Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. And we are giving up right out of the gate on our episode about the Barkley Marathon.
That's right, our friend Chad. We want to shout out our friend Chad Crowley, who we talked about before, who was the producer and director and showrunner of our TV show back in the day. I got this idea from Chad because we had coffee over the holidays and he is running ultra marathons now, wow, which is a very Chad thing to do. Like he starts running a handful of years ago and then now is running ultras. And
I was like, Chad, how long is that? And he said sixty miles generally, And I said, could you run to Athens? He said how far is Athens? And said I can't remember how far? I said, like eighty miles. He said I could run one hundred miles.
Wow, But he'd need a ride back.
Are you kiddy? He said it might take a while, but I could probably run one hundred miles. And I'm just like floored by this idea that people can do this, and he said, he said, man, you should do a guys should do an episode on the Barkley Marathons, which
I had heard of before. Oh really, which is this, Yeah, which is this ultra marathon plus a trail run plus in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee that is known for just being a crazy race, a crazy hard race, and having a really unusual origin story and unusual founder and just how it's all done. It's just this remarkable story. And I agree.
Yeah, there's a really great documentary from twenty seventeen called the Barkley Marathon colon the Race that Eats It's Young,
which is a nickname for that race. And there's a few people in there who are seasoned trail runners, ultrathonors, like people who know their stuff and have done crazy things as far as running goes, who are like, this is far and away the hardest race on the planet, Like, there's nobody who's doing anything like this, And if you think you know what you're doing, you're going to be completely amazed at how far off you are in what you thought this is going to be, Like, it's that hard.
Yeah, you got a chance to watch it.
Yeah, it was good. And there was a guy who was a Special Operations like I guess a former a Special Ops soldier who was like, I've done crazy stuff with my body and this like that did nothing to prepare me for this.
Yeah, it was really well done. It's on YouTube, and I recommend watching it because it really there's a lot of drama that takes place. The year that they did the documentary. I think they did it on twenty twelve or twenty thirteen maybe, oh was it and it came out in seventeen, you.
Said, okay, so yeah, I was confused at what year it was.
I think it was twenty twelve or twenty thirteen, and it was. There's a lot of good drama. So we don't want to spoil some of the stories that happened, but uh, I recommend watching. And here we go with Barkley Marathons.
Oh okay. So the whole thing about Barkley marathons is that you can trace them back. I mean you could start at the very beginning. We talked about in our what was the one crazy marathon episode we did not too long ago.
It's on marathons.
No, it was on a specific marathon, and I think Los Angeles.
Oh, I don't know. We did want of marathons years ago.
No, remember the guy who was running the Human Zoos at the World's Fair came up with like a he called it the Special Olympics Marathon. This was months ago.
Man, Hey, you can't remember it either, buddy, all right, why can't you remember it existed? At least?
Yes? Anyway, Oh, get this. Apparently we did an entire short stuff on Sad's rings and didn't mention it because I have no recollection of doing a short stuff on Saturn's rings. Do you?
I don't remember that?
You do remember we did a saddern episode that came out like a few days back.
I'm so mad at you right now, don't you. We're still getting emails on that one. So yes, I do. Okay, all right, cool, What LA marathon are you talking about?
It might not be La, but it was. It was like just you remember like that one Italian guy I think he was running in like oh oh oh, he'd stop and eat people's fruit and yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody. And there were the two guys from Africa who.
Are remember that now?
Yeah? It was I can't remember where it was or what the name was, what it was?
Yeah, oh boy, people are just screaming at their pod player.
The sad thing is the whole reason I brought that up, Chuck, was to say that we went over a lot of the origins of marathons in that episode, so we don't need to do that in this episode. That we just did all that and.
Our Marathons episode. Yeah, anyway, let's not even do that. The marathon has been a long a long time. Ultra Marathon started in the nineteen seventies, and that's what we're really talking about. And this guy Gary Kintrell, aka Lazarus Lake or laz he's in his seventies now is he is the creator, along with his friend, of the Barkley Marathon, whom he named after his friend, a farmer named Barry Barkley.
In the documentary, very sweetly, over the end credits, they ask him with Barry why he named it after Barry, and he said, well, he's to help me with a lot of races, and I don't know it just spit.
Yeah, Barkley, he's a farmer, he's never run anything like that. And he said, I have no idea why he named it after me.
Yeah, so there's no real reason, but they're called the Barkley Marathons. And Cantrell has an interesting story in that he is a former athlete. He's run supposedly over about one hundred and fifty thousand miles in his life, but he smokes camel cigarettes. He just floods his body with doctor pepper. He's you know, older gentleman now and has kind of wrecked his legs from all that running, so
he hasn't run for a while. But he got interested in this as a boy scout in Tennessee as a teenager or preteen, I guess when he was started doing backpacking trips that he hated until he found out there is a great joy in overcoming a hardship and doing something tough physically and completing a goal and got kind of hooked on that feeling.
