When passion crosses the line
Canadian Robbins risked death and found heartbreak pursuing life goal in quirky, gruelling Barkley Marathons
After running up and down mountains in the backwoods of Tennessee for three days and two nights, Gary Robbins raced as fast as his exhausted legs would carry him to the finish line. He was running out of time and he knew it.
One, two, three, four, five, six seconds past the 60-hour time limit, he hit the yellow gate marking the finish of the Barkley Marathons and collapsed to the ground.
That’s six seconds in a race well over 160 kilometres long, with so much uphill terrain that it’s the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest twice. With no marked trail, runners navigate with map and compass, and tear out pages of books hidden along the route to prove they’ve been there.
It’s undoubtedly one of the toughest trail races in the world.
That Robbins — whose ultra-running pedigree is as extensive as his bushy red beard — was six seconds from becoming the first Canadian finisher of a race that only 15 people over three decades have ever completed is a story that went viral around the running world this month.
But it’s not the story Robbins wishes had been told. In truth, he knew the far bigger problem was that he was three kilometres short of finishing the course and crossed a raging river that could easily have killed him.
To comprehend how such a thing is even possible you have to understand a few things about the Barkley, which is as quirky as it is gruelling.
The Barkley was born from a prison escape.
In 1977, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. He was on the run for nearly 60 hours and yet only managed to get 13 kilometres from the prison, on the edge of Frozen Head State Park in eastern Tennessee.
Gary Cantrell, a local ultra runner, mocked that effort, claiming he could go at least 160 kilometres in that time. In 1986, that joke turned into the Barkley Marathons.
It’s run in loops — from a campsite in the park, the only place to get aid or supplies — which are marked as 32 kilometres long but runners say are closer to marathon length, about 42 kilometres. The entry process is a quasi-secret. The fee is $1.60 U.S. and for the 40 runners accepted — notified with a condolence letter — there’s a further payment: an item that Cantrell feels in need of. This year, it was comfortable white socks.
The five-loop race starts whenever Cantrell (who calls himself Lazarus Lake) decides to send the signal — by blowing into a conch shell — which can be any time in a 12-hour window. This time it started at 1:42 a.m. on April 1.
The weather is unpredictable but generally awful, the terrain so difficult that only about a fifth is runable. The rest of it requires climbing up and down and bushwhacking through woods and thorny briars.
Each time someone does manage to finish the course, it’s made harder and longer the next year.
The only man to finish this time — many years, no one manages at all — was local runner John Kelly, who resorted to putting on a plastic bag and droopy hat he’d found stuck in the briars, trying to stay warm and upright in his final hours. He finished in just over 59 hours and 30 minutes.
For four loops, Kelly and Robbins raced together, pushing each other and helping with navigation. But on the very rare occasion that more than one runner makes it as far as the fifth and final loop, they must run in opposite directions.
So, 47 hours into the race at 12:30 a.m., Robbins left camp for the last time, with nothing but a few hallucinations to keep him company.
Once day broke — Robbins doesn’t say sunrise, because it was raining too hard to see it — he started to see flashes of light in his peripheral vi- sion, like the headlights of a car.
“I just realized that was going to be my hallucination, and it went on for a few hours,” says the 40-year-old, who lives in Vancouver.
Then he heard a voice in his head, which he said was a bit distracting until he settled on what it was: his telephone voicemail system that normally says, “You have a message.”
“Maybe it was my wife saying hurry the hell up,” he says, laughing.
Wife Linda Barton, an accomplished ultra runner herself, was anxiously waiting in camp with their 19-month-old son, Reed.
Still, things were going remarkably well and Robbins believed he was on pace to finish the fastest fifth lap in history. But when fog rolled in, he lost an hour while looking for the fourth book.
He dug deep to make up that time over the next few hours.
“I was (trying) to get each book in time to get to the finish, and I was fighting minute by minute to get there. I got the13th book and I looked at my watch. I knew exactly where I was and I actually went, ‘Oh my god, I’ve done it,’ ” he recalls. “Now, I just need to run down the trail to my family and friends and I get to be a finisher of this race.”
He pulled out page 155, the number corresponding to his race bib. But that final book, titled Lost and Found, turned out to be less of a good omen than he’d hoped.
