The race director, Gary " Lazarus Lake" Cantrell, based the race on the story about a prisoner who tried to escape the Bushy Mountain State Penitentiary but didn’t get very far because of the rough terrain. We aimed for our run to be about 20 miles and designed to hit two points, the lookout tower and the old coal mine that the prisoners worked at. The buildings used to house the 10s of thousands of workers remain as apartment complexes in the area.įor our run we mapped out a loop course following the main trail in the state park.
The government chose the location for its remoteness but also because there was abundant power necessary to run the centrifuges used to separate out the uranium for nuclear weapons.
Oak Ridge is a very interesting place in its own right, since it is where the uranium for the Manhattan Project was refined. My friend Brian came along for the ride and we stayed in the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I took the occasion of my 50th birthday to travel down to Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee. Having done a 100 mile ultramarathon myself, that included 18,000 feet of elevation gain, it is hard to comprehend how one can get so much elevation gain over about the same distance. Besides the distance, the elevation gain is 60,000 feet (18,000m). On paper it is clearly one of the most difficult ultramarathons given that it is much more than 100 miles (160 km), that’s why there is an “s”, it’s marathons, as in 4 of them. Since it’s hard to capture an understanding of something unless you see and experience it first hand, I decided to see the course myself to get an appreciation for why the Barkley Marathons are so hard. It’s inspired from the attempted prison escape by James Earl Ray The entry process is strange and secretive
Commonly mentioned topics in these articles are: Reason being, there has been an excellent documentary on it, The Barkley Marathon: The Race That Eats Its Young, and many long form articles written about it, including one recently in Runner’s World. Even if you are not an ultrarunner, you may have heard of the Barkley Marathons.
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