Yeah. He also apparently really liked the idea that if he continued to work at something, he would continue to improve. Yeah, that's a big part of he's running. That's a big part of running. That's a big part of hiking. It's a big part of everything that's hard while yeah exactly, So, yeah, he got the bug pretty early on he started running marathons. I think in nineteen sixty six. He started running. By high school, he was running marathon and then he started
running ultra marathons. And he was there like right at the beginning of the ultra marathon craze, which I think kicked off in nineteen seventy four with California's Western States one hundred. A guy named Gordy Ainsley set that up. And so by this time, you know, the ultra marathons were starting to catch on, and Gary Kintrell was enough of a runner that he knew of these things. But he was also married, he was starting to have kids, he had a job as an accountant, and he just
couldn't travel the country to go participate in ultrathons. So he started setting his own up around Tennessee.
Yeah exactly. They first took the form of what he called journey runs, which is this all sounds fun. If I was into running, I would do something like this. But he and his friends would get together and be like, all right, let's run from Knoxville to Nashville, or let's run I love the three run. Their idea of a through run was either from Alabama or Kentucky running to the other just straight through Tennessee. Let's run through the
state of Tennessee. Right, pretty fun idea they were doing these. They led to some other kind of legit races. I think one of the two is still around. He called it, and he's always had a sense of humor. You can tell by the way names these things. The last annual Ball State obviously Volunteer State Road Race, which is a three hundred and eleven mile run from Missouri to Georgia, Georgie exactly ten day cut off time, no comfort stations along the way, you have to source all your own
food and water and shelter along the way. And then another one called the Idiots Run, which I don't think is around one hundred and twenty three mile gravel, all gravel road run.
Yeah, that's so bad, that's just such a bad idea. Well,
he called it the Idiots Run for a really good reason. Yeah, And that's the whole his whole jam is, like he loves coming up with a kind of race that just is at the border between the possibility and the impossibility of human endurance of what the human body can actually do, Like he wants it just inside of that limit so that you could, if you push yourself enough, complete this race, but most people are just not going to be able to because it's so close to impossible.
Yeah. I mean, many many years the Barkley Marathon has no finisher at all. Many years no one makes it to the fifth loop. There are four loops that will get into all this in a second. It's happening more and more now, I think just there are more veterans that come back that once you kind of know the deal, I say, it gets a little easier, but you know, a little easier in that it's possible to finish. It's never easy, but I think the veterans have an advantage for sure.
Yeah, because I think I think the astonishment at how difficult it is, Yeah, probably takes up a lot of your mental energy and focus while you're while you're doing it for the first time, and that Yeah, once you've even tried it before and even dropped out, you probably are past that and it's got to be a huge leg up totally. So we should talk a little bit about the whole basis of all this, right or do you want to take a break?
Yeah, let's let's talk about where this thing's held right.
Okay, Well, the whole thing is held at Frozen Heads State Park. It's named after Yeah, it's named after the tallest peak in this state park. It's in Northeastern Tennessee, which is kind of guess where Northeastern Tennessee is where Virginia and North Carolina come together with Tennessee. It's beautiful area and this will be in the Cumberland Mountains. And this particular state park is not like the kind you just you know, go to everybody goes to on the
weekends for picnic. It's pretty remote. It's three hundred and thirty acres, but this three hundred and thirty acre state park surrounded by twenty four thousand acres of forest land. And the whole thing, I guess started with convict leasing. So this area is like really dark.
Yeah, you know, no totally and if you look at you know, they do these aerial shots in the documentary of this prison that we're about to talk about, and it's just you know, it's in the middle of nowhere, like at the bottom of you know, sort of a ravine and very inhospitable. I mean, you'd like to think about places like Alaska being like you know, some of the most inhospitable places in the United States. But I mean the mountains of northeastern Tennessee are no joke.
No, And this area is in hospitable because of its terrain and in part because of the weather and the elevation.
Yeah.
The whole reason there's a prison there is because back in the nineteenth century, Tennessee started making money by leasing its prisoners convicts to mining company. These coal mining companies just make a little extra on the side from forcing your prisoners to engage in hard labor. Right. Well, I think in our man, I need to keep a list of all of our episodes, like handy because I can't
remember the name of it. But do you remember that one war, the strike war in the nineteenth century, and I think coal mines in uh Madawan Mattawan, Yes, thank you. In that episode we talked a lot about what happened also in Tennessee's coal mines where the labor was taking
on management and it was resulting in wars. Well, one of the things that resulted out of this in Tennessee was that the laborers, the free laborers who worked for the coal mining companies, would frequently help the convicts whose labor was being leased out by the state escape and so Tennessee was like, well, fine, we're not doing that anymore. But undeterred, they just started setting up their own coal mines and using the prisoners directly instead of leasing them out exactly.
