band and Noah Gray will also perform. Find the full entertainment schedule below: The festival is also hosting a one-of-a-kind live drawing event and Q&A session with members of the National Cartoonists Society at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 26. Featured Guests will include Alex Saviuk (Spider-Man, Superman, Hulk, The Flash), John Rose (Barney Google and Snuffy Smith), Robert Pope (Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, Peanuts), Greg Cravens (The Buckets & Hubris), Bill Holbrook (Kevin & Kell, Safe Havens), and James 'Doodle' Lyle (The Phantom). In addition, Knoxville's own Charlie Daniel, a cartoonist for The Knoxville News Sentinel, may make a special appearance. East Tennessee model train company fears industry shutdown amid tariff war To learn more about the festival, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
‘60 hours of hell': hardship is the only way forward at the Barkley Marathons
A month before the 2025 Barkley Marathons, Lazarus Lake is out on his daily eight-mile stroll along the rural roads near his Bell Buckle, Tennessee home. Pausing mid-step, he fixes his gaze on a vine creeping onto the asphalt – kudzu, the invasive scourge of the American South. Laz pins it with the toe of his worn-out shoe, then crushes it with a sharp twist. Pop. 'Nature isn't about balance,' he says, kicking the remains aside. 'That's a common misconception – it's war.' Frozen Head State Park, where he's held the Barkley since 1986, has managed to fight off this botanical kraken – so far. Introduced from Japan in the 1930s to combat soil erosion, kudzu earned its reputation as 'the plant that ate the South' by swallowing entire forests, abandoned houses, and telephone poles at a pace of up to a foot per day. The government once paid farmers to plant it; now they pay them even more to destroy it. Frozen Head's relatively intact ecosystem provides a natural defense, but its steep, scarred mountains bear witness to countless other invaders – a fitting setting, as Laz sees it, for the world's toughest footrace, where change, adaptation and the struggle to survive play out over what Outside magazine once described as '60 hours of hell'. Related: The longer the race, the closer it gets: women are closing in on men in the ultra-endurance arena The Barkley is combat – in 39 years, only 20 have finished this briar-gnarled ultramarathon. With books hidden in the woods as unmanned checkpoints, enough elevation gain to thwart a Sherpa, and a panic-inducing 12-hour start 'window' – this run is more crucible than race. Yet three broke the code in 2023, and a record-setting five finished in 2024. The answer, at first glance, seems obvious: perfect weather. Gone is the pea-soup-thick fog, the sudden torrential rains, and the mud-slop footing. But the deeper reasons aren't as clear. One factor may be Laz's decision to intervene. A few years back, when temperatures climbed into the 80s, he retreated the start of the race into March. Traditionally anchored to April Fool's weekend, a sly nod to the absurdity of its demands, it was a tactical move to outflank a spring creeping ever closer. The challenge for Laz has always been keeping the Barkley on the razor's edge of possibility –where runners suffer but still stand a chance. That means holding it at winter's retreat, before the heat takes hold and the trees fill out making navigation nearly impossible. The day before this year's race, I spot three-time-finisher John Kelly. He's at the back of the line to check in. It's been two years since I saw him, and he somehow looks younger – slightly tousled dishwater-blond hair, boyish face. I remind him of his pre-race hike that year, when he heard a staccato clatter, like a shaken maraca. The angry timber rattler began to coil. 'I don't think I'd ever seen one that early,' mutters Kelly, who grew up on the edge of the park. 'We're not really certain what's going on,' says a park ranger who shows up in camp. 'It's a bit of the frog in a boiling pot situation. But it's not unusual for a snake to come out of their hole on a warm day.' He declines to be quoted – politics – and shies away from the word climate change. Laz doesn't. 'Hell, I've been hiking in Frozen Head since before it was a park,' he counters. 'These snakes aren't just sunning a bit; they're on the move. It's Grandfather Syndrome. If you actually go out every day for 60 years and pay attention, it's hard to watch. Fall is approaching spring from the other side. We've got one month of winter.' The next morning, he sends 40 of the toughest ultrarunners in the world into the wilds by lighting a cigarette. Most are in shorts. 