The Experience of a Lifetime - Part 1 - Barkley Marathons Race Report

The Experience of a Lifetime - Part 1 - Barkley Marathons Race Report


Physical preparations alone for the Barkley far superseded anything I had poured into a single race.  Pile on the mutli-faceted approach of gear to handle virtually any weather, navigation, and self-support for a race I didn’t know a single person prior to the quest.  I reached out to Barkers with several willing to help lessen the learning curve.  Preparations reminded me of wedding planning…if I had to do it again I could do it in a fraction of the effort! To hear about these preparations, read my prior blog posts. In the end, it wasn’t enough, but it was an incredible experience. 

Making it to the start line

My journey to The Barkley Marathons starting line has been an opportunity to grow in many areas of my life.  In 2020, I decided to use the most direct route into the Barkley, winning the Barkley Fall Classic (BFC), but didn’t get in.  A year later, I won it but got an uneasy feeling when time ticked by and I heard nothing about the next steps to claim my guaranteed slot only to find out I missed the secret application deadline by days.  I returned to BFC to claim the dubious honor as a defending champion and met my goal for the best ever women’s finish in the event.  I boldly told Laz when he punched my bib at Decision Point that no woman had finished better than fourth at BFC but I would.  Although this required me to run down a past Barkley Fun Run finisher to claim a spot on the podium, I followed through.

Laz cautioned me that the number one reason people don’t race Barkley is they withdraw due to injury.  Others warned me that many come into the Barkley on the brink of injury.  Although withdrawing would be devastating, the journey was incredible improving my overall health and reaching the best fitness of my life which I never expected to do as a mother of three. Although I didn’t put together an extensive training plan, I did identify a few capstone workouts. I also tracked my mileage and vert for the first time in my life.  My initial goal was to accumulate 250,000 feet of elevation gain in five months, but I hit that in three months, two days.  You can read more about my physical journey here.

Imposter syndrome

Laz was amused by my nonchalant responses, including if I wanted a picture with him.

From the moment I pulled into the campground, I felt like an imposter. Superstar ultra runners were everywhere I looked. Would I even find a single book? The number of variables that could be disastrous – holding my compass upside-down a single time and wandering off the map, falling during a river crossing and becoming hypothermic, a lapse in concentration and skipping a book, the list was endless for possibilities of utter failure. On the other hand, numerous veterans exuded confidence as media surrounded them. My mood turned as a cold rain shower came and the dreaded cold and unpredictable weather ahead.

When it was time to check in, I began to chill until my hands went numb due to Raynaud’s and I feared I would be battling loss of dexterity the whole race with the cold temperatures. My license plate was equivalent to a flashing sign blinking “virgin” above my head. I set my license plate on the ground since the cold conducting through the metal further numbed my fingers, but I’m sure all the veterans could tell by my face I was a scared virgin.

Racers must record the race course onto their own map from the master map.

As I approached the front of the line, bib number 1, designated for the human sacrifice, was still in the pile. As I told Laz I was willing to claim it, he gave me number 65 and accepted my license plate. My attitude was the polar opposite to approaching Laz at bib pickup just six months earlier at BFC. I rehearsed for weeks what I would say and as I waited in line I felt my heart racing and became light-headed for the first time in my adult life. When I was asked if I wanted a photo with Laz at Barkley, I nonchalantly said, “I guess so.” Laz and Keith Dunn were quite amused. I further tickled them when Laz asked what I thought of the course. “It looks doable,” I casually responded.

As I traced the map and had the opportunity to chat to a few other racers (including Leonard Martin who shared the origin of Leonard’s Buttslide), I felt like I was becoming part of the Barkley Community. As I struggled to use packaging tape to laminate the map at my campsite, I hoped I’d do better on the race course than I did laminating. At least the likelihood of rain was low. I had put in the work and the preparations were done so I only reviewed the map a final time before going to bed. I rolled around with my heart thumping the entire night. Even though I got zero sleep, this has been the case for most of my recent ultras so I knew I could get through at least one day without impaired judgement. Plus with only a single woman ever starting a fourth loop, I determined long before arriving at Frozen Head State Park that I would not need to formulate a sleep strategy no matter how little sleep I got.