And they needed somewhere to put those prisoners, so are workers, I guess slash prisoners. So they built a new prison. It is called Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. And in the nineteen thirties a lot of that land eventually became that great conservation area that we were talking about, those twenty four thousand acres, and the New Deal era Civilian Conservation Corps built a lot of trails. It became a natural area,
you know, officially in the nineteen seventies. But there are these trails there now, not like again, like you said, not like a lot of state park trails that you go to. A lot of these trails are still pretty rough. The prison stayed open. But why we're telling you all this is for a couple of reasons. One is, at one point in the race, they navigate through a tunnel, like a little water channel that goes under the prison, and that's part of the race route where you're definitely
going to get your feet wet. I don't think we mentioned you're running through rivers and things, so like wet feet, and it's just a part of the challenge of this race. But the prison remained open and James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Junior, was sent there with six other men. He escaped in nineteen seventy seven from Brushing Mountain and spent fifty four hours in that rugged terrain, eventually being recaptured about eight miles from the prison and
Lazarus Lake. Old laz Cantrell heard this story. Heard they made it only eight miles in that fifty four hours, and he said, man, I could travel one hundred miles through that terrain in fifty four hours. So he invents this race sort of inspired by this. He said that he still gets hate mail every year and angry letters for people that think it's some sort of tribute to James Earl Ray, and he's like, no, it's the opposite. It was started because I'm making fun of the fact
that this guy only made it eight miles. We're doing one hundred, one hundred and thirty.
Really, you want to take a break.
Yeah, let's take a break. We know the name of the marathon, we know where it takes place, we know who started it and where it came from. And we'll be back with more of the bark of the marathons right after this.
Yes, So, like you said, I think in nineteen seventy seven, James Lay escapes and Cantrell lived in the area. Said it was big news at the time, so he was aware of this, and a few years later he and his friend Carl Hen known as raw Dog for reasons that I don't want to ask about, they decided.
It was in nineteen eighty five months you don't know, all right, your good point.
So they decided to hike into the state park. This is this is a place where he's like, okay, like, we could totally do so many more than eight miles and fifty four hours. Let's go check this out and
have fun. And like you said, most of this area are not nature trails where like there's signs posted there's a path you can look down and follow, like these are hard to find trails that you need to know how to use a compass, a contour map, like all you have to you have to be good at orienteering is what it's called, in addition to hiking and putting up with all sorts of terrible just uncomfortable stuff and
pushing your your limits. So these guys were like, let's just go for a fun hike for a day.
Yeah, And they showed up there. There was a park ranger that was like, you guys should leave, Like you shouldn't be out there. It's like, it's not like you think you're gonna get lost, You're gonna get hurt, You're gonna need rescue. They ignored him. They did make it through. They did an eight mile They.
Didn't even like, yeah, no his existence.
Yeah, he just walked right by. They made this eight mile hike, this loop. But it took him a full day, which is you know, you should be able to hike much more than eight miles in a day. And it required a lot of orienteering, like you said, and paying attention to that kind of thing. And he said, all right, I think I have an idea here for a race. Let's make a nearly impossible to finish race. I think it's kind of hard to tell because there's not a
website for this. You can't get like historical I mean people have written about it since then, but you can't get like the official website documentation on this race in history because it doesn't exist, to keep it very much under wraps. So the way he tells it on the documentary, it was always supposed to be one hundred miles, but no one ever did more than the first three loops out of the five. Yeah, I think though maybe this first version was shorter. It was about a fifty to
fifty five mile course. It was held over April Fool's Day weekend nineteen eighty six, and the initial cutoff was twenty four hours with thirteen participants in zero people finishing.
Yeah, and this is just a fifty to fifty five mile version, like you said, Officially the current Barkley Marathon is one hundred mile, and in reality it's also like one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty miles based on reports from people who've actually run it.
Right, Yeah, I mean he changes the route every year a little bit, that's why it varies. But the year they did the documentary, it was documented at one hundred and thirty and everybody is like, it's not one hundred Just stop saying that.
So the first version, like you said, is three loops, and it wasn't until two years after the first one that the somebody completed it. And I mean we're talking like dozens of people attempting this, and it took three times before one person finished. And there was something about this that I don't know if we've mentioned yet. Just this first version, there was an elevation gain of twenty
four thousand feet. So all of the times you went up and down, if you count all the ups, it would equal twenty four thousand feet in elevation that you've climbed over these three loops. And that is a lot. And in fact, the guy who finished frozen D fertile. Yeah, he was just edfertaw until he won, and from then on he was frozen D fertile. He thought that there was a misprint in Ultra Running magazine that the elevation was actually twenty four hundred feet, not twenty four thousand.
