“Why would anyone want to do this, you might ask? Why would anyone not want to do this?” Dr Pepper knock-offs. Oh, and despite having competed in his youth as one of the first ultramarathon runners, going on to found six unique races, and having just completed a 126-day, 5,100km, coast-to-coast trek across the United States, Lake wants to make it clear that he doesn’t particularly like exercise. “I can’t stand it,” he says with a laugh. “It signifies doing something pointless, at the end of which you have nothing to show. Instead of lifting weights, I built rock walls. I accomplished the same thing, but at the end I had something to show for it.”
ALEXIS BERG
L
azarus Lake is a contradiction. The Tennessean devised the most infamous ultramarathon in existence, but he prefers to slow down and hike a trail rather than run it. He smokes like a chimney, buys his beef by the cow, and continually has a bottle of Dr Pepper to hand. He also loves butter. “I’ve never eaten something and thought, ‘That could use less butter,’” he says. “You know when you’ve got too much butter? It’ll tell you – it just slides right off.” Not for him today’s academic nutritional debates. Perhaps it was Lake’s individual brand of off-kilter humour that prompted him to create the Barkley – renowned as one of the toughest ultramarathons around. Physical and mental fitness are essential components, yes, but it would be remiss to attempt it without a sense of humour, too. Founded in 1986, the Barkley is a looped ultramarathon beginning and ending at a yellow gate located at the start of the Frozen Head trail. It consists of five laps, each roughly 32km (although runners maintain each loop is actually a full marathon of 42km). The first two laps are run clockwise, the second two anticlockwise and – should you make it that far – the fifth and final lap is run in the direction of your choosing. Each loop contains almost 3,700m of clime and an equal descent, for a total of 37,000m of elevation change – the equivalent of climbing and descending Everest twice. THE RED BULLETIN
The race is traditionally run on the closest Saturday to April Fool’s Day and starts at some point between midnight and noon. A conch shell is blown to notify runners that it will begin in 60 minutes’ time, then Lake lights a cigarette to kick things off. The trail changes each year, but it will always include iconic obstacles such as Testicle Spectacle hill, Danger Dave’s Climbing Wall (an area of exposed routes and sandy banks), and Rat Jaw (a slope of tree stumps and razor-sharp briars). Runners are outfitted with a compass and a map with which to navigate the course, and GPS is banned. At points during each lap, competitors must locate a certain book that has been placed along the route, and retrieve the page that corresponds to their race number. Not only is this the only indication that a runner is on the right track, but the counting of the pages post-lap is a sure-fire way for Lake to know a runner has indeed hit every checkpoint. As the race takes place in March, runners must battle through snow, sleet, rain and fog. Often, it’s difficult to see as far as 10m ahead. The Barkley must be completed inside 60 hours, which limits runners to brief pit stops between laps, when friends and family will force food into their mouths, soothe their scratched legs and attend to their blistered feet. Then it’s back to the race. The record time for the course belongs to American runner Brett Maune, who finished it in 52:03:08 in 2012. To date, only 15 competitors have ever completed all five loops. “I think that people who go through this are better for it,” Lake says. “They’re better for what they’ve asked of themselves.” The plan, he claims, was never to make the Barkley the hardest race in the world; it was simply to test what people could do. The idea came when, in 1977, James Earl Ray – the assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr – escaped from Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, sparking the state’s biggest-ever manhunt. Ray was captured in the woods 54 hours later, having covered less than 13km. Convinced he 49