Taking place in Frozen Head State Park, runners are taken through the park’s 24,000+ acres and by the now-closed Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Only 40 runners can compete every year and each runner has to pay a $1.60 application fee, fill out a form entitled 'Why I Should be Allowed to Run in the Barkley' (returning runners must also supply Cantrell with a packet of Camel cigarettes) and all applicants are given a ‘letter of condolence’ if they are successful. This is a race like absolutely no other - even getting into the marathon is a challenge. It has seen more than 1,000 runners compete in it, yet only 15 individuals have ever finished and in this year’s instalment, which finished on Thursday, not a single runner was able to complete the entire route. Participants have just 60 hours to complete the full five-loop course (12 hours per-loop) of this 100-mile ultra (though most finishers end up running about 130+), across some of the nastiest terrain on Earth.

Thus, in 1986, the inaugural Barkley Marathon was born and 35 years later, it is still considered one of, if not the toughest ultra-marathon in the world. A paltry effort, believed Gary Cantrell, a Tennessee native who boldly claimed, “I could do at least 100 miles.” Ray was no Andy Dufresne though and, after just 55 hours and a massive police manhunt, he was found a mere eight miles across the prison’s treacherous backwoods. In 1977, James Earl Ray, the gunman behind the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr., embarked on an ill-fated escape from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in the town of Petros in Morgan County, Tennessee.

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