For many of us, Keith Dunn’s X account (formerly Twitter) is an outsider’s window into the Barkley Marathons. Since 2009, Dunn has traveled from his home in Arlington, Virginia, to East Tennessee’s Frozen Head State Park, to witness one of the most storied events in ultrarunning. From the campground located near the famed yellow gate, he posts real-time updates of the race as it progresses. But his knowledge of the sport of ultrarunning began years prior.
A seasoned runner who began tackling ultra distances in 1999 and has completed more than 30 ultramarathons, he first experienced Barkley as a participant. In 2005, after an email from the listserv, Ultra List, he discovered there were three slots for the race available on a first come, first served basis, so the 45-year-old attorney signed up. He knew he likely wouldn’t finish a loop, but his goal was to find the first book and get at least one page. That year, it snowed on the Frozen Head course. “I was as cold as I’ve ever been,” he remembers. At Coffin Springs, approximately 8 miles into loop one, he and a group of runners had suffered enough in the cold and returned to camp. But he had gone farther than he anticipated and was grateful to have collected a total of two pages.
After two more starts, in 2006 and 2007, he finally found his true Barkley calling in 2009. That February, he signed up for the social media platform, Twitter. Wondering what to do with his account, he decided to update readers on the progress of ultras in real time. While this would be difficult to do for point-to-point races where keeping up with the leaders requires more strategic coverage, he realized that the Barkley’s looped format allowed him to report from a central spot. “Nothing happens at the gate, but everything happens at the gate,” he says.
When he told race director Gary Cantrell aka “Laz” that he wanted to post updates about Barkley, Laz was skeptical. Regular communication had never been part of the race’s culture, but Dunn assured him that he would let him review each post before it was sent. He’s been Tweeting from the race ever since.
Dunn describes his communication strategy as “less is more.” His goal is to relay a sense of what’s happening at the gate, as readers will never see a course map or be able to monitor each runner’s location. Every year, people from all over the world often get frustrated that he doesn’t list each of the starters. But the list of Barkley runners is never revealed to the public prior to the start, and Dunn thinks it would even be unwelcome to some participants who prefer anonymity during the race. He says that Barkley exists for the runners, not the spectators.
After almost 15 years of updating the world about Barkley, Dunn wonders whether his efforts remain necessary to the race. The hashtag he and a friend created for the race, #BM100, is now popular on several social media sites. “My role becomes less and less important,” he says.
Despite Dunn’s concerns, the popularity of his account (@keithdunn) still spikes during the week of Barkley. This year, it reached over 90,000 followers. Dunn attributes this to the historic firsts of this year’s event: Barkley had five finishers and Jasmin Paris became the first woman ