No one finishes the Barkley again; only Sébastien Raichon completes the Fun Run

The conch sounded at 5 a.m. on Saturday 14 February and the Barkley Marathons started an hour later, the earliest date in its 40-year history. Forty runners from 15 countries, ten of them women, lined up in the dark at Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee. The yellow gate was under construction, so each loop started and ended somewhere different, and race director Gary Cantrell sent them round the course backwards. Then it rained.

Five loops of roughly 20 miles each, about 67,000 feet of climbing, no markings, books hidden in the woods, 60 hours. The first five runners finished loop one together in 9:47:08. Only 12 of the 40 finished it at all; in a normal year it is more like 26. Twelve started loop two. Sébastien Raichon of France, Mathieu Blanchard of France and Damian Hall of Britain finished it together in 22:35:40, Max King of the United States in 24:06:38. Séverine Vandermeulen of Belgium was the only woman to start it.

Four started loop three. Blanchard stopped in the cold. King gave up after finding four books in the fog. Hall came back to camp without all his pages. Raichon finished the loop in 38:05:46, inside the 40-hour Fun Run limit but more than two hours past the 36-hour cutoff to start a fourth.

It is the second year running with no finisher, after five in 2024, Jasmin Paris among them. Twenty people have finished the Barkley in four decades. Raichon, who won the Winter Spine Race a month ago, is now the only person to have done the best anyone managed this year.

Sources: iRunFar; Marathon Handbook.