Look around everyone, every car you see is probably on AutoTrader.
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Even that vintage sports car that's tailing you a little too closely.
New cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars.
Well okay, no flying cars YET but, as soon as those things get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader.
If you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader.
That's kinda their THING.
AutoTrader. Hey everybody!
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHHART radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
And we are giving up right out of the gate on our episode about the Barber of the American.
that's right our friend chad we want to Shout out our friend Chad Kralley who we've talked about before who was the producer and director and showrunner of our TV show back in the day.
I got this idea from Chad because we had coffee over the holidays and he is running ultra marathons now.
Wow! Which is a very chad thing to do like he starts running a handful of years ago and then He said, 60 miles generally.
And I said, could you run to Athens?
He said, how far is Athens?
And I said... I know.
I can't remember how far I said like 80 miles.
He said, I could run a 100 miles.
But he'd need a ride back.
Are you kidding? He said, it might take a while but I could probably run a hundred miles and I'm just like floored by this idea that people could do this.
And he said... He said, man, you should do a...
You should do an episode on the Barkley marathons, which I'd heard of before.
Oh really? which is this yeah which is this ultramarathon plus a trail run plus in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee that is known for just being a crazy race a crazy hard race and having a really unusual origin story and unusual founder and just how it's all done just this remarkable story and I
agree yeah there's a really great documentary from 2017 called The Barkley Marathon colon, the race that eats its young, which is a nickname for that race.
And there's a few people in there who are seasoned trail runners, ultra thonners, like people who, who know their stuff and have done crazy things, as far as running goes, who are like, this is far and away the hardest race on the planet.
Like there's nobody who's doing anything like this.
And if you think you know what you're doing, you're going to be and completely amazed at how far off you were and what you thought this was gonna be like.
It's that hard. Yeah.
You got a chance to watch it.
Yeah, it was good. And there was a guy who was a special operations, like I guess a former...
A special ops soldier.
Yeah. He was like, I've done crazy stuff with my body and that did nothing to prepare me for this.
Yeah, it was really well -done.
It's on YouTube. um, and I recommend watching it because it really, er, there's a lot of drama that takes place the year that they, er, did the documentary.
I think that they did it on 2012 or 2013 maybe.
Oh, was it? It came out in 2017 you said.
Oh, okay, so yeah, I was confused at what year it was.
I think it was 2012 or 2013, and it was, er, there's a lot of good drama, so we don't want to spoil some of the stories that happen.
But, er, I recommend watching, and here we go with Barkley marathons oh okay so the whole thing about Berkeley marathons is that you can trace them back I mean you could start at the very beginning we talked about an hour what was the one crazy marathon episode we did not too long ago marathons no it
was on a specific marathon and I think Los Angeles oh I don't know we did one of marathons years ago no remember the guy who was running the humans use at the world's fair came up with a like a But he called it the Special Olympics marathon.
This was months ago, man.
Hey, you can't remember it either, buddy.
All right. Well, I can't remember it again.
I can't remember it existed at least?
Yes. Anyway, Oh, get this.
Apparently we did an entire Short Stuff on Saturn's Rings and didn't mention it...
Oh! ...because I have no recollection of doing a Short Stuff on Saturn's Rings, do you?
Uh... I don't remember that.
You do remember we did a Saturn episode So, it came out a few days back.
I'm so mad at you right now.
Don't you? We're still getting emails on that one, so, yes I do remember.
Okay all right, cool.
What L .A marathon are you talking about?
It might not be L .A, but it was like, just you remember like that one Italian guy, I think he was running and...
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
He'd stop and eat peoples' fruit, and stuff, he'd chat with everybody.
And there were the two guys from Africa who...
I remember that now.
Yeah, it was, I can't remember where it was or what the name was.
Oh boy, people are just screaming at their podplayer right now?
The sad thing is the whole reason I brought that up, Chuck, was to say that we went over a lot of the origins of marathons in that episode.
So we don't need to do that in this episode.
Can you permit that we just did all that?
And in our marathons episode.
Anyway, let's not even do that.
Their marathons have been along a long time.
104. Ultramarathon started in the 1970s and that's what we're really talking about.
This guy, Gary Kentrell, aka Lazarus Lake or Laz, he's in his 70s now, he is the creator along with his friend of the Barkley marathon, whom he named after his friend, a farmer named Barry Barkley in the documentary very sweetly over the end credits.
They asked him with Barry why he named it after Barry, and he said, well he used to help me with a lot of races and I don't know.
It just fit. Yeah, Barkley, he's a farmer, he's like he's never run anything like that, and he said he had no idea why he named it after me.
Yeah. So there's no real reason, but they're called The Barkley Marathons.
And Cantrell has an interesting story in that he is a a former athlete.
