The Barkley 2024 was predictable: after three finishers last year, no one was expected to make it to the fifth loop. The course would be toughened up. But what unfolded was something altogether different and soon we were dealing with a rash of firsts, tattoos, a Rusty Spoon, a photo gone round the world and an Italian painting from 1603.
By 4 a.m. on Friday morning, almost 48 hours after the race began, Jasmin Paris was sitting in a camping chair in a small pool of light near a metal gate attached to a stone pillar. This gate has come to embody the most challenging test in ultrarunning. It’s a test that Paris has been battling for years. Items litter the ground in front of her: an empty Coke bottle, a half-full Coke bottle, a gallon of Minute Maid and a pint of oat milk.
She’s busy cramming everything she can down her throat, inhaling calories in gulps and gobbles. Then, she stands up—on the verge of history—to begin loop five. She’s also sick as a dog. A small round of applause breaks out as she pulls off her dark jacket and straps on a hydration vest. It’s the same one she’ll be wearing when the race clock expires, and she’s collapsed under the yellow gate.
It was clear from the start that things weren’t the same this year. Carl Laniak was manning the pillar instead of Laz. His first year as the Barkley successor quickly became a tense one as a pack of 18 runners came in off their first loop. Laz called it “a full-frontal assault on books.” What was surprising was not only the sheer number in the pack, but their speed.
Conversation among the inner circle before the race was that the course was going to be damn near impossible this year. There was a new section: the Rusty Spoon. It was a climb so steep, so full of briars and so long, that Naresh Kumar described it as “Rat Jaw on cocaine.” Rat Jaw is one of the most well-documented climbs at Barkley with steep grades and overgrown, mangled briars. He’d helped Carl set out that particular book, another checkpoint for the runners (15 in all, this year). “I tell you, man, we would take 10 steps and have to take a break.” But now, 18 runners were in—and fast. Pages had to be counted quickly. And then the drama began.
The sheer number of pages to be counted had thrown them into a scramble. So, Laz and Naresh joined Carl in the task. But the first set Laz counts has only 14. He counts again. This can’t be. Then, he finds two folded in on each other. Quickly he moves on to the next runner’s pages: 13. That can’t be. He counts again. The panicked runner digs into his gear and out come two more. Ah, 15. Then he gets to Guillaume Calmettes, 14. This can’t be. He counts again. “Naresh,” he says, shaking his head, “Come count these, I’m snakebit.”
Guillaume, the Frenchman, has an infectious smile that jives with his arm-sleeve tattoos to make him one of the most noticeable figures on any course. His energy lifts up everyone around him, and the smile is his secret weapon. He holds onto it when things get hard. But this was too much. Naresh counted 14, too. It couldn’t be…not again. Years back, a blast of wind had sent one of his pages soaring into the night sky and over a cliff. It was impossible to find. It was impossible to even try to find.
Not again. It can’t be. That infectious smile is gone and emotion is rolling down his cheeks. “What can I do?” he asks. “Can I go back and find my page?”
Carl asked for a ruling, and Laz stepped in and said it’d happened before, but no one had ever gone back, found it and returned with enough time to continue. But dropping was unacceptable, so Guillaume swallowed a candy bar and dashed off. When he reached Chimney Top, he ran into another runner. To his surprise, the guy had his page! But more surprising was, he wasn’t the one who had found it. Another runner, Kelly Halpin, had found the page but she’d given it to him because he was faster and might get it back sooner. That proved to not be the case when she passed him but didn’t think to get the page back. If she had, Guillaume would have missed her. His race would have been over.
After 3 hours, Guillaume is back at the gate and runs straight through onto loop two, mere minutes ahead of the cutoff. He’s still in the race but now must rewire his brain. He’d been a contender. Now, he was just trying to survive.
Since the opening cigarette, Jasmin had been redlining to stay with the front pack. She knew that was her best chance of finishing: run with them as long as possible then hang on. But she’d done more than that. Heading into loop three, she was at the front. “She was running every loop with a gun at her head,” said Laz.
But now, in from loop three, she sits in her camping chair, chin in hand—lost in thought. The fire in her eyes is gone as she gazes out into nothing. Loop four looms, a return to the nastiness of going counterclockwise. It had been tough enough on loop two. Now, she would have to tackle it again, with less energy and a digestive tract that was done. Behind her, the bugle sat atop the pillar, waiting for the next round of “Taps.”
Earlier, Ihor Verys sat in camp in similar fashion. His first time at Barkley, he was surprised at the state of his feet. “They were macerated,” said Laz. Naresh described them as looking like “bald chickens that had sat in water for 12 hours.” Swollen and wrinkled, the nerves were beginning to burn. But he told Laz that after Big’s Backyard last year, where he finished as runner-up (an assist to the winner, Harvey Lewis, but technically a DNF), he wasn’t going to quit again. So, he headed back out, each step like bare feet on hot coals.
Jasmin did the same, heading onto loop four, pale with waves of nausea wrenching her gut. But she wasn’t going to quit…not today. Too much was on the line, and she wasn’t ready to come back and do it all over again.
In 2023, I was standing by the gate when she appeared at the bottom of the hill. A shock of adrenaline coursed through my chest and down my arms to my fingers. I knew she was over time. Laz knew it. She knew it, too. But she was running. Running to us—to the gate. “Do you want my pages?” she asked Laz. He didn’t need them, he said, but asked how many she’d gotten before the time limit. “Nine,” she said. It was a record. But she hadn’t stopped there—she continued on. She had all 14 pages (14 books in 2023). Laz asked if she still thought she could get 100 miles. She smiled and said she could.
He smiled back, “Please put this to bed.”
Laz made this bed, he knows that. He even tucked in the covers when he said that no woman could finish Barkley—that they weren’t tough enough. But as anyone who knows him personally can attest, he’s a prodder and a goader. He’ll tell you something’s impossible in hopes that it will motivate you to do it. Of course, this crawled up the skin of many a tough female competitor. Courtney Dauwalter came and got one loop. Maggie Guterl came three times and also got no more than one. Only Bev Anderson-Abbs and Sue Johnston have gotten three. Until 2023, when Jasmin became the third woman.
Now, it’s in the small hours of Friday morning and the first miracle occurs. Guillaume appears out of the dark like a ghost and touches the gate, a mere 7 minutes before the cutoff. After all he’d been through, he had a “Fun Run.” A Fun Run on paper is three loops at Barkley, but those who were there know it was much more.
Then, Jasmin is in—four loops down—but her stomach is in wretched shape. A quick dash behind the barricade for a puke and she’s back. Her crew urges her to drink, but she refuses. Finally, she surrenders to a mouthful then proceeds onto the fifth loop of Barkley—the first woman to ever do so.
And so, the rest of the dark morning creeps along agonizingly slow. Crew and handlers wait. Laz and his inner circle wait. Those in the US wake up and grab their phones. In Europe, it’s primetime. In the far east, many convince themselves it’s only sleep and it’s the weekend, after all.
At roughly 2 p.m. in the afternoon Eastern Time, word hits camp that Jasmin has been spotted at the Fire Tower. The description is brief; she was heading down Rat Jaw—fast. But it’s enough to send the itchy-fingered internet into full hysteria. The hashtag #smalleuropeanwoman begins trending in the top 10 on X (Twitter) in the US and the UK. And soon, graphs and charts and theories pop up faster than you could hit refresh.
Mike Dobies, Barkley’s statistician, was in camp with his computer, crunching numbers and said Jasmin was too far behind. “Nope,” he said to Naresh. “She’s not going to make it.” She had done the tower to the gate in 2 hours and 45 minutes on the first loop. But on loop three, it had taken much longer. And that was Thursday. This was Friday, and she only had roughly 3 hours now.
On top of that was the severe nastiness in front of her, a nastiness that can only live in a wilderness haunted by collapsed mines full of dead prisoners. Souls that never had the Father, the Pastor or the Preacher say holy words over their graves. All that was left of their lives was the shuttered Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. She’d have to negotiate that prison through a tunnel underneath with foot-deep water flowing through. Once she was out of that, she’d face the Bad Thing, the Zipline and Big Hell. Nope.
In the meantime, four runners finish—a first at Barkley. Ihor Verys finishes first on his debut attempt. John Kelly is next, his third finish. Jared Campbell completes his fourth Barkley, another first. A record 12 runners get a Fun Run. Then comes Greig Hamilton, the first Kiwi runner to finish. But no Jasmin.