Yeah, And I guess we can go ahead and tell everybody the current iteration, like we said, is supposedly one hundred but it's really more like one hundred and thirty miles. It's got a sixty hour time limit and the elevation is the total elevation climb over that race if you finish it is sixty thousand feet, which is equivalent to hawking to walking up and back down Mount Everest twice.
Yes, yeah, so yeah, the total elevations one hundred and twenty thousand, because, yeah, if you go up sixty thousand feet and you're coming back down, you got to come down sixty thousand feet. Yes, it's harder to climb up, but it's not that easy to go down too, especially if you're on an incline. And that's a big part of it too, is now diving into things like brianart
and saplings and yeah, it's rough. Like just watching like the effects on some of the runner's bodies and like what they were coming back to camp looking.
Like was oh my god, god, I bet some guy had like a.
Head wound and they show him like slipping on rocks and hitting his forehead. It was really it's nuts what these people are doing to themselves.
Yeah, I mean their legs are all just because these briers they have to go through one part which is a really heavy brier area, but every single person's legs are just thrashed.
Like it looks like ground meat.
Oh yeah, like disgusting bleeding. Their feet are disgusting and blistered and and just riddled with I think the one guy that we'll get to the stops, but the one guy, they were like, it would take you eight hours to fully dry your feet out, so you know you can't. You're not gonna get dry feet, which is a big problem. And they're basically not sleeping when you when you complete a loop, you have what's called an interlooper period where you can do whatever you want. You can take however
much time you want to get. You can get first aid, you can eat, you can drink, you can rest, you can change your clothes and socks, you can take a nap if you want. But that clock is still running, so how long you wait is up to you. I think the winner that you said he slept about an hour total. So just try staying up and awake for sixty hours in a.
Chair and without drugs.
Yeah, exactly. These people are doing this and you know, we say it's a run, like a lot of this is hiking and bouldering and walking and crawling, so it's not like they're running the whole time. But it's just brutal.
Yeah, it really is. One of the other things that really kind of gets this across too, is in what you said, So you've got sixty hours to finish, and from the start that clock's always ticking, right, Yeah, but you're going one hundred and thirty miles. So if you
do the math. Olivia helps us with this, and she pointed out that goodness, Yeah, you could sleep for two eight hour nights and still finish this course at a twenty minute mile pace, which you can basically do on your hands and knees, and still complete it within the sixty hour cutoff. So the fact that some people can't even finish the first loop, yeah, go to show you how difficult this is. That if we were flat, it
would be beyond easy. But those same those same limits, the time limit and the length put on this particular terrain or in this topography is just it changes absolutely everything.
Oh yeah, at this twelve hour time limit per loop must have come in after the documentary, right.
Yeah, that confused me too, because they were finishing in like thirteen hours and something like that. I didn't get that. So yeah, I think it must have been a new one.
Yeah, I think so. So finishing the three loops. If you finish three loops, that is considered a fun run, and that is a designation and that is a huge accomplishment. Yeah,
just to finish the fun run. We should add he also has a baby Barkley in the Fall, the Berkeley Barkeley Fall Classic, which is a fifty k so thirty one miles, and that has about four hundred runners, but only about thirty five to forty participants are allowed per year to compete in this thing because of you know, it's out in nature, so that the state won't let them have like hundreds of people. Like not a ton
of people can go watch. It's just like family and I think some you know, former winners can be there and it's you know, it's pretty small operation because they just can't you know, run rough shot over the area. But they have the sixty hours to complete, now twelve hours per loop. The first loop is run clockwise. The second loop, which is at night, will go counterclockwise, and then again day night clockwise counterclockwise. And then this is
pretty devious, the final fifth loop. If you get there, the first person to finish the fourth gets a choice which way they want to run, and then they start splitting people up, because almost everybody runs with a buddy or two. It really really helps to have someone out there and they're really helping each other. But at the end, he's like, you're gonna lose your buddy, which way do you want to run? And the first person will say, I'll go clockwise, the next person has to go counterclockwise,
and then they alternate. So at some point, if they finish that fifth loop, they're going to pass their former buddy going in the opposite direction.
Right, Yeah, And in the documentary, Cantrell points out like these by this time, these people who had like formed serious bonds by running together oh total loops, are now direct competitors. Like, now it's a race because they're in the fifth loop, and whoever's going to finish in what time they finish a yeah, yeah, is going to determine the actual winner, Like now there's a possible winner, yeah,
And everything changes. So I don't they probably don't like class pans, and then you know they're they're pulled apart, you know, sadly when they have to go in different directions at that point.