He's run supposedly over about 150 ,000 miles in his life.
But he smokes camel cigarettes.
He just floods his body with Dr.
Pepper. He's - he's, you know, older gentleman now and has kind of wrecked his legs from all that running, so he hasn't run for a while.
But, uh, he got interested in this as a boy scout in Tennessee as a teenager, or pre -teen, I guess, when he was, started doing backpacking trips that he hated until he found out there is a great joy in overcoming a hardship in doing something stuff physically and completing a goal and got hooked on that feeling.
Yeah, he also apparently really liked the idea that if he continued to work at something, he wold continue to improve and that's a big part of running, it's a big part of hiking, it's a big part of doing everything worthwhile.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, he got the bug pretty early on and he started running marathons.
I think in 1966 he started running, by high school, he was running marathons.
And then he started running ultramarathons, and he was there like right at the beginning of the ultramarathon craze which I think kicked off in 1974 with California's Western States 100.
Guy named Gordy Ainslie set that up.
And so by this time, you know, the ultramarathons were starting to catch on, and Gary Cantrell was enough of a runner that he knew of these things, but he was also married, he was starting to have kids, he had a job as an accountant, and he just couldn't travel the country to go participate in ultra -thons,
so he started setting his own up around Tennessee.
Yeah, exactly. They first took the form of what he called Journey Runs, which is—this all sounds fine.
If I was into running I would do something like this.
But he and his friends would get together and be like, all right, let's run from Knoxville to Nashville." Or, "'Let's run.'" I love the 3 -run.
Their idea of add -through run was either from Alabama or Kentucky running to the other just straight through Tennessee.
Let's run through the state of Tennessee.
– Right. – Pretty fun idea.
They were doing these, they led to some other kind of legit races, I think one of the two is still around, he called it – and he's always had a sense of humor, you can tell by the way he names these things.
The last annual Ball State, obviously Volunteer State road race which is a 311 mile run from Missouri to Georgia in 10 days.
Exactly. A 10 day cutoff time, no comfort stations on the way, you have to source all your own food and water and shelter along the way and then another one called the Idiots run which but don't think it's around 123 -mile all gravel road run.
Thank you. Yeah. That's so bad, that's just such a bad idea.
Well, he called it the Idiot's Run for a really good reason.
And that's the whole, his whole jam, is like he loves coming up with a kind of race that just is at the border between the possibility and the impossibility of human endurance of what the human body can actually do.
You want to just inside of that limit so that you could, if you push yourself enough, complete this race but most people are just not going to be able to because it's so close to impossible.
Yeah, I mean, many, many years, TheMAG deck has no finisher at all.
Many years no one makes it to the fifth loop.
There are four loops that we'll get into all this in a second.
It's happening more and more now.
I think just there are more veterans that come back that, once you know the deal, I say it gets a little easier but a little easier in that it's possible to finish.
It's never easy, but I think the veterans have an advantage for sure.
Yeah, because I think the astonishment at how difficult it is...
Yeah. ...probably takes up a lot of your mental energy and focus while you're doing it for the first time.
And that, yeah, once you've even tried it before and even dropped out, you probably are past that.
And it's got to be a huge leg up.
So, we should talk a little bit about the whole basis of all of this, right?
Or do you want to take a break?
Yeah. Let's talk about where this thing's held, right?
Okay, well, the whole thing is held at Frozen Head State Park.
It's named after the tallest tallest peak in this state park.
It's in Northeastern Tennessee, which is kind of, I guess, where Northeastern Tennessee is where Virginia and North Carolina come together with Tennessee.
It's a beautiful area.
This would be in the Cumberland Mountains.
This particular state park is not like the kind you just, you know, go to, everybody goes to on the weekends for picnic.
It gets pretty remote.
It's 330 acres, but this 330 -acre state park is surrounded by 24 ,000 acres of forest land.
The whole thing I guess started with convict leasing, so this area is really dark.
Yeah. You know? No, totally.
If you look at, they do these aerial shots in the documentary of this prison that we're about to talk about.
It's in the middle of nowhere.
like, at the bottom of sort of a ravine and very inhospitable.
I mean, you like to think about places like Alaska, being like, you know, some of the most inhospitable places in the United States, but...
I mean the mountains of Northeastern Tennessee are no joke.
No, and this area is inhospitable because of its terrain and in part because of the weather and the elevation.
Yeah, yeah. But the whole reason there's a prison there is because back in the 19th century, Tennessee started making money by leasing its prisoners convicts to mining companies, coal mining companies.
Just make it a little extra on the side from forcing your prisoners to engage in hard labor, right?
Well, I think in our, man, I need to keep a list of all of our episodes, like Handy, because I can't remember the name of it, but do you remember that one war, The Strike War in the 19th Century and I think coal mines...
