In one of the many intricacies inherent to Barkley, where the runner is allowed to choose direction as the first runner, Kelly opted to run the final loop clockwise, with all subsequent runners alternating direction. Kelly was first out with 46:02 on the clock, allowing him almost 14 hours to complete his final loop. These were, in order: John Kelly, Aurélien Sanchez, Karel Sabbe of Belgium, and Damian Hall.
With just two more drops from the men’s field on loop 4, for the first time in Barkley Marathons history, four runners headed out on loop 5. Three more men made it within the 36-hour time limit and opted to head out on loop 4, including Aurélien Sanchez of France. Herrero took a little longer and embarked on loop 4 with 33:03 on the clock. Kelly was out on loop 4 first, after 23 minutes, with Hall hot on his heels. Just over 32 hours in, within seconds of each other, Albert Herrero of Spain, Kelly, and the U.K.’s Damian Hall all finished loop 3. However, some of the others had not yet had enough, and the race that is normally more about survival was evolving into a neck-and-neck battle. John Kelly beginning his fifth and final loop of the 2023 Barkley Marathons, on his way to his second Barkley finish. Read on for more details on how the event played out on the men’s and women’s sides. In one of the sport’s greatest quirks, due to the course’s remote location and an imperative to protect the ecosystem in which the event takes place, which precludes observation of the event by most anyone besides a select few members of the media, nearly the entirety of the event coverage came via the Twitter feed of ultrarunner and longtime Barkley reporter Keith Dunn. Rain and fog, which have been omnipresent in some years, were absent in 2023. This year marked better weather than the event has seen in years, with the main environmental challenges being long hours of darkness and cold nights in the late winter setting. Runners are allotted 60 hours to complete all five 26-ish-mile loops, and up until this year’s event, only 15 runners had successfully done so in the race’s 36-year history. The notoriously brutal and mostly off-trail route covers roughly 130 miles and takes in about 63,000 feet of elevation gain.
The event got underway on Tuesday, March 14, in Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee. A file photo of Aurélien Sanchez during the 2019 John Cappis 50k.
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