'We might have to move it back to January,' Laz says later in the afternoon. His checked flannel jacket is off as the temperatures have now climbed into the low 70s. To combat the recent string of finishers, he's added severe nastiness to this year's course. Just to get to the first book, runners will turn off-trail, tackle a 1,500-foot climb, then navigate their way down a treacherous 1,800-foot descent. From there, a new slope waits: Ball Bearing Hill. This and other navigational trickery led one Barkley veteran to predict that three, maybe four will make three loops – 'no finishers.' John Kelly is one of 11 who return from the first loop under the cutoff. Ten will go back out. Turning in his book pages, he says, 'the course is on the verge of perfection'. Night has settled over the park, thick as coal, and he has no idea when he returns again – it will be 15 hours later, and all chances of a finish will be gone. Throughout the night, Taps rings solemn through camp on an old bugle – honoring the many runners who've fallen short – while the few that remain press past rusting mining equipment wrapped in briars, brittle dynamite shacks, and caved in mines. 'One wrong step,' Kelly had told me, 'and you could find yourself at the bottom of one of those shafts.' Strip mining, deep mining, logging – all have exacted their toll. But nothing has proved as indomitable as nature unleashed by man's misguided attempts to intervene. Last year a runner was knocked sprawling by a dark, grunting beast. Originally brought to the Smoky Mountains for sport hunting, wild hogs bred with local hogs to create an aggressive, highly adaptable hybrid. The state responded by introducing legislation to allow open-season hunting year-round on them. This backfired spectacularly. Unrestricted hunting inadvertently encouraged people to illegally transport and release hogs into new areas, including Frozen Head, hoping to create additional hunting opportunities. The ranger I spoke with had just 'downed him' one the other night – more than 100, he said, in the last year. But he's not naïve – that's barely a dent. 'I just want to keep them from the visitor center and the playgrounds.' But invasive pests, whose larvae now survive increasingly mild winters, are proving the toughest foe yet. In the 1990s, a six-legged scourge barely 3mm long advanced from the south – the southern pine beetle. Once held in check by substantial winters, they bore through the bark and create intricate galleries in the phloem tissue. The pine responds by producing resin to 'pitch out' the beetles, but when too many attack at once, the tree's defenses are overwhelmed. Within weeks, their needles turn yellow, then red, before dropping entirely. The next invader came in the form of innocent little tufts of what appeared to be lint – the hemlock woolly adelgid. This tiny aphid-like insect attaches itself to the base of hemlock needles and inserts specialized mouthparts to feed on the tree's stored starches. Covered in a protective white, woolly wax that resembles cotton balls, a single adelgid can lay up to 300 eggs. The insects gradually drain the tree's energy reserves, causing needle loss, branch dieback, and eventual death within four to 10 years. In 2002, a metallic green beetle only about half an inch long arrived in Chicago as a stowaway in wooden packing materials – the emerald ash borer. It reached Tennessee in 2010, adding to the ecological pressure. The earliest and perhaps most catastrophic scourge was the chestnut blight. It reached the park in the 1930s and killed an estimated four billion trees across the eastern United States. First discovered in 1904 at the Bronx Zoo, the fungal pathogen spread rapidly southward. From 1912 through 1914, the forest service sent crews wielding crosscut saws and axes through the woods to cut away a 60-mile 'barrier zone.' The rhythmic chunk of steel biting wood echoed through valleys as hundred-year-old giants toppled in thunderous crashes. When Laz first hiked here in the early 70s, there were chestnut stumps 'you could park a Volkswagen on.' But the blight jumped the zone, and 'Above the level of a man's head,' observed naturalist Donald Culross Peattie, 'the woods will never look the same again.' Through this lens, each Barkley runner isn't just battling distance, elevation, and Laz's mind games – they're moving through a landscape that's fighting its own race against overwhelming odds. Nearing the 40-hour mark, Frozen Head seemed to remember itself. '50 mile per hour wind, steady rain, less than 1:15 to go,' Keith Dunn, the Barkley Twitter man posts. 'The runners better be on Ball Bearing Hill if they hope to get here in time. Wherever they are, things are getting intense. This is the Barkley.' Hopes of a finish are long gone. All that's left is a Fun Run – a special check-down finish of three loops. For this, Laz grants a cushion of four extra hours – but no runner arriving after that extended window can continue on to loop four. To proceed, they needed to start at the 36-hour mark. For the best of the best, it's a consolation prize – but three are out there fighting to get it. Those in camp wait and stare into the night. Ten minutes remain. Then a holler cuts through the silence and a light appears at the bottom of the hill – John Kelly. He reaches the gate in a desperate sprint. His haunted, hollow eyes move to his watch. He's made it. The thought folds him over the gate. The two others won't be so lucky. Laz stands nearby, under a budding oak, smoke curling from his cigarette. The Barkley has won. To say Laz over corrected ignores the race's history. After Kelly finished in 2017, it took another five years before anyone finished. Whenever the bar is raised, a readjustment period follows. It's the way of things that live on the edge. If you look hard enough, you can still spot chestnuts in the park, young ones. It's been observed that though the trunks die, the roots often survive the blight to send up new shoots. Within 10 to 15 years, most will be infected again. Yet they persist despite near-certain failure, till one day they'll adapt enough to thrive again.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
