One among operating’s hardest occasions simply ended — with out anybody incomes the correct to face on a podium. The 2025 Barkley Marathons concluded this week with no finishers of its 100+ mile course. There was only one completion of the Enjoyable Run by U.S. athlete John Kelly.
Going again a 12 months, the 2024 Barkley Marathons noticed a report variety of finishers — 5 in whole, together with Jasmin Paris, the occasion’s first-ever feminine finisher. This unprecedented outcome left many speculating that the 2025 Barkley Marathons course could be the toughest but — and that expectation seems to have been met.
The Barkley Marathons is an unmarked ultramarathon at Frozen Head State Park, Tenn., consisting of 5 20-plus-mile loops. Previous rivals report masking as much as 26 miles on a single loop. Navigation by GPS is just not allowed, and runners should use a map and compass to navigate to places on the route and accumulate pages from hidden books in lieu of a extra conventional dibber system.
The route and e-book places fluctuate from 12 months to 12 months. Over time, race organizers purportedly make the race tougher to complete.
“They made the course considerably more durable this 12 months and I missed the cutoff by two minutes for ending Loop One,” runner Kelly Halpin instructed iRunFar. “Nevertheless it was actually enjoyable. Fingers down, the toughest course I feel in historical past.”
The unique model of this text appeared on iRunFar.
60 Hours to End 100+ Miles
With a view to be awarded an official end, runners should full the 5 loops in lower than 60 hours. Runners who don’t make the interim cutoffs nonetheless have the chance to finish a Enjoyable Run, if they will end three loops inside 40 hours. This 12 months, that appeared about as a lot as anybody may aspire to.
The occasion has no set begin time, solely a 12-hour begin window. Throughout that window, organizers blow a conch shell to sign the occasion will begin in an hour.
For 2025, the race started on Tuesday, March 18, at 11:37 a.m. EDT, beneath comparatively cool climate and partly cloudy skies, as race director Gary Cantrell, a.okay.a. Lazarus Lake, lit his ceremonial cigarette. This was the most recent begin time on report for the occasion.
The Barkley Marathons entrants listing is stored secret, and the names of members aren’t usually talked about within the group’s protection till the occasion’s superior levels. This makes understanding the race dynamics, not to mention the fundamental race roster, largely speculative. On this article, we share what we’ve been in a position to collect befell.
2025 Barkley Marathons Males’s Race
The attrition fee at this 12 months’s Barkley Marathons was larger than ever, with what we imagine solely 10 of roughly 35 males making it via the primary lap inside the allotted time. Early reviews from the race’s lone media feed, Keith Dunn, indicated that the race was already delayed: “The primary runner has come via the Fireplace Tower in [circa] 7:00 hours, over an hour slower than final 12 months.”
Whereas particulars stay imprecise, we perceive the primary individual again after Loop One was three-time Barkley finisher John Kelly. Subsequent after that was French orienteer and path runner Maxime Gauduin, adopted by France’s Sébastien Raichon and Japan’s Tomokazu Ihara.
As Loop Two commenced with 9 runners remaining within the race — a kind of Loop One finishers opted to retire — it already appeared uncertain that we’d see a finisher of the complete occasion.
The remaining hope dissipated when the 24-hour mark arrived, and no runner had returned from the second lap. For comparability, greater than 10 of us completed two laps in beneath 24 hours, each in 2023 and 2024.
There have been reviews of bewildered runners returning having didn’t navigate the loop, with certainly one of Dunn’s posts studying, “Two runners have come again after wandering round Stallion Mountain and some different locations earlier than coming again.”
With 10 minutes to go, John Kelly arrived again on the notorious yellow gate that marks the beginning and end of every loop, stopping the clock at 39:50:27. That earned Kelly a Enjoyable Run end, and rounded out his eighth look on the Barkley Marathons. Ihara and Raichon tried and failed to complete 4 loops in time to earn a Enjoyable Run end.
Over at Bluesky and X, the Barkley Marathons’ lone media entity Keith Dunn made his conventional declaration: “The 2025 Barkley Marathons is over. There are not any finishers.”
2025 Barkley Marathons Girls’s Race
This 12 months’s roster appears to have included a small variety of girls, however amongst them, some have the potential to turn out to be the second Barkley Marathons girls’s finisher. We imagine these girls included Kelly Halpin, Christiana Rugloski, Claire Bannwarth (France), Dena Carr, and Isobel Ross (Australia). The race, nonetheless, had different concepts, and we perceive that this 12 months, no girl made it so far as Loop Two.
For Ross, this was her third effort on the Barkley Marathons. In 2019, she completed the primary loop in 16 hours, 50 minutes, nearly 5 hours over the cutoff to proceed, however was not postpone, and returned in 2022 for an additional try. Her luck didn’t enhance, nonetheless, because the two-time Australian path champion failed to finish a single loop.
Bannwarth additionally would have seemed like a promising hopeful. She specializes within the longest, most grueling of races, and has twice received the U.Okay.’s 268-mile Winter Backbone Race.
She additionally set a self-supported quickest identified time on the 500-mile Colorado Path, simply a few weeks after her fifth-place end on the 2023 Hardrock 100. This was her Barkley debut, and like Ross, she failed to complete the primary loop.
We perceive Halpin was the highest girl finisher and got here the closest to ending a loop. She got here to the race with some Barkley expertise, having tapped out on loop two within the 2024 version. Even by the occasion’s usually powerful requirements, this 12 months was “brutal,” mentioned Halpin.
“As a comparability, I completed my first lap final 12 months in 10.5 hours,” Halpin instructed iRunFar. “This 12 months, I completed in 13 hours, 22 minutes. And that was with all my information from final 12 months’s course and nearly completely navigating the course and discovering the books this time. It was nuts.”
