The Barkley Marathons is our annual reminder that failure isn't always the end of the world

One of the most difficult ultramarathons in the world is designed with the intention that runners fail to finish it.

The last two weeks have been busy ones for me, full of lots of ups and downs. Keeping that in mind, I hope you’ll all indulge me while I talk about something incredibly niche and nerdy. If ultramarathon running doesn’t interest you, I’ll see you later this week when we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

“You have to really like punishing yourself to want to do it” I said to my fiancé on Wednesday night.

“Yeah, says the girl who runs marathons” he retorted. 

“That’s why I know, you have to be really out of your mind to do this” I said. 

We were talking about the Barkley Marathons, a 100-mile race through the woods that has only had 15 finishers since it began in 1986, and started at 9:54 on Tuesday morning with the lighting of the ceremonial cigarette. The race is the cruel brainchild of a man known as Lazarus Lake, and was the subject of the 2014 documentary “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young” (enough said?). The race takes place in Frozen Head State Park near Wartburg, Tennessee and is premised on a failed prison escape that took place in the area in the late 1970s. It consists of running five loops under a time limit, and is intentionally disorganized with no volunteers to keep runners on the course, and no GPS watches allowed. The total elevation gain and loss of the entire course is equivalent to climbing and descending Mount Everest from sea level twice. There is no website and no registration window. It’s basically Fight Club. All coverage of this race, which at the time of writing this on Thursday evening, still has three runners remaining, happens in one Twitter thread. It’s eclectic and brutal. I will never run it. But I am completely obsessed with it. Since Tuesday morning I have been compulsively checking the Twitter feed for updates. At every coffee and bathroom break I watched the pool of runners dwindle from 40 to 3, wondering if this is a year where someone might actually complete the race. 

According to the limited information available, the only way to register for the Barkley Marathons is to know a previous entrant who can provide you with the information on where to mail your application and $1.60. The sheer near impossibility of the Barkley Marathons coupled with the intermittent updates on the progress of the runners is magical. For almost four days, a pack of runners trying to achieve a both personal and common goal that so few have ever and will ever accomplish is inspiring. 

In a strange way, following an attempt to do something I would never push myself to do, helps to create perspective on my own struggles with motivation to run that have developed over the last two winters. The Barkley Marathons is one of few races where the play-by-play reporting addresses the decisions of runners to stop. While many runners drop out of the race because they fail to complete the loops within the permitted time window, more just decide that they’ve had enough and no longer can or want to push their bodies any further. It may not seem like a very big deal when it comes in an update on Twitter, but for those runners, it likely is. It’s a terrible feeling, to train for months for a race and not be able to complete it, even if, as in the case of the Barkley Marathons, that is the norm. 

The Barkley Marathons normalize failure, not as something terrible, but as part of athletics and life. No one criticizes a runner’s decision to tap out of the race. Runners like Jasmin Paris, only the second woman to begin the fifth loop of the race are celebrated for the attempt to run the race, because that in and of itself is an accomplishment. The commentator simply notes that the runner is no longer competing and waits for them to return to camp. So often, if we can zoom out of our immediate emotions and see even a slightly broader picture, that’s how our failure is. We become so easily fixated on reaching the end point that we forget about the ways that the successes that took place along the way. I’m not talking about learning from failure, that’s something we have heard many times, but accepting it as part of the inevitable and moving forward.  

We fail at all kinds of small things, promises we make to ourselves, or at least I do (you’ll probably have noticed that my Substack posts have not been coming out on Thursdays when they are supposed to). There are times that it makes sense to get down on ourselves about failure, but there are a lot more times when the thing that we perceive to be us not achieving or not following through, isn’t worth the stress. There is no consequence to tapping out of the Barkley Marathons, the journey isn’t of less value or deserving of less celebration because someone stopped running. There’s a lot we can take from that approach, particularly when it comes to big goals that we are accomplishing only for ourselves. 

Note: Between writing this piece and finding the time to edit and publish it, the 2023 Barkley Marathons ended. For the second time since 1986, three runners completed the race within the 60-hour time limit, the last of whom, a runner who was rescued by state troopers after he went off course and was found hallucinating and talking to a garbage can last year, finished with only 6 minutes to spare.