The fog thickened to pea soup and he drifted a little to the right of the route. So instead of hitting the apex of a U-shaped trail and taking the obvious left-side trail down the mountain and into camp, just three kilometres away, he became disorientated and ended up taking the right-side trail. “That ended my race,” he says. But he didn’t know it yet. He continued running and looking for something familiar, until he hit a staircase.
Maps of Frozen Head State Park are a decade out of date, and so the service roads near where Robbins got lost at book four weren’t on his map, and the U-shaped trail where he went the wrong way isn’t, either. But even in his exhausted, sleep-deprived state, he knew there wasn’t a single staircase on the route.
To fix his mistake he had to turn around and run about a kilometre, with 200 metres of climbing. In the overall scheme of what he’d already accomplished — something in the neighbourhood of 200 kilometres with more than 20,000 metres of elevation — it was nothing. “So minuscule it was ridiculous,” he says now.
But at the time, in his frame of mind, it was impossible.
“I recognized that I had run out of time to correctly finish the course, but my mind had been hardwired for 60 straight hours to get to the yellow gate in under 60 hours. . . . I wish I could have rattled my brain in that moment and said: ‘I’m sorry you’ve been fighting for this long and it’s not going to happen, but you’re going to be better served if you turn around and finish in 60 hours and five minutes.’ ”
Instead, he bushwhacked down the mountain and crossed a raging river — chest deep — to get to camp on another trail.
“That brings pains to my heart,” he says now, about the river in particular. “As a father, it was a really bad decision . . . the whole story could have had a very different ending.”
He recalls weighing the risks at the time.
“I was fortunate,” he says. “I had a moment as I was doing it where I thought this is a bad idea, but the very next moment was: ‘You need to get there.’ There was nothing else in the universe that existed for me other than a yellow gate and 60-hour timeframe.”
All anybody at the finish line knew was that Robbins was running into camp from the wrong direction, soaking wet and a heartbreaking six seconds late.
“Thirty minutes earlier, the local kid (Kelly) who had tried it two times and failed comes in and finishes, and he’s emotionally destroyed. He sits in this chair, and you can just see that he will never accomplish anything that great again in his life and he knows it, and it’s this perfect moment. Everyone is elated. There are tears of joy,” recalls Michael Doyle, editor-in-chief of Canadian Running magazine.
All anybody at the finish line knew was that Robbins was running into camp from the wrong direction, soaking wet and a heartbreaking six seconds late.
“Thirty minutes later, you see Gary come in and everyone’s heart is just sinking. Everyone just hung around hoping that there would be some sort of intervention — ‘Oh, the watch wasn’t quite right. He was actually one second under’ — and that just didn’t happen.”
The Barkley makes no concessions to anyone.
There’s applause in the finish-line video that Doyle shot, but Robbins doesn’t remember that.
“It was silent for me; I didn’t hear any of that. I don’t know how much of that was how deeply I had buried myself and my lack of ability to really process things at that moment, or how much of it was the knowledge that I wasn’t finishing the race, and I wasn’t hearing the applause because I knew they were misguided.”
Eventually, when Robbins is able to walk away, he thanks Cantrell for a great race.
When speaking about the philosophy of the Barkley, Cantrell has said that the only way to really know how much someone can do is to push them to the very edge of what they can’t do. That’s why longtime Barkley runner Ed Furtaw calls the Barkley “a gift” to the ultra-running community. Robbins shares that view. “(It’s) an event that truly pushes you to your complete outer limit and forces you to look inside, and find something that you’ve never had to display before, and for two straight years I’ve gotten myself to that point.
“I understand that to be the addiction of the Barkley — whether you finish a single lap, four laps or you get to finish the entire thing. It demands of each person out there something that they’ve never been faced with before in adversity, and I think that is truly a gift for people who choose to accept the journey.”
Last year, Robbins made it 55 hours into the race before accepting that he couldn’t finish. It was the fear of not finishing again — and feeling compelled to come back for a third time — that drove him through an entire winter of gruelling training to prepare for this year’s event.
“This was kind of my worst nightmare,” Robbins says. “To not only have not attained the finish line, but to have done so in the most storyworthy way ever — where it got 10 times the traction that it seemed to last year — and now I’m woven into this crazy story of intense failure.” His body and mind will take months to heal, but he already knows he’ll have to go back for a third attempt: “The story doesn’t end like this.”