18: 1,000 Milers – Part 2 – The Barclay Match

Can a person walk or run 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours, doing a mile in each and every hour for nearly 42 days? That was the strange question that surfaced in 1809 in England. In Part 1 of the 1000-milers I covered the attempts to reach 1,000 miles as fast possible. This part will cover what became known as the Barclay Match, walking a mile every hour, which was feat of enduring sleep deprivation and altering sleep patterns dramatically. In a way, these matches were similar endurance activities to the bizarre walkathons of the 1930s that required participants to be on their feet every hour.

Critics of these 1,000-mile events called them "cruel exhibitions of self-torture" that had no point expect to "win the empty applause of a thoughtless mob" and put a few pounds into the pockets of the walkers. They said, "there is nothing to learn from such exhibitions save they are positively injurious, physically and morally." But others thought the matches gave "convincing proof that man is scarcely acquainted with his own capacity and powers.”

These "1,000 miles in 1,000 hours" events captivated the world, were cheered in person by tens of thousands of people, were wagered with the equivalent of millions of today's value in dollars, and launched the sport of pedestrianism into the public eye. It was first thought that this 1,000-mile feat was an impossibility, and it was called a “Herculean” effort. Betting was heavy and wagers were nearly always against success. But during a 100-year period, there were more than 200 attempts of this curious challenge and more than half were successes. How did this all begin?