Yes. Thank you. In that episode, we talked a lot about what happened also in Tennessee's coal mines where the labor was taking on management and it was resulting in wars.
One of the things that resulted out of this in Tennessee was that free laborers who worked for the coal mining companies would frequently help the convicts, whose labor was being leased out by the state, escape.
Tennessee was like, well, fine.
We're not doing that anymore.
then into turd, they just started setting up their own coal mines and using the prisoners directly instead of leasing them out.
Exactly, and they needed somewhere to put those prisoners, or workers, I guess, slash prisoners, so they built a new prison.
It is called Brushie Mountain State Penitentiary, and in the 1930s, a lot of that land eventually became that great conservation area that we were talking about, this 24 ,000 acres.
And the New Deal -era civilian conservation corps built a lot of trails.
It became a natural area, you know, officially in the 1970s, but there are these trails there now.
Not like—again like you said—not like a lot of state park trails that you go to A lot of these trails are still pretty rough.
The prison stayed open, but why we're telling you all this is for a couple of reasons.
One is, at one point in the race, they navigate through a tunnel like a little water channel that goes under the prison.
And that's part of the race route, where you're definitely gonna get your feet wet.
I don't think we mentioned you're running through rivers and things so like wet feet and just a part of the challenge of this race.
But the prison remained open and James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., was sent there with six other men.
Then he escaped in 1977 from Brushy Mountain, and spent 54 hours in that rugged terrain, eventually being recaptured about eight miles from the prison.
And Lazarus, Lake, old Laz, Cantrell, heard this story, heard they made it only eight miles in that 54 hours, and he said, man, I could travel 100 miles through that terrain in 54 hours.
So, he invents this race sort of inspired by this, he said that he still gets hate mail every year and angry letters for people that think it's some sort of tribute to James Earl Ray, and he's like, No, it's the opposite, like it was started because I'm making fun of the fact that this guy only made
it 8 miles and we're doing a 100 – Right, right.
– 130, really. Uh, you want us to take a break?
Yeah, let's take a break.
We know the name of the marathon.
We know where it takes place We know who started it and where it came from and we'll be back With more of the bark of the marathons right after this 2025 is bound to be a fascinating year.
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Good people, what's up.
It's Questo, Questlove, and Team Supreme and I have been working hard to bring you some incredible episodes of Questlove Supreme with guests that you definitely don't want to miss.
Now one of the things I love about this Questlove Supreme podcast is we got something for everybody, every type of musical ever we enjoy speaking to the people who were the face of some movements there's some people you've seen on stage or TV or magazine covers but we also love speaking to the folks
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So, like you said, I think in 1977 James Earl Ray escapes and Cantrell lived in the area.
He said it was big news at the time, so he was aware of this.
And a few years later, he and his friend Carl Hin, known as Rawdog — for reasons that I don't want to ask about — they decided — I don't think it was in 1985.
I don't think it wasIZ— You don't know?
All right. You're a good point.
So they decided to hike into the state park.
This is, this is a place where he's like Okay, like, we could totally do so many more than eight miles in 54 hours.
Let's go check this out and have fun.
and like you said, most of these are not nature trails, where there are signs posted, there's a path you can look down and follow, these are hard to find trails that you need to know how to use, a compass, a contour map, you have to be good at orienteering is what it's called.
In addition to hiking and putting up with all sorts of terrible, uncomfortable stuff and pushing your limits, So, these guys were like, let's just go for a fun hike for a day.
Yeah, and they showed up there.
There was a park ranger that was like, you guys should leave, like you shouldn't be out there.
It's like, it's not like you think you're going to get lost, you're going to get hurt, you're going to need rescue.
They ignored him, they did make it through, they did his eight mile.
They didn't even know his existence.
Yeah, they just walked right by.
They made this eight mile hike, this loop.
But it took them a full day, which is you should be able to hike much more than eight miles in a day.
And it required a lot of orienteering like you said and paying attention to that kind of thing.
And he said, all right, I think I have an idea here for a race.
Let's make a nearly impossible to finish race.
I think it's kind of hard to tell because there's not a website for this.
forms, you can't get, like, historical, I mean, people have written about it since then, but you can't get, like, the official website documentation on this race in history because it doesn't exist.
They keep it very much under wraps.
So, the way he tells it on the documentary, it was always supposed to be a hundred miles, but no one ever did more than the first three loops out of the five.
I think, though, maybe this first version was shorter.
It was about a fifty to fifty -five -mile course.
It was held over April Fool's Day, weekend in 1986 and the initial cutoff was 24 hours with 13 participants and zero people finishing.
Yeah and this is just a 50 to 55 mile version.