And we’re off upon Laz lighting the cigarette!

When I sat up in the middle of the night, I made the mistake of looking at the check in area and spotted several ominous silhouettes. Now I had in my head the conch would be blown soon. When daylight finally came, I told myself to try to still attempt to sleep since the conch may not be blown for several hours and then I’d have an advantage with the more recent sleep. That didn’t work either. I finally gave up and began lubricating my feet when the conch was blown. I went through my one hour to go checklist and spent the remainder of my time in the heated bathroom before heading to the Yellow Gate. I debated if I should remove a layer, but since the peaks was generally much colder, I kept all three top layers on. As a result, I was overdressed the entire race and drank much more than I had planned.

Rocky start

As we headed up the first climb, I soon lost contact with the main group. After snagging the first book, I was in a situation I had dreaded…only a single runner, another virgin, was in sight. The race strategy to stay with a group with at least a veteran was instantly out the window. Next, I lost my confidence in navigation after jumping off a spur a hair early, and ending up off my intended target on the very first descent. We lost precious time weaving back-and-forth across a rocky creek bottom to get back on track. At least my feet didn’t get wet.

We found another group of four at the book and continued on with them on the next climb. We didn’t need to look for the book since we had caught up to racers who were ripping out their pages. I followed the majority of racers down the next descent and was thrilled that we nailed our descent exactly as I had envisioned. A few of the creeks looked much smaller than I expected so it was nice to have a group to follow, where we ended up exactly at the book. As we climbed up the next ridge, Stephen, another virgin from Australia, and I had pulled away from the others. We decided to team up since our paces matched exactly on both the descents and ascents thus far. He had done his homework and he was an excellent companion. One of the books was a bit shredded, I assumed from wild boars (which is one of the reasons the books are hidden, the other main reason is so hikers don’t come across them). The Ziplock had seen better days and pieces of paper littered the ground. Post-race around the campfire, one of the other racers confirmed my suspicions as he shared about finding this book about 20 feet from the intended book location! As Stephen and I continued, we reconnected with a veteran and another virgin just as we were headed into some areas I had hoped to leverage a veteran’s knowledge for. We nailed everything and as we approached the New River, I had a slight mental hiccup and suddenly lost everyone except Stephen. I was upset with myself since this was an area that I feared would be riddled with errors without a veteran’s knowledge.

High point

I was beaming at the fire tower after Stephen and I had nailed navigation on our own.

Stephen was ok with me executing my plan of attack for this next section, which I nailed. We were both elated. When we arrived to the next book, we realized we leapfrogged the others and my confidence soared. As we made our climb to the fire tower, we devised our strategy for loop 2 which would be in the opposite direction and trickier to navigate. I was excited for us to return in a few hours to execute our game plan. We were able to find several of the trails that many others had missed making our path pretty easy going.

When we arrived at the fire tower I was very proud of our teamwork on our own as virgins. Although no one could provide any information, I figured I was the second woman to arrive which I was also proud of.

Night and day

Descending Rat Jaw was a breeze with no briars.

Descending down Rat Jaw was an incredible experience. It was very runnable without any briars, the polar opposite of my last descent down Rat Jaw at BFC. At BFC I was overheating as I spent an hour thrashing and crawling through the towering briars. At BFC I yelled at our group to get back under the power line when we briefly ducked into the woods…now that my field of vision was more than a couple feet ahead of me, I could see the pit that would have otherwise swallowed us!

My shoes had stayed surprisingly dry so we opted to climb out of the ventilation opening at the prison to prevent getting our feet wet. I panicked for a moment as Stephen pulled me to safety as I wasn’t able to quite pull myself up. I nearly forgot to grab the next book as we jogged by.

