Prison Break Inspires a Near Impossible Ultramarathon
The Barkley Marathons: Unorthodox and Almost Unbearable
Maybe you’ve heard of the Barkley Marathons, an ultramarathon trail race held yearly in Frozen Head State Park about 50 miles east of Knoxville, TN. Participants have 60 hours to complete a five-loop, 100-mile course (it’s longer than that). The 2024 race had a record five finishers: Ihor Verys, John Kelly, Jared Campbell, Greig Hamilton, and Jasmin Paris. Paris is the first woman finisher.
Since the race was lengthened to 100 miles in 1989, there have been 20 finishers. That’s right — 35 years, 20 finishers. It’s worse than you think. Every year, the rules change, and the race gets harder. Race director Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, a certified evil genius, always comes up with new twists.
Here are a few fun facts about the race. Six hours before race start, Cantrell posts a course map that runners must copy onto their own maps. No GPS devices are allowed. Books are hidden on the course and serve as unattended checkpoints. Each lap, runners must find each book and rip out the page that corresponds to their bib number.
Over the Wall and Through the Woods
But did you know that the race was inspired by a prison break at nearby Brushy Mountain State Prison? On Friday, June 10, 1977, seven inmates escaped, including James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated civil rights legend Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Five prisoners assembled a flimsy length of pipe and used it to climb a 12-foot wall topped by barbed wire with 2,300 volts running through it. They had picked a corner where there was an 18-inch gap in the wire. Ray scrambled up and over first, followed quickly by the other four. Two additional inmates saw them go and ran over to join the escape.
A guard spotted one of the latecomers making his dash to the wall and opened fire with his shotgun. Jerry Ward, a bank robber, was the last man and was hit by buckshot and easily caught just the other side of the wall. The other six had hit the ground running and were nowhere to be seen.
The prison steam whistle blew six times, once for each escapee. The sound rang across the valley, and so many people inside and outside the prison tried to call out at the same time that the Morgan County telephone system crashed.
Looking for Limits
So, a race with a cutoff of 2.5 days, which often doesn’t have a finisher, with a more or less unmarked course in some of the roughest terrain that Tennessee has to offer — why would anyone show up for the multiday suffer-fest?
Why did Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climb Mount Everest in 1953 with no oxygen and almost no equipment? Why did Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard ride the Trieste to the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, in 1960? Why did Apollo astronaut Alan Shepard take a six-iron head and two golf balls to the moon and set the lunar driving record of 40 yards (37 m) in 1971? Humankind is hardwired to change the impossible into the wildly unlikely.
Frozen Head State Park gets its name from Frozen Head Mountain, its highest peak at 3,324 feet (1,013 m), so named because it is often snow-capped in the colder months. The park is not named after an 18th-century settler whose head they found was still frozen in the spring, which was my first guess. The park has 14 peaks at or over 3,000 feet (910 m). The Barkley course changes almost every year and has approximately 54,200 feet (16,500 m) of accumulated vertical climb — a reminder: Mount Everest is 29,031 feet (8,849 m) tall.
The same rugged terrain that tests the Barkley participants also tested the prisoners, who did not fare anywhere near as well as the runners. Granted, the runners aren’t pursued by hounds. The prison break search lasted 2.5 days; you may be sensing a theme here.
Two redbone hounds, Sandy, and Little Red, led dog handler Johnny Newberry to James Earl Ray lying supine in some leaves, sweat-soaked and covered with mud. He had covered 12.5 miles (20 km) in 54.5 hours. Some accounts say he only made it 8 miles (13 km).
Cantrell, AKA race director Lazarus Lake, heard about Ray’s lackluster performance as an escapee/trail runner/menace to society and estimated that he could have covered 100 miles (160 km) in that time. From that seat-of-the-pants estimate came a devilish idea that grew to become an unimaginably arduous race.
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Sources
New York Times, March 23, 2024, “Jasmin Paris Becomes First Woman to Complete Extreme Barkley Race”
Jackson Sun, Jackson, TN, Sunday, April 08, 2018, Page A1, “Manhunt in the Mountains” by Matt Lakin
Wikipedia: Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary
Wikipedia: Frozen Head State Park
Wikipedia: Trieste (bathyscaphe)
Space.com 50 Years Ago, an Apollo 14 Astronaut Played Golf on the Moon