Yeah, I think it's probably it makes it a lot tougher, but I get the idea that if you make it, if you're one of the maybe two, maybe three, maximum four people that are even on the fifth loop, then that's when things get serious. That's when it turns into an actual race.
Yeah, that's what I took it as too. One thing that I didn't get I got from context. I didn't see it anywhere because I guess it's so obvious. No one thought it needed to be spelled out except me. But it's the same loop, right, Yeah, Okay, so they're doing the same loop five times, which is why they do it clockwise and counterclockwise and different ones at day and night, so that you can't just be like, yep, I remember this, this is nothing now, I remember exactly
what the trail is. You're super disoriented the first time, but it's not like you have it down pat after that first loop necessarily.
Yeah, and it definitely doesn't seem like it gets easier because that they were finishing when they were fresh legged at loop one, they were finishing in about eight or nine hours for the fastest times, and then those fastest people were doing like twelve and thirteen hours on the next loop through the darkness. Yeah, and we should mention the weather. You know, it's with these huge elevation changes.
You're going to go from temperatures sometimes in April in the eighties where it's low to like ten degrees at night. They have about one hundred gallons of water they put out randomly on the course, like there are no technical water stations, but you'll just happen upon a jug of water. And Laz said that. You know, one year they were one hundred eight pound blocks of ice because it was ten degrees at elevation. Yeah, it's just crazy.
I say, we take a break and talk about how you would get into this race and then what it's actually like running it.
Yeah, let's do it.
Okay, this is.
All right, so we're back. The race is about to begin. We should point out to the other thing to keep in mind is if you quit, quit near the start finish line, right, because like a lot of people finish like a loop and they're like, I'm out, or maybe the two or a lot of people get to that third fun run and they say that's good enough for me. The one guy in the documentary quit and it took him ten hours to navigate back because it's not like they send somebody out you don't tap out on radio
and they come and get you. Yeah, you just decide I can't do this anymore, and then you very slowly walk back to the finish line.
Yeah. And at some point you might as well be like, well, at least I guess I'm gonna have to finish the first loop. I might as well keep going that direction.
Yeah, No, totally, or if there, I mean, it depends on where you are. If you're below the halfway point, a lot of people come back the way they came right.
Yeah, So going even back before the start of the race, you said that the Barkley Marathon has no website, and that is intentional. The whole thing is meant to be kept largely a secret. There's not a website. There's not like some information on this is how you apply. You have to use basically your investigative skills just to figure out Gary Cantrell's email to email to ask to apply.
And they make it really really hard to apply for this because in part they're just weeding out people who don't have even the beginning of the motivation and dedication to complete this race. Like if you can't even go to this trouble to like, really do your research to figure out how to apply. Then don't even bother trying to apply. There's no website, no thanks exactly, and if you do want to imply, you have to cough up a dollar sixty.
Yeah, that's a non refundable application fee. I think most people send in two single dollar bills because he says they don't give change. And he every year chooses, you know, he chooses a range of people. Some of them are very experienced, some of them are random. Every year he chooses one human sacrifice that he said the runners even appreciate, even at the expense of not getting in themselves. He
chooses one person that has no business being there. In the year of the documentary, that poor guy made it six hours, yeah before And I knew as soon as that guy headed out in his camouflage cargo pants, I was like, this guy, what is he doing? What's he wearing? So he didn't make it very far?
No, he didn't. And he was like, this is six hours man, Like he didn't make it very far at all. Now, and this guy was way more qualified to do it than like the average person. Like it wasn't like he was just some like he went and plopped the guy out of mc donald's like mid bite of a big mac and right through him on the trail. Like this guy was in pretty decent shape, and he thought that he had a chance. It's not like he's like, yeah,
I'm gonna go be the sacrificial human, right right. He thought like he was going to try to complete it. He didn't even I don't even think he made it halfway through the first loop, did he?
No? I don't think so.
No.
It was pretty funny and sad. He took it on the chin like a like a like a big boy though.
Yeah, yeah, imagine if he'd started like yelling, you just.
Brought me out here to make fun of me a little bit. More about the application process, everyone knows it takes place generally around April Pool's day. They send in an essay to get in with a weird prompts, like one year it was what's the most important vegetable group? One of the women, I think she was in the documentary that you're Beverly Abs who by the way, that
you're completed the fun run so quite an achievement. She said she was told to send the application in exactly at midnight on Christmas Day in the time zone where Lazarus Lake was, so she had to figure out where he was at the time. And then she wrote a poem as her essay and she got in right. And then once you get in, you get a letter that says I'm sorry to inform you that you have been accepted. Basically, misery awaits you.