We complemented each other perfectly as we nailed navigation to the next books. I was happy to see that the two racers we had lost prior to the New River had caught up to us and we made the final climb together. A surge of excitement came as the lead group of four passed and shortly thereafter a second group of four with Jasmin Paris! It sure seemed like far more than 40 runners were in the event with the number of runners we passed as we headed into camp. I fished out a headlamp of my pack as we ran the trail back into camp and we decided that we’d try to regroup on trail as we climbed out of camp after interloopal.

At the gate, my stomach dropped when Laz’s count was one book short AND so was mine. I briefly looked on the ground and then desperately unfolded each of my quartered pages, finding the hidden page! My interloopal took the longest in the group (it didn’t help that I had to go to the bathroom since my period began just after race start), so I raced to catch up to the others. I was surprised to see several headlights floating in the woods, after a short bushwhack connecting two trails. Soon I was able to catch back up to Stephen and we were happy to be together again. In addition to the two racers I had been trying to regroup with plus one that needed to recoup in camp, there were now at least three different racers surrounding me in the woods.

We chose to be conservative on our next approach knowing that if we reached the next river without knowing whether the book was upstream or downstream we could lose a lot of time. We ended up too far upstream and lost a few minutes traversing the slopes along the water, but were content with the conservative approach. As we left the book, we saw two more headlamps which used the exact same strategy as us.

As we made our next climb, I was incredibly thankful to have Stephen who flawlessly thumbed the map while I followed our bearing. Once again we saw headlamps on both sides of us on incorrect bearings. Unfortunately, I thought we had reached the top of the climb when in fact we hadn’t so we lost a few minutes backtracking as we pretty much walked past the book a hair too low. As we backtracked, we met back up with the group of four we had encountered at book 2 who had generally gone a slower pace but must have been more efficient at stops and nailed navigation. We proceeded with them all the way up to Rat Jaw which I found to be rather enjoyable with poles to aid my climbing. Just before we crested, Stephen broke the news to me that he’d be dropping due to his feet. He wanted the best for me so he encouraged me to join the group of four. I had looked forward to finishing loop 2 with him, but knew his mind was made. Most of the water jugs were frozen at the top of Frozen Head Mountain but we found some in the middle that were usable. I was elated to reach the top toasty warm including my hands, in the middle of the night at the coldest spot on course (during the coldest night in the past month). I didn’t stop long since the group was extremely efficient and darting back into the woods.

Little things adding up

I was thankful to have an experienced group with three veterans to allow me to join them even though I was probably crashing their party as they were all friends. This was the section that Stephen and I had devised a strategy of attack on the tricky downhill, but I wasn’t sure this group’s plan and I didn’t want to disrupt their team dynamic and plan of attack. I made the mistake to wait until I was certain they were off course to speak up. By then, we needed to make a significant adjustment and now knew we’d have a rough going the remainder of the descent. By the time we neared the next book they were able to get back on the correct line and we didn’t waste any additional time searching for the book.

Not only did I not want to get scraped, I also wanted to contribute to the group, so I informed them of the ideal place to cross the next river which they were unaware of. The moon and starlit sky was amazing, but I never paused long enough to fully enjoy it. As we continued, we found two more racers backtracking. For a brief while I marveled that 17 hours into this crazy race we had seven racers bunched up, with me being the only American! As the two pulled away, one of the four suggested that I consider going with them. Both were veterans that were capable of scraping me and I opted to stay conservative with a group of slower racers (that had somehow caught up to Stephen and I despite us moving a faster pace and having clean navigation!) I recognized I was at a decision point but didn’t have the confidence in my navigation to potentially go solo if scraped after screwing up the first descent. Plus the timing was literally crappy…not only did they already have a slight gap but I needed to stop to poop soon. I knew all too often speed was mitigated quickly by a navigation error or two. (Remember those orienteering meets where the old guy walks the whole course and still manages to beat you to the checkpoints!) Case in point was all the racers I was leapfrogging with the entire race that obviously had different speeds.

Shortly thereafter, I got in my adventure racing “following mode” only to discover we had gotten off our feature we needed to follow. As soon as I realized this I let the group know, but none of us were certain how long we had deviated from the feature so we were unsure if we could make it back to the last known point. I immediately put on my coat as the wind blew atop the mountain and I feared the worst. My skills for determining a location on a map in the dark with few features is non-existent, so a wave of relief rushed over me as we wandered and someone miraclously spotted the next book location.

Amidst the excitement, a few of the others began running downhill. I yelled at them that we needed to follow the spur, but they did not follow me. I began in my own direction in search of the spur and luckily one of the others was agreeing with me after consulting the map. I soon found the spur and the next landmark which finally convinced the others to follow me. I was out of water (again) so I wanted to get ahead and fill up my water and help the others quickly tear out book pages to save precious time since we were battling the clock. Unfortunately, I lost the spur at the bottom began wandering. When I turned around I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t see any headlamps. I retreated and quickly found the others tearing out book pages. I skipped the water fill up so I wouldn’t lose the group. As we ran, my poles slipped off the ice on several puddles, but I didn’t dare trust the ice to hold my full body weight as I skirted around them.

Chasing the cutoff

I caught up quickly and this is where I should have pushed the pace at the cost of breaking away from the group; however, I wasn’t confident in my navigation skills. Looking back, the remainder of the course ended up being very straightforward and I should have reassessed as we fell off pace. Additionally, the group was making small errors based on their memory of the course and weren’t helping our situation as our cushion was evaporating. Somehow, my pocket with my map became half ripped off. Amazingly, the map bulged enough that I never lost it, but I spent the rest of the race periodically tucking it back into the remainder of the pocket. After daybreak, two of us pulled away on the hardest climb of the race which took an hour including 2/3 mile section averaging 44% grade. Our footing was ideal since the ground was frozen and I can’t imagine the struggle in muddy conditions. My poles were critical, even with the frozen mud balls on the tips and sometimes had to make mini switchbacks. At the top we decided not to wait for the others and make a run for it, although we feared it was too late. After descending we made our way up the final climb where I couldn’t help thinking the brutality of repeating these climbs on a third loop. I secretly hoped to reach the gate at 26:39:50 to get my loop 2 to count but not have enough time for my pages to be counted and depart. If I had any time, I’d have to continue on, until I could no longer trudge on, especially since I still had enough food in my pack for at least 1/2 loop.

I missed the cutoff by minutes.

One reason I hadn’t departed on my own was I didn’t think I’d be able to nail the final descent. Ironically, as we crested the final hilltop my companion darted off like a madman in hopes to fly down the hill to reach the cutoff. I yelled to him that he needed to run the spur as he descending on one side, but then he crested the ridge and continued darting in that direction with no regard to the feature or a bearing. I yelled and whistled to no avail. I found myself completely alone in the end. Knowing I had just run short on time, I took out my map and carefully navigated the final descent out of pride. As a small condolence I nailed the navigation and it was an absolutely beautiful day to be in the woods. The second I realized my race was over, my right foot was a mix of numbness and burning. I had noticed it earlier on the loop but was able to disassociate from the pain. As I reached the final stretch of trail, I bent over four times coughing up globs of phlegm I could chew and gagging so hard I nearly vomited. I just hoped my final Barkley memory wouldn’t be gagging and vomiting at the gate during taps. (I had been coughing constantly during the race and the previous 3 1/2 weeks leading into the race. Several racers asked if the cold was flaring up asthma as I constantly coughed throughout the race, probably driving them nuts. The cough lingered for weeks after and a couple days after the race I had strained muscles in my chest and couldn’t do much without discomfort…had that happened before Barkley I wouldn’t have been able to survive a lap.)

My first time not making a cutoff.

As I approached the gate, Laz greeted me. After taps, I sunk into a chair back at camp, pleased with my experience as the second woman completing loop 2. Turns out, one of the two veterans in our group that I opted not to take off with just made it in to begin a third loop whereas the other didn’t make it back until after I had showered due to a navigation error. I went conservative with my choice to stay with the slower group. Had I rolled the dice, it appears it could have gone either way. Also, even with our navigation mishaps, it seems like we, relatively speaking, didn’t lose as much time as I felt we did. My only regret in my preparations and execution on race day was to not take the gamble. I attempted to minimize the opportunity for failure from variables within my control with gear, so my pack at the end of loop 2 was surprisingly heavy despite being out of liquids…so maybe I went overboard with six pairs of gloves/mitts and three sets of handwarmers!?!