‘60 hours of hell': hardship is the only way forward at the Barkley Marathons
A month before the 2025 Barkley Marathons, Lazarus Lake is out on his daily eight-mile stroll along the rural roads near his Bell Buckle, Tennessee home. Pausing mid-step, he fixes his gaze on a vine creeping onto the asphalt – kudzu, the invasive scourge of the American South. Laz pins it with the toe of his worn-out shoe, then crushes it with a sharp twist. Pop. 'Nature isn't about balance,' he says, kicking the remains aside. 'That's a common misconception – it's war.' Frozen Head State Park, where he's held the Barkley since 1986, has managed to fight off this botanical kraken – so far. Introduced from Japan in the 1930s to combat soil erosion, kudzu earned its reputation as 'the plant that ate the South' by swallowing entire forests, abandoned houses, and telephone poles at a pace of up to a foot per day. The government once paid farmers to plant it; now they pay them even more to destroy it. Frozen Head's relatively intact ecosystem provides a natural defense, but its steep, scarred mountains bear witness to countless other invaders – a fitting setting, as Laz sees it, for the world's toughest footrace, where change, adaptation and the struggle to survive play out over what Outside magazine once described as '60 hours of hell'. The Barkley is combat – in 39 years, only 20 have finished this briar-gnarled ultramarathon. With books hidden in the woods as unmanned checkpoints, enough elevation gain to thwart a Sherpa, and a panic-inducing 12-hour start 'window' – this run is more crucible than race. Yet three broke the code in 2023, and a record-setting five finished in 2024. The answer, at first glance, seems obvious: perfect weather. Gone is the pea-soup-thick fog, the sudden torrential rains, and the mud-slop footing. But the deeper reasons aren't as clear. One factor may be Laz's decision to intervene. A few years back, when temperatures climbed into the 80s, he retreated the start of the race into March. Traditionally anchored to April Fool's weekend, a sly nod to the absurdity of its demands, it was a tactical move to outflank a spring creeping ever closer. The challenge for Laz has always been keeping the Barkley on the razor's edge of possibility –where runners suffer but still stand a chance. That means holding it at winter's retreat, before the heat takes hold and the trees fill out making navigation nearly impossible. The day before this year's race, I spot three-time-finisher John Kelly. He's at the back of the line to check in. It's been two years since I saw him, and he somehow looks younger – slightly tousled dishwater-blond hair, boyish face. I remind him of his pre-race hike that year, when he heard a staccato clatter, like a shaken maraca. The angry timber rattler began to coil. 'I don't think I'd ever seen one that early,' mutters Kelly, who grew up on the edge of the park. 'We're not really certain what's going on,' says a park ranger who shows up in camp. 'It's a bit of the frog in a boiling pot situation. But it's not unusual for a snake to come out of their hole on a warm day.' He declines to be quoted – politics – and shies away from the word climate change. Laz doesn't. 'Hell, I've been hiking in Frozen Head since before it was a park,' he counters. 'These snakes aren't just sunning a bit; they're on the move. It's Grandfather Syndrome. If you actually go out every day for 60 years and pay attention, it's hard to watch. Fall is approaching spring from the other side. We've got one month of winter.' The next morning, he sends 40 of the toughest ultrarunners in the world into the wilds by lighting a cigarette. Most are in shorts. 'We might have to move it back to January,' Laz says later in the afternoon. His checked flannel jacket is off as the temperatures have now climbed into the low 70s. To combat the recent string of finishers, he's added severe nastiness to this year's course. Just to get to the first book, runners will turn off-trail, tackle a 1,500-foot climb, then navigate their way down a treacherous 1,800-foot descent. From there, a new slope waits: Ball Bearing Hill. This and other navigational trickery led one Barkley veteran to predict that three, maybe four will make three loops – 'no finishers.' John Kelly is one of 11 who return from the first loop under the cutoff. Ten will go back out. Turning in his book pages, he says, 'the course is on the verge of perfection'. Night has settled over the park, thick as coal, and he has no idea when he returns again – it will be 15 hours later, and all chances of a finish will be gone. Throughout the night, Taps rings solemn through camp on an old bugle – honoring the many runners who've fallen short – while the few that remain press past rusting mining equipment wrapped in briars, brittle dynamite shacks, and caved in mines. 