Yeah, that's the whole, the whole jam. The way that it's treated is like you're like, you're not going to finish, You're a dummy for even trying. There's this weird kind of push pull going on that Gary Cantrell established basically out of the gate that's based on his kind of impish sense of humor. Yeah, and so that means that like, you're just as likely to be abused or mocked when you like quit as you are to be told like, hey, you completed one loop. That's pretty good just in and
of itself. It just, I guess depends on what his mood is right then, and a lot of people like, aren't don't really like this guy that much? They like, if you don't, if you're not tuned into his sense of humor, you're probably not gonna like him. You might find him obnoxious or you know, I might find him just mean, but if you are tuned into it, I think he's he's pretty funny. Like reading about him on paper and reading interviews with him, I was like, I
don't really like this guy. Yeah, and then I saw him in the documentary. I'm like, oh, okay, saying he's just hard to translate into a description, and when you see him talk yourself, you're like, yeah, he's fine.
Yeah, he's He's one of the great eccentrics of the world. And sometimes those people are hard to pin down, you know, because they'll fit into a box.
I know.
But he has to write some other fun things. If you're a first time runner, you bring a license plate from your home state or home country and he makes these cool signs out of them and hangs them up. If you have to bring a gift as well, if you are part of the race. If you are a first time runner, you have to bring an article of clothing. And the documentary was very funny. He said it kind of depends what he needs. One year it was a
bunch of white ox for shirts. Another year it was socks, another year was flannel shirts, and then if you have finished the race and you come back to race again, you have to bring him a pack of camel cigarettes.
Yeah, and the camel cigarettes play a big role because the start of the race is marked officially by him lighting a cigarette. So everybody's standing there at this gate that's the official starting line for the race, and just standing there waiting for him to light the cigarette. And he finally does and it's like a random time. I think it was like eight to eleven am when the whole thing started, and he lights a cigarette and soon everybody takes off.
Yeah, when you get accepted, you know what day it's going to be on. You go, you camp out in the campground and you're just sort of waiting for him to blow the conck. He blows a conk sometime between midnight and noon on the Saturday of that weekend. You don't know when it's coming. So if he blows it at you know, seven am or sometime in the more, you're up all night. You're not getting sleep because you're so amped up and ready for this and apprehensive because
you don't know when it starts again. He's just sort of messing with people. Yeah, and so when he decides to blow the conk. He blows the conk. That means you have one hour and everybody you know starts getting ready to go. At that point there is no prize. We should also mention the prize is just finishing this thing.
Yeah, I mean there's bragging rights for sure. Like you if you told any ultra marathon runner, you know, trail runner that you completed the Darkly Marathon, like they would drop to their knees and start kissing your rings.
Yeah, it gets a big.
Deal to have finished this. And yet there's also like from Gary Cantrell's perspective, from everything that I've read, the way that he describes it as like he's giving people an opportunity to push themselves to their maximum possible limits. Because remember this race is intended to be just inside
the possible human the possibility of the human body. Right, Yeah, so if you can complete it, like you're doing all sorts of things that you never thought you were capable of it, Like your mental endurance is among the greatest of people walking around. And so yeah, it's way more than just bragging rights, Like you're if you're into bragging rights, you're probably not even going to finish the first loop, Like if that's why you're doing it and you somehow
got accepted, it's not going to translate. So these people don't care about bragging rights, even though they would have bragging rights for life.
Totally. I like that one dude, the long hair guy from Arizona in the documentary that that was his first one.
Mm hmm.
He just had a cool vibe. Like everyone had a pretty cool vibe. Like it's a really as a great spirit of helping one another out. And during the interloper periods where they're which is by the way, the only time they're allowed to have their sort of aid crew with them, like they don't you know, they can't get
helped along the way. So this is when they see other people and there's other former winners there, and when people drop out, they stick around and they're really helping people get their feet together and they're giving them dry socks and feeding them and it's just a real great spirit of sort of camaraderie and helping one and out another out. It feels like, yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah, because as people get pared down, the people around them are like they want to see somebody succeed then.
Yeah, for sure, pretty cool, real quick. What else as far as housekeeping, No GPS, that's a big one. They can wear a little cheap or they're given a little cheap watch. And I think they banned altimeters in twenty fourteen or twelve or something.
Something like that. Either way, you're stripped down to the bear essentials. Yeah, and you have a map, but you don't have a copy of their map. They give you the master map to use to trace the route onto your own map. He traced it incorrectly. Well, that's ts for you. And people do get lost like a lot. There was one guy who oh, man, don't remember what year it was, Oh, in two thousand and six. Yeah, this guy wandered off the course and spent thirty two
hours trying to get back. Man, And in the end he only did like two miles of the actual course. He wandered so far off course. So the way he put it, he did sixteen hour miles in this race.