Takeaways

Just getting to the Yellow Gate was a blessing.

  • Multi-faceted preparation is key. One must have physical capabilities, navigation skills, and mental fortitude to attempt the nearly impossible. One must be fully committed to the Barkley and preparations are all-consuming…yet you can’t talk about it.

  • Having only a trail running experience would be an incredible disadvantage. Rogaine experience would be ideal. I was surprised how easy the bushwhacking was. The woods were very open so we could easily see the topography in the leaf-off condition, with few rocky areas, and sparse briars (the layers of clothing also helped and I had only a single scratch on my body). I had encountered far worse blackberry and briar patches during most of my navigation practice in Wisconsin and in many adventure races. In contrast, I found the briars significantly worse at the Wildcat Rogaine a few weeks earlier yet didn’t hear a mention from a single participant at that event regarding the briars.

  • For those that think they want a Barkley experience, I HIGHLY recommend racing BFC and participating in a adventure race, rogaine, and/or orienteering meet. Not only was the Winter Wildcat Rogaine fantastic preparation for Barkley, but it was an incredibly run event on a beautiful course which I look forward to racing again President’s Day weekend. The Winter Wildcat Rogaine was a very similar outdoor adventure on comparable topography in old strip mines with similar weather, but not as physically demanding. Plus preparations weren’t all-consuming.

  • If you’ve done your homework, following a veteran is not necessary. In fact, I was surprised how little veterans vocalized / remembered landmarks during the race. This may also be due to the individual nature of this event in comparison to the team nature of adventure races.

  • Mistakes will happen and a positive attitude and game plan is key.

  • Proper gear including poles (which I initially resisted) are essential to not end your Barkley prematurely.

  • The Barkley lore is true…from the difficulty, its quirks, the half cooked chicken, and even the necessity to hide the books from hikers and wild boars (both of which had encounters this year!)

  • The Barkley Community is full of wonderful and talented people.

Support team

I am indebted to so many for this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Thanks to my crew, Ashley, for all the support!

  • God for this privileged life I can afford the time and cost to prepare for this adventure which in the context of eternity is folly (Hebrews 12:1-2). Although I thought with 2022’s world-class field I missed out on the tiny window for finishers, He knew better! His providence was clear in that I missed my opportunity in 2022 where my body wouldn’t have been able to withstand the miserable overnight conditions. He had a plan and gave me enough talent to win BFC, twice, to get into this year’s Barkley as the stars aligned for the event’s all-time best results. I share about this incredible experience in my next blog post.

  • The entire Barkley team including Laz. I tried my best to photograph in my mind God’s beautiful creation at Frozen Head State Park Natural Area that can only be experienced through the Barkley Marathons including numerous rocks had icicles shimmering in the sun.

  • The 14 veterans I reached out to that answered my questions about this crazy event

  • My crew for meeting all my requests and stifling my insecurities

  • My husband for taking care of our three kids while I chased this silly dream including long training sessions, five scouting trips, and the week away for the race

  • All those in the adventure racing community, especially Rib Mountain Racing, for introducing me to a map and compass and teaching me all that I know

Books

Books were chosen to fit this year’s theme “The Worst Case Scenario Is Only The Starting Point”:

All 13 book pages from loop 1.

  • Things Fall Apart

  • Last Will And Testament

  • The Bad Beginning

  • Bad Luck and Trouble

  • Three Day Road

  • Ready Or Not

  • 10 Million Steps

  • Abandon Hope

  • Poor Support

  • Overexposed

  • A Series of Unfortunate Events

  • Rising Darkness

  • When All Plans Fail

Banner photo: Showing off my virgin license plate among all the others.

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