![]() ![]() The Barkley was made famous by a 2014 Netflix documentary ‘The Barkley Marathons – The Race That Eats Its Young’. Lazarus and his friends felt they would have done a lot better, and the rest is history. He was captured after covering just eight miles in 54 hours. The race was born following James Earl Ray’s (the killer of Martin Luther King) escape from a Tennessee prison in 1985. Roughly 80% of the race is off-trail and there are no aid stations – just two water points. The route changes every year and, as there is no GPS allowed, it is impossible to review. Any runners who manage to complete just three loops are awarded ‘fun run’ finisher status. In reality the loops are more like 26-miles long meaning that anybody who completes all five will have covered 130 miles. ![]() The Barkley Marathons is made up of five 20-mile loops with more than 54,000 feet of ascent, each loop starts and finishes at the yellow gate where competitors and support teams make camp. If successful, you will receive a ‘letter of condolence’. Your application must include an essay detailing why you feel you should be allowed to race. You first need to find out when and where to send applications from a previous competitor. The race opens out onto the mountains at multiple scales, multiple speeds, and along multiple vectors and in turn, these particular mountains are allowed to have their own specific, non-generic influence on the form and style of the event.The race is restricted to just 40 entries and the first challenge is to be considered. Considered as a form of constraint-based endurance performance art (which it is admittedly not), the Barkley Marathons suggest a "found" approach to performance constraints: an approach that puts performance in a more direct and fine-grained relationship with the details (geological, topological, meteorological, botanical, human-historical, non-human-historical) of the world in which (and with which) the performance occurs. Its rules follow a unique set of constraints specific to the contours of the local topology, to the history of incarceration in the area, and to the idiosyncratic aesthetics and ethics of the race's two founders. It takes place in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee, is approximately 130 miles long, and must be completed in under 60 hours. The Barkley Marathons is an infamously brutal endurance trail race, having only been completed by 15 runners in its 30-year history. ![]()
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