20: Barkley Marathons – First Few Years

The Barkley Marathons, the toughest trail race in the world, is held in and near Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee, with a distance of more than 100 miles. The first year it was held was in 1986, and it is now world famous. Only 40 runners are selected to run.

Barkley is the brain child of Gary Cantrell (Lazarus Lake) and Karl Henn (Raw Dog).  In 1985, they had been intrigued by the very few miles that James Earl Ray had covered back in 1977 during his 54.5-hour prison escape in the mountains.  Cantrell felt that he could do much better.  See Barkley Marathons – The Birth

That year Cantrell and Henn went up into that wilderness to backpack, in two days, the “boundary trail,” about 20 miles, constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps decades earlier. Four people died building the trail. When they showed the rangers their route around the park, they were told that they wouldn’t be able to make it. The rangers didn’t want them to go on the hike because they didn’t want to have to rescue them. But the rangers were convinced to give them a permit. The first 7.5 miles took the two ten hours to cover.

They did finish their backpack trip and told the rangers that they had some friends who would probably like to run the trail. The idea for Barkley had been hatched and a course was designed and plans put into to for the first year of the Barkley in 1986 at Frozen Head State Park.  Cantrell later said, “The best description of the course I’ve heard? Someone told me that every ultra has its signature hill, the nasty one that’s totally unreasonable and makes or breaks the race—the Barkley is like all those hills just put end on end.”