Gary Cantrell

Failure has a unique place in our lives. We do not want to fail. It is painful. It is embarrassing. And it is absolutely necessary if we are to accomplish great things. It stands between us and limitless possibilities.

We cannot all have the talents of elite runners, but there is nothing that prevents us from approaching the sport with the same professionalism. You will leave your footprint on ultrarunning, one way or another. Leave the footprint you want those who follow to see.

The secrets to completing the Barkley, or your Barkley, are not about diet, equipment or your crew. You must learn as much as possible about the course you are facing and prepare yourself to eliminate wasted time. Most importantly, you must maintain the effort even when success doesn’t seem possible.

Rules; who likes ’em? Nobody.

Who needs ’em? Everybody.

Running ultras is supposed to be fun. The last thing we want to deal with is having a bunch of rules to worry about. Unfortunately, ultrarunning is practiced by humans. And, without rules, some of those humans are bound to take liberties with what might seem innately obvious.

We should have known better… The 13 starters were indicative of what would transpire. The fact that Barry Barkley, the race’s namesake, had to work and missed the event. The failure of the temperature to reach above freezing during the race – both the weekends, before and after, it had reached into the 70’s. Most of all, just knowing the nature of the Boundary Trail, we shouldn’t have even tried. But we did.

The calendar was my first running “tool.” When I began seriously training, a simple wall calendar provided a handy place to record what I had done. These days, the old running calendar has become a part of social media. I think the value still distills down to the same essential ingredients: the numbers and the compulsion to improve them.

How we had come to be sharing the intimate moments of a collapsing transcontinental run attempt was quite a story in and of itself. A month earlier, when he began this run in California, Robert Young and his transcon were not even a blip on my radar.

No one watches the long-range weather forecast like an ultrarunner. Whether we are planning some long training run or preparing for an event, nothing weighs as heavily on us as the forecast. Of course, it really makes little difference if we are headed to a race. Having invested our children’s inheritance in the entry fee, we’re going to go no matter the weather.

The first good advice that most of us receive, regarding the running of an ultramarathon, is to “break it down” into manageable pieces. And good advice it is. Once the…

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, but, just as there are Americans, and Southerners, there are runners, and ultrarunners, and:

What am I doing here? And why did I decide that this was the race to “go for it?” Now I just wish I were at home between my own sheets with hyperactive bladder and bowels and cold sweaty feet and hands. Most of all, I wish that tomorrow held something other than an early rise and a day of exceedingly painful effort. Ah, well. close the eyes, breath deeply, and please, please, go to sleep.

Your great victories seldom make entertaining stories. What people want to hear about are your appalling errors and grievous miscalculations.

As best I can tell, the GPS mile is somewhere between eight and nine tenths of a mile as measured by a steel tape, a wheel, a surveyor or even a laser beam. Even at a race held on a paved, certified, one-mile loop, the race director was accosted by runners during the event, swearing that the loop distance was far more than a mile… their GPS measurements proved it.

From the greenest novice, to the most seasoned veteran, as ultrarunners, each of us has an ambition of reaching our potential. Whether our goal is to simply achieve a finish…

It is the number one answer to the number one question we get as ultrarunners… “Why do you do it?”

“For the challenge!”

The answer sounds so glib that it might come across as a throwaway line.

But the truth is, there are many nuances to the challenge of running ultras.

There really is no big secret to improve our results as ultrarunners. For all the time and energy we expend on nutrition, gear, cross training, and other peripheral aspects of the sport; in the end our results are a direct reflection of our training mileage. And the biggest obstacle to accumulating the mileage necessary to achieve the results we desire is inconsistency.

From the house it looked just like snow. For 36 hours, billions of tiny bits of ice had poured from the sky. By the time it finished, everything in sight was covered by a six-inch sheet of ice. No matter that I had listened to the unmistakable sounds of falling ice for a day and half, it looked like snow, dammit.