God, I felt so bad for that guy.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, And then what else.
Chuck, this isn't And to me, this is kind of one of the coolest things because the whole time, until we had gotten to this part, I was like, well, how do they know that people are running that route because they're not staked out along the way. In the documentary they had some people staked out a little bit just to get some footage, but it's not like they have people at checkpoints that are making sure they're on
the route and all that. He did something pretty lo fi and genius, which was he puts ten books out ten to twelve depending on the year, at different points along the way, and you have to rip the page out corresponding to your BIB number, and that is the proof that you ran the real route. You have to show up with depending on how many books, ten or eleven pages when you touch that start finish line, and you have to turn them over to Cantrell and he has to look them over and verify it.
Yeah, and I'm guessing that they they are the books in the same place every time.
Ah, that I'm not sure about.
But I do know that they hide them. They're not just always out in plain sight. Like the one of the things you're having to stay oriented, you're having to push your body and endure, and then you're also at the same time having to make sure you don't trop past one of the books. So you have to backtrack and get the page out.
Yeah. I mean the one guy the year of the documentary that won and set the record. I think he said he spent a couple of hours looking for the book.
I would lose my mind. Man.
Oh yeah.
And also if you're like, well, how do you get the same page eleven times? Do you get a different BIB number? Free loop? So you would be tearing out a different page each time.
Yeah, And I think there was a story just last year. In fact, there was a French runner who got to the final loop to find that a book was gone. There was a day hiker that thought the race was over and took the book as a memento, so he's like, what do I do? He completed the race and when he got back to the gate, they had turned the book in, so they counted that.
That's awesome. Yeah. I've read about one runner too, who I think this. I don't remember what year was, maybe twenty sixteen or seventeen. He made it. He showed up six seconds after time. Oh my god. But he had all his pages and they said like he was just collapsed on the ground and he said, I have all my pages. But he didn't make it by six seconds.
You know, I bet that he feels a great sense of accomplishment, though I would think, so sure finished that thing six seconds, be damned. You know, you'd have.
To be one hell of a perfectionist to be like, well I failed technically, Yeah, for sure.
I think there was one more piece of housekeeping here. Oh that's right. When a runner gives up, a guy named Dave Hen, who is a race volunteer, plays taps on a bugle.
Yeah, and that's Carl raw Dog Hen's son.
Oh is it it is raw Dog Junior?
Yeah, Little raw Dog.
Or the third Yeah, he said.
He said that he thinks the reason why is because it's just one final punishment for you from Gary Cantrell to basically be humiliated with taps. And on the on the other side, some runners when they finish, especially when they actually complete the race, he has one of those staples, easy buttons, Yeah, that they press and when you press it, a voice goes that was easy.
Yeah. It was really fun to watch. It was someone just like on their last leg literally, like you're bleeding at the legs and he's like hit the button right because that was easy.
Yeah. The guy who was on the documentary was I think his name was John Kelly. He finished second of two I think that year, maybe three, and he they show him and he's just totally out of it, like he's sitting on a chair with people surrounded surrounding him talking and yeah, yeah, he's just in another world, like totally out of his skull because he hadn't slept at all like that whole time.
Yeah, sixty hours.
It's crazy.
Man. The one guy that couldn't in the documentary that tapped out and was just like crying.
Oh I don't remember him, which one?
Uh boy, that was tough. He had kind of dark, curly hair and he was pretty pumped up going into it about his chances and yeah, I mean, what can you say about a race where like whatever, probably ninety eight percent of the people had never been right, maybe more maybe ninety nine.
That was a well. Yeah, so I think officially twenty out of one thousand plus people have finished. So I'm sure we have some sixth graders who can calculate that for us and send it in.
Let me see last I'm sorry. This year there were a record five people completed it, and that is I think the maximum before that may have been three, maybe four, but usually it's one, maybe two or zero last. I'm sorry. This year a woman was a finisher for the first time. Yes, me and Paris or Perry. I don't know how she pronounces it. She came in two minutes short of the deadline to finish that race.
Yeah, so she finished with two minutes last.
Right, that's incredible.
Yeah, it really is. And one of the reasons it's incredible is because Gary Cantrell. This is another reason a lot of people don't like him. For years and years and years, he would say publicly, there's no woman out there who could possibly finish this race. Yes, And you know, he was criticized for saying that kind of thing because there's plenty of amazing women marathonors and ultrath honors and
trail runners. And he defended it by basically saying, if a woman could defeat this, it would be exactly the kind of woman who would need to hear somebody say something like a woman would never be able to complete this.
Yeah, I agree, got yeah, And I don't know if I'm being an apologist, but I got the idea that a lot of that was sort of goating. Yes, someone to finish, Like that's how I took it too. Yeah, Like deep down he's like, there's going to be a woman that's going to do this, and maybe I need to stoke the fire a little bit, right.