'One wrong step,' Kelly had told me, 'and you could find yourself at the bottom of one of those shafts.' Strip mining, deep mining, logging – all have exacted their toll. But nothing has proved as indomitable as nature unleashed by man's misguided attempts to intervene. Last year a runner was knocked sprawling by a dark, grunting beast. Originally brought to the Smoky Mountains for sport hunting, wild hogs bred with local hogs to create an aggressive, highly adaptable hybrid. The state responded by introducing legislation to allow open-season hunting year-round on them. This backfired spectacularly. Unrestricted hunting inadvertently encouraged people to illegally transport and release hogs into new areas, including Frozen Head, hoping to create additional hunting opportunities. The ranger I spoke with had just 'downed him' one the other night – more than 100, he said, in the last year. But he's not naïve – that's barely a dent. 'I just want to keep them from the visitor center and the playgrounds.' But invasive pests, whose larvae now survive increasingly mild winters, are proving the toughest foe yet. In the 1990s, a six-legged scourge barely 3mm long advanced from the south – the southern pine beetle. Once held in check by substantial winters, they bore through the bark and create intricate galleries in the phloem tissue. The pine responds by producing resin to 'pitch out' the beetles, but when too many attack at once, the tree's defenses are overwhelmed. Within weeks, their needles turn yellow, then red, before dropping entirely. The next invader came in the form of innocent little tufts of what appeared to be lint – the hemlock woolly adelgid. This tiny aphid-like insect attaches itself to the base of hemlock needles and inserts specialized mouthparts to feed on the tree's stored starches. Covered in a protective white, woolly wax that resembles cotton balls, a single adelgid can lay up to 300 eggs. The insects gradually drain the tree's energy reserves, causing needle loss, branch dieback, and eventual death within four to 10 years. In 2002, a metallic green beetle only about half an inch long arrived in Chicago as a stowaway in wooden packing materials – the emerald ash borer. It reached Tennessee in 2010, adding to the ecological pressure. The earliest and perhaps most catastrophic scourge was the chestnut blight. It reached the park in the 1930s and killed an estimated four billion trees across the eastern United States. First discovered in 1904 at the Bronx Zoo, the fungal pathogen spread rapidly southward. From 1912 through 1914, the forest service sent crews wielding crosscut saws and axes through the woods to cut away a 60-mile 'barrier zone.' The rhythmic chunk of steel biting wood echoed through valleys as hundred-year-old giants toppled in thunderous crashes. When Laz first hiked here in the early 70s, there were chestnut stumps 'you could park a Volkswagen on.' But the blight jumped the zone, and 'Above the level of a man's head,' observed naturalist Donald Culross Peattie, 'the woods will never look the same again.' Through this lens, each Barkley runner isn't just battling distance, elevation, and Laz's mind games – they're moving through a landscape that's fighting its own race against overwhelming odds. Nearing the 40-hour mark, Frozen Head seemed to remember itself. '50 mile per hour wind, steady rain, less than 1:15 to go,' Keith Dunn, the Barkley Twitter man posts. 'The runners better be on Ball Bearing Hill if they hope to get here in time. Wherever they are, things are getting intense. This is the Barkley.' Hopes of a finish are long gone. All that's left is a Fun Run – a special check-down finish of three loops. For this, Laz grants a cushion of four extra hours – but no runner arriving after that extended window can continue on to loop four. To proceed, they needed to start at the 36-hour mark. For the best of the best, it's a consolation prize – but three are out there fighting to get it. Those in camp wait and stare into the night. Ten minutes remain. Then a holler cuts through the silence and a light appears at the bottom of the hill – John Kelly. He reaches the gate in a desperate sprint. His haunted, hollow eyes move to his watch. He's made it. The thought folds him over the gate. The two others won't be so lucky. Laz stands nearby, under a budding oak, smoke curling from his cigarette. The Barkley has won. To say Laz over corrected ignores the race's history. After Kelly finished in 2017, it took another five years before anyone finished. Whenever the bar is raised, a readjustment period follows. It's the way of things that live on the edge. If you look hard enough, you can still spot chestnuts in the park, young ones. It's been observed that though the trunks die, the roots often survive the blight to send up new shoots. Within 10 to 15 years, most will be infected again. Yet they persist despite near-certain failure, till one day they'll adapt enough to thrive again.
