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The Man Behind the Most Grueling Footrace on Earth

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Deep in the Tennessee mountains sits a footrace built entirely around the idea that you will fail.

The Barkley Marathons has no finish-line banner, no chip timing, and no guarantee anyone will even see the course to the end. Great Big Story’s profile “The Man Behind the Most Grueling Footrace on Earth” turns the lens on Gary Cantrell — better known by his running alias, Lazarus Lake, or simply “Laz” — the man who dreamed up this 100-mile ordeal through Frozen Head State Park near Wartburg, Tennessee. What emerges is less a race director than a folk-legend prankster who built an event where success is the exception, not the goal.

• Cantrell co-founded the Barkley Marathons in the mid-1980s after learning that escaped convict James Earl Ray covered only about eight miles in 55 hours fleeing through the same mountains in 1977 — Cantrell figured he could have logged at least 100 miles in that time.
• The course consists of five off-trail loops officially billed at 100 miles (widely believed to run 120 miles or more) with roughly 60,000 to 66,000 feet of climb, no GPS, no aid stations, and a strict 60-hour cutoff.
• As of early 2020, more than a thousand people had attempted the Barkley, but only 15 had completed it since the race expanded to its full 100-mile distance.

An Escaped Convict’s Eight Miles

The Barkley’s origin story is stranger than most races’ entire mythology. In 1977, James Earl Ray — convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. — broke out of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and vanished into the surrounding ridgelines. Search teams eventually recaptured him, and when Cantrell later learned Ray had managed to cover only about eight miles in 55 hours of running through that terrain, he didn’t see a failed escape. He saw a challenge. Cantrell reasoned that a properly motivated, properly trained runner should be able to knock out 100 miles in that same window, and the idea for the Barkley Marathons was born.

A Course Built to Break You

There are no trail markers, no ribbons, no GPS units allowed. Runners navigate Frozen Head’s briars, creek beds, and unmarked climbs with nothing but a compass and a paper map, covering five loops that Cantrell insists add up to 100 miles but that most veterans believe stretch closer to 120 or beyond. The elevation gain alone — somewhere between 60,000 and 66,000 feet across the full distance — rivals climbing Everest from sea level twice. To prove they actually completed each loop rather than shortcutting it, competitors must find paperback books stashed along the route and tear out the page that matches their race bib number, handing the torn pages to Cantrell as evidence at the end.

It’s the kind of self-supported navigation grind that mirrors what a lot of endurance hikers already chase, just cranked up to a lethal degree — the same instinct that drives someone to attempt something like hiking 70 miles alone on the Sawtooth Loop Trail in Idaho, only with a 60-hour clock, no trail, and Cantrell watching from the yellow gate.

The Rituals of Race Day

Cantrell runs the Barkley like a piece of performance art. Nobody knows the exact start time in advance — it can go off anywhere between midnight and noon, signaled by Cantrell blowing a conch shell. Exactly one hour after the conch sounds, he lights a cigarette at the park’s yellow gate, and that’s the official start of the clock. Entry costs a symbolic $1.60, plus an essay explaining why the applicant deserves a spot, plus whatever oddball item Cantrell happens to be requesting that year — a license plate from your home state, a pack of socks, whatever strikes his fancy.

More than a thousand runners have tried the Barkley. Fifteen have finished it.

The Finishers’ Club

That 15-out-of-more-than-a-thousand ratio is the number that defines the race. It’s not a cutoff built around talent alone — foul weather, dense briars, and the total absence of course markings have turned elite ultrarunners into DNFs within hours. The gap between “attempted” and “finished” is the whole point of Cantrell’s design: he wanted an event where completing it means something specific, not an event that rewards everyone who shows up in good shape. The comparison that keeps coming up around endurance circles is the kind of brutal, no-shortcuts test you see in something like the Air Force Special Warfare PAST test — except the Barkley doesn’t end after one bad afternoon. It can end after two and a half days in the woods with nothing to show for it but torn pages you never got to collect.

Every year, Cantrell picks the field, blows the conch whenever he feels like it, and lets Frozen Head do the rest. The next running of the Barkley Marathons will draw the same handful of hopefuls it always does, chasing a finisher’s tally that, heading into 2020, still sat at just 15 names since the race went to its full 100-mile format.