So finally, yes, I think Jasmine Paris's She's a brit who teaches at the University of Scotland. Did you say that part?
No, I also said Jasmin Peris.
I know that was just correcting you. Oh, I'm sure it was Jasmine per Jesmond Pieri.
Who else? In twenty twenty four, a mechanic engineer named Jared Campbell became the first four time finisher. He's in the documentary and an interesting just sort of side note in this and Lyvia pointed out, but then when you watch the documentary it really hits home is that it seems like this race and ultra marathoning and this sort of endurancing attracts people of very, very high intelligence. I felt like every person they interviewed were like, I'm an engineer,
I'm a I'm a scientist. And they talked to almost called him Barkley to Lazarus about this to Cantrell in the documentary and he said, yeah, he said those are the achievers in life. Those are the people that go to graduate school and go to get their doctoral thesis, and people who set hard goals and accomplish them. It just sort of fits. And I never really thought about that that tie. But I don't think there's a lot of dumb dumbs that do stuff like this.
No, although even though dumb dumb to do.
It, it's a weird dichotomy.
Yep, I say. We finished on the story of John Fega Veresi.
All right, let's hear it.
He was a runner in oh, I don't know what year he ran, but he was an experienced ultra marathon runner. He participated in the Bad Water ultra marathon, which runs through Death Valley one hundred and thirty five miles. Yeah, and he was like, this is that's nothing I'm paraphrasing. Yeah, I'm sure he wouldn't say this, but he was basically
like that, you can't even really compare the two. And he completed it, and he was so incoherent from sleep deprivation that he apparently didn't remember like downing a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, like at the finish line. He had no idea that he'd done that, and he spent the next day and a half just laying around
the campground recovering. So after that time he's like, all right, I guess I'll drive home, and he started falling asleep on the way home, so he had to stop and check himself into a hotel, where he slept for an another sixteen hours.
Man, that's called human exhaustion.
Yeah, and I say we quietly close the door and leave John to his slumber and go on to a listener. Mayl.
I do want to shout out the record though, Brett Mahn, who is one or a few times now, I think he's a physicist. The record, current record right now is lies with Brett at fifty two hours, three minutes and eight seconds. Very nice, just incredible.
You woke John up. That's right.
Sorry, John, come back and sleep. Here's your chubby hobby.
That's the best.
I can't find it anymore.
I can't either.
It's people say it exists. I get pictures occasionally emails, but it doesn't exist in Atlanta.
That's said. What did Alena do to be so punished?
I don't know. I don't need ice cream anymore anyway, Which is the saddest part of this story. All right, I'm gonna call this a lake versus pond. We got quite a few emails, by the way, I want to mention one differentiator we saw said that the difference they heard between lake versus pond is if sunlight can reach the bottom. If it can, then it's a pond. If it can't, then it's a lake. But this comes from Mark. Hey, guys,
the answer, I think depends on who you asked. But as an ambassador from the land of ten thousand Lakes, Minnesota, which is technically and forty two lakes, perhaps I have a bit of clout. Most folks would assume the difference has something to do with size and depth. It's not
quite that simple, though. According to a twenty twelve CBS News article, retired DNR water supervisor Glenn Yackle suggests that a lake needs to be large enough and deep enough to allow for wave action to be considered a lake that can clear vegetation from its shoreline. Pond, on the other hand, lacks this wave action, meaning its shoreline is typically surrounded by vegetation without clear boundaries. But guys, it
gets even more complicated. Government agencies often have regulatory thresholds that lead to discrepancies per state. For example, here in Minnesota, with our eight and forty two lakes has fewer lakes than Wisconsin. And any Wisconsin I will gleefully point out that they have fifteen thousand. But here's where the differences come into play. While they do have fifteen thousand lakes, their definition includes a body of water with an area
of at least two point five acres. In Minnesota, our standards are higher, and to qualify as a lake here we must cover at least ten acres. If we lowered our threshold to match Wisconsin's, we wouldn't dare dream of it, though we'd have over twenty thousand lakes.
Wow, took. I feel more lake informed than I ever have been in my entire life for real.
That is from Mark Mark's had always pleasure to listen to you guys with my boys who are six and seven and big fans, and Mark had replied with their names, and I'm very frustrated because I cannot find that reply. So let me just say Mark and sons of Mark, thank you for the sport.
Yes, and I can vouch for Chuck Mark. We just edited out many minutes of him searching for that email, so he really did give it a try.
Sorry, guys, but they're six and seven, so maybe that's for the best.
Right. If you want to be like Mark and his unnamed sons, you can write to us as well. Send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.