Barkley Marathon is a very extreme, mysterious, ‘underground’ sort of event, that I had the priveledge of participating in early this year in Tennessee(100 miles).  I’ve been thinking about that event again lately. I maintain the mailing list for the Race Director, and as things are being prepared for next years events, my thoughts go back to that crazy day .  I did write a race report, with photos and videos, but didn’t really let very many people know about it.  In a sport(ultra running) that is already on the fringe of fringe sports, Barkley is over the cliff.  When you decide to enter events that are essentially impossible to finish for almost everyone, (most years there are no finishers), they light a cigarette to start the event, and the race shirt says ‘Endless suffering without a point’, well, let’s just say it doesn’t bolster the argument to friends and family that you are a sane individual.  That seems to get questioned more and more these days.

http://www.daveharper.com/Barkley/index.htm

I was playing an email game with my daughter and some friends, where you think of one word to describe the person you are emailing and what they mean to you.  My daughters one word description of me was WILD.  Not great, not inspiring, not loving, not caring, not honest or strong… WILD.       

I’m a little afraid to ask, but how about it.  Describe me in one word …. just one single word. Send it to me and to me only via email.  I’ll post the results afterwards if they are printable, without your name of course.  I’ll send you an email you can forward to others with the instructions for doing the same.  It’s enlightening to see what folks think about you, as you see can above.

In any case, here is the race report that I wrote from Barkley, it has photos and short video clips of different parts of the course, finding the books, etc.  http://www.daveharper.com/Barkley/index.htm

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 4:07 am and is filed under Family, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.