I spent 47 hours with Jared during The Barkley and am now honoured to call him a friend. I feel like that should be enough, just saying his name, and to those who know him or have witnessed him in action they know what I mean here. The Barkley is beyond classification and hard to put into words, though I will try with an eventual blog posting. A Barkley finish, if it is in my future, would have to wait another year. I had answered all of the questions I'd set out to source answers to when I lined up for this beast, and I had nothing left to prove to myself on the course. I eventually dropped off the course and found a ride back to the campground to face my fate against the bugle. I dropped down RJ, again attempting to generate enough adrenaline to stay awake, yet at the bottom of the descent I sat down and knew sleep was my only course of action. I decided to at least keep moving for a few more hours and I grabbed the fourth book at the prison and then climbed Rat Jaw for the fifth and final time.Īt the top of Rat Jaw were a collection of misfits, also known as previous finishers and world class badasses, and they all but forbid me from ceasing forward progress. I would not become the 15th ever finisher of The Barkley Marathons, and I would time out on the fifth and final loop. When I finally located book three I knew that my Barkley dreams were shattered. Over the following 2.5hrs I wandered in circles in the forest as I watched the merciless 60 hour time limit fade away before me. Small mistakes became big mistakes and turning right instead of left became my undoing. ![]() The following decisions that somehow made sense at the time will haunt my dreams until I one day return. From the second book to the third I shot a bearing, triple checked it, followed it as closely as possible and came up a just a few degrees from where I intended to be, yet in my sleep deprived state I processed that I was too far north instead of too far south of my target. I knew my final lap would have to be mistake free and I was calculated and precise in grabbing the second book of the counter-clockwise loop, one of the harder books to locate (the first book on the CCW loop is a gimme). ![]() On my 5th and final loop I was up against some of the deepest sleep deprivation of my life, having not slept the night before the race and being unable to catch more than a ten minute nap during the race, I was on about 90hrs since my last snooze. The Barkley is tougher than I ever could have imagined and I'm incredibly proud to have made it almost four and a half loops into what is a notoriously difficult race to close out.
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