Behind the scenes at the Barkley Marathons as runners explain why 2025 was so tough

Laz Lake, the man who created the infamous Barkley Marathons, has already had his say on where most of this year’s runners went wrong.

In stark contrast to the previous two years, there was not a single finisher this time – indeed only Barkley legend John Kelly made it through three of the potential five loops.

Laz cited three main reasons in his race recap and called it “a battlefield littered with the corpses of hubris and overconfidence” and now there’s a fascinating film from inside this year’s race from Singletrack which provides plenty of different perspectives and brings the 2025 edition to life.

Inside track

It’s well worth a watch and is embedded below. Little details – from the watches being handed out after the conch is blown through to John Kelly ‘tapping’ himself out – will delight Barkley fans and it’s already had over 300,000 views on YouTube.

And the insights from some of the runners involved are just as revealing.

For while Laz said: “Most of them should have been able to knock out one loop under the time limit!” there was a very different perspective from Kelly Halpin.

She missed the loop one cut by just a couple of minutes and she underlined the fine margins and the toughened up course in 2025 when she said: “Last year I wouldn’t have said it was the hardest thing I’d ever done, this year it was the hardest thing I’ve done.

“And I gave 100%. We found all the books almost right away. Almost perfect navigation. And I still missed the cut-off by two minutes.”

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma…

Another bugbear for Laz was the navigation issues many faced as he pointed out: “Checkpoints are not ‘hidden’. They they are not probably in plain sight, and they have to be placed where hogs cannot get to them. But the map markings and directions are intended to make them easy to locate.”

Unfortunately a knee injury meant last year’s brilliant Dragon’s Back winner Max King had limited time on the Frozen Head State Park trails but in the video he explains some of the navigational challenges.

He said: “Once you get to a book, that’s the hard part. It’s kind of like an Easter Egg hunt finding the book off of the instructions.

“Because [in] an orienteering race, it’s very specific. There’s a red dot on the map at the GPS location that you need to be at. Here it’s like circles and you’re in that area but is it in that area though? You know they didn’t check it with GPS – they just figure they know where they are and then just circle it on the map and it’s close to that area.

“So when you get to that area you use the course instructions, but the course instructions are like ‘it’s in a rock, within these four boulders’ or ‘it’s in this beech tree’ and there’s like 20 beech trees – that’s the hard part.