Like you said, officially the current Barklee Marathon is a hundred mile and in reality it's also like 120 to 130 miles based on reports from people who've actually run it right?
Yeah I mean he changes the route every year a little bit that's why it varies but the year they did the documentary it was documented at 130 and everybody is like it's not 100, just just stop saying that.
So the the first version like you said is three loops and it wasn't until two years after the first one that somebody completed it, I mean we're talking like dozens of people attempting this and it took three times before one person finished.
And there was something about this that I don't know if we've mentioned yet.
Just this first version, there was an elevation gain of 24 ,000 feet.
So all of the times you went up and down, if you count all the ups, it would equal 24 ,000 feet in elevation that you've climbed over these three loops.
And that is a lot, and in fact, the guy who finished, frozen Ed Ferta, he was just kidding.
And just Ed Furtaugh until he won, and then from then on he was frozen Ed Furtaugh.
He thought that there was a misprint in Ultra Running Magazine that the elevation was actually 2400 feet, not 24 ,000.
Yeah, and I guess we can go ahead and tell everybody the current iteration, like we said, is supposedly 100, but it's really more like 130 miles.
It's got a 60 hour time limit.
And the elevation is the total elevation climb over that race, if you finish it, is 60 ,000 feet, which is equivalent to walking up and back down Mount Everest twice.
Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, the total elevation's 120 ,000 because, yeah, if you go up 60 ,000 feet and you're coming back down, you've got to come down 60 ,000 feet.
Yes, it's harder to climb up, but it's not that easy to go down, too.
especially if you're on an incline, and that's a big part of it too is sliding into things like briars and saplings.
It's rough. Just watching the effect on some of the runners bodies and what they were coming back to camp looking like was pretty bad.
Some guy had a head wound and they show him slipping on rocks and hitting his forehead.
It's nuts what these people are doing to themselves.
Yeah, I mean their legs are all just because these briars they have to go through one part which is a really heavy briar area.
But every single person's legs are just thrashed.
Like, it looks like ground meat.
Oh, yeah, like disgusting, bleeding, their feet are disgusting and blistered and just riddled with, I think the one guy that we'll get to the stops.
But the one guy they were like it would take you eight hours to fully dry your feet out So you know you can't you're not gonna get dry feet right at which which is a big problem and and They're basically not sleeping right when you when you complete a loop you have what's called an interloper period
Where you can do whatever you want you can take However much time you want to get you can get first aid you can eat.
You can drink you can rest You can change your clothes and socks You can take a nap if you want, but that clock is still running so how long you wait is up to you I think the the winner that year said he slept about an hour total So just try staying up and awake for 60 hours in a chair and without drugs,
yeah, exactly these people are Are doing this and you know we say it's a it's a run like a lot of this is Hiking and bouldering and walking and crawling so it's not like they're running the whole time but it's just brutal.
Yeah. It really is.
One of the other things that really kinda gets us across too in what you said, so you've got 60 hours to finish them from the start that clock's always ticking, right?
Yeah. But you're going 130 miles.
So if you do the math, Olivia helps us with this.
And she pointed out that.
Thank goodness. Yeah.
You could sleep for two, eight hour nights and still finish this course at a 20 -minute mile pace, which you can basically do on your hands and knees, and still complete it within the 60 -hour cutoff.
So the fact that some people can't even finish the first loop.
Goes to show you how difficult this is.
That if it were flat, it would be beyond easy.
But those same limits, the time limit, and the length, put on this particular terrain or in this topography is just – it changes absolutely everything.
Oh, yeah. This 12 -hour time limit per loop must have come in after the documentary, right?
Yeah. That confused me too, because they were finishing in like 13 hours and something like that.
I didn't get that. So, yeah, I think it must have been a new one.
Yeah, I think so. So finishing the three loops, if you finish three loops, that is considered a fun run and that is a designation.
And that is a huge accomplishment.
sonland just Earth finish the frankly we should add he also has a baby Shockley in the fall the Berkeley Berkeley for classic which is fifty k.
So thirty one miles and that's about four hundred runners.
But only about thirty five thirty th or twenty participants or allowed per year to compete in this thing because of you know it's out in nature so the state won't let them have like hundreds of people like not a ton of people can go watch it's just like family and I think some former winners can be
there and it's a pretty small operation because they just can't run roughshod over the area.
But they had the 60 hours to complete now 12 hours per loop.
The first loop is run clockwise.
The second loop, which is at night, will go counterclockwise and then again day, night, clockwise, counterclockwise.
And then this is pretty devious.
the final 5th loop, if you get there, the first person to finish the fourth gets a choice.
Which way they wanna run.
And then they start splitting people up because almost everybody runs with a buddy or two.
It really, really helps to have someone out there and they're really helping each other.
