The Barkley Marathons: the hellish 100-mile race with 15 finishers in 36 years

At 6.54am on 8 March 2022, 39-year old Johanna Bygdell from Sweden was perched next to her tent in the middle of Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee, eating breakfast with her boyfriend when she finally heard the noise she had been both craving and dreading. It was the blowing of a conch, marking one hour until the start of arguably the world’s most hellish race: the Barkley Marathons.

“Finally, let’s get the party started,” she thought.

Bygdell made her final preparations, packing clothes and food, and honed in on her goal of finishing the annual 100-mile ultra endurance challenge. This year, around 40 other determined runners from around the world gathered behind the race’s famous starting line, a yellow gate, with the same hope.

But finishing the Barkley Marathons is an anomaly. Since its conception in 1986, only 15 runners have managed to conquer the merciless course – which features punishing sections with names such as Checkmate Hill, Little Hell, Rat Jaw and Testicle Spectacle.

Most years see no finishers at all in the race’s 60-hour time limit. And 2022 was no exception.

Despite no one finishing, one Barkley first-timer, Jasmin Paris, beat the clock to become the first woman in a decade to complete three loops – otherwise known as the ‘fun run’.

“This was one of the years that the Barkley felt like an entity in itself, picking people off one at a time that you thought would finish,” says race director Gary ‘Lazarus Lake’ Cantrell (most runners just call him ‘Laz’), who co-founded the race in the decade following the 1977 breakout of Martin Luther King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, from the nearby Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. During his 55 hours of freedom, Ray covered just 12 miles of ground. “I could do at