Twenty minutes are left, and time stretches on and on with no end. In camp, dozens glance at watches, check phones and scan the bottom of the hill for a sign. Online, it’s become a Baby Jessica in the well scenario—the world is watching, waiting and hoping for a miracle. A woman posts on Twitter that she “didn’t know anything about The Barkley till today,” and that Jasmin “is a complete stranger to me. But I can’t stop crying.” Ten minutes come and go, then five, three…
“RUNNER!!” The shout pierces through camp.
There she is, a lean patch of red and black against a brown screen of trees. A chorus of voices rifle up the hill. She can feel the tension and the immediacy. She needs to sprint. And sprint she does, up the hill, gasping and pushing to the yellow gate.
We spend most of our lives believing our brains are in control. Then there are times when it’s a secondary organ, at the whims of our deeper selves. The mind narrows and something raw inside responds to an immediacy—a threat. Our vision begins to tunnel and we become a primal predator of intent.
And Jasmin’s intent is to reach that gate. And she’s coming in like a freight train until she touches it and folds over it like a rag. A thunder of applause erupts, and she abruptly slumps to the ground. Her head rests against the column of rock. One leg flops over the other. Her face is a death mask. Eyes closed. Mouth open. One hand in the dirt, the other on her leg, her wedding band visible but dusty.
Snakebit Laz refuses to count her pages. Instead, he says to Carl, “I’m gonna make you count ‘em. If there’s a missing page, you’ll be the most hated man in ultrarunning.” “Ninety-nine seconds,” someone calls out. She’d beaten the clock by 99 seconds. And her pages are all there. At last, a woman has conquered Barkley. At last, Jasmin Paris is a finisher.
“It was insane,” Naresh said after. “It was like seeing the first person step on the moon. So many people were crying.” Harvey Lewis called it, “the finish of the century.” Damian Hall declared it was “the greatest sporting achievement I’ve seen in the flesh.”
Over the weekend, Jasmin was everywhere from The New York Times to The Guardian to ABC and the BBC. The photo of her slumped under the gate, taken by Jacob Zocherman, spread over the internet like wildfire. According to Laz, it was the result of following the rules, “He was the only one that didn’t bulrush the gate. He did what he was supposed to do.” Because he was on the side, she fell right into his lens, perfectly framed by the gate.
And the photo went everywhere. When ArtButMakeitSports.com created a meme of it alongside Domenichino’s 1603 painting The Lamentation, a woman posted, “Sweet God. My favorite account recognized a moment I have hoped and prayed for over the decades. I wept in public when she finished.” One social media response from France read, “Legendary. Impossible. Magnificent. Chapeau bas, madame (Hat’s off, lady).” One woman on Twitter got a #smalleuropeanwoman tattoo. Barkley communications director Keith Dunn’s Tweet of her finish topped 2.4 million views.
What it all means is quite clear. Like the 4-minute mile, Jasmin has opened a door. She’s proven women are capable of more. When I reached out to her the Saturday night after her finish, she said it was all still a bit fresh and may take some time to process. “The memory of that final sprint is a bit traumatic,” she said. “And wonderful.”
8 comments
Beautifully written. Thanks for capturing this important moment!
Just wow!
Fantastic article, thank you. My 9 year old just asked me, if everything was alright, why I was crying. Pretty sure I just provided her with new role model.:)
Beautiful content . Awe inspired . Thank you
Great article. I think Jasmin’s finish and Sarah Thomas’s 4-way English Channel crossing are the two most amazing sports firsts I’ve witnessed in my 50+ years of life. Truly incredible.
Wonderfully written! So many were cheering from afar. Jasmin’s performance has stirred up so much emotion and pride.
Outstanding story, both the event and the writing!! Left out when Jared waited for her at the start of Loop 5 in order to say, “Jasmin, if you want clockwise it’s all yours.” (the easier direction), but presumably that will be in the upcoming movie, which we all will certainly watch.
Holy crap! That was the best text about Barkley 2024 I’ve read. Had a lump in my throat when reading it and finally burst into tears. Such a great achievement of Jasmin! So inspiring for me as an ultramarathoner.