1/22/2024 0 Comments Download the barkley race![]() Cantrell stands on the other side of the gate with a fresh Camel in hand. Though you might know him by a different name: Lazarus Lake.Įvery year on the closest Saturday to April Fools’ Day, about 40 hand-picked runners line up behind the yellow metal gate that marks the entrance to northern Tennessee’s Frozen Head State Park. He is the mastermind behind arguably the world’s toughest footrace: the Barkley Marathons. I’m an old, beat-up man who doesn’t have a lot left in the tank.” He cut a pea-shaped piece of moleskin and pressed it into the ball of his foot.īut Cantrell is not just any old man. “It’s a mystery to me why you want to write about my transcon,” he said. The previous night, I had driven up from my home in New Mexico to meet him at a Super 8 motel, where I found him seated next to a half-empty box of pizza, applying benzoin and bandages to his feet. ![]() Cantrell was averaging 27 miles a day and would take four months to finish. Many people who cross the country on foot run 40 to 50 miles a day and finish in two or three months. This patch of sandhills and hay bales just east of Valentine marked the roughly 1,800-mile point in a transcontinental journey that Cantrell had begun two months earlier in Newport, Rhode Island. “I take them the way they’re headed,” he said, “or they’ll just turn around and walk back.” ![]() With a painful moan, he bent down and scooped up the animal, then righted himself and shuffled across the road, where he set the turtle in the long grass. ![]() Above white crew socks peeked a few inches of tanned calves. The cattle prod he was using as a walking stick tapped against the asphalt as he made slow, steady headway along the shoulder.īoth pinky toes poked out of holes in Cantrell’s running shoes. “We gotta get there before a car does,” he said, pointing at the small green-yellow shell a dozen yards ahead of us in the westbound lane of Nebraska’s Highway 20. Around 10 A.M., Gary Cantrell saw a turtle in the middle of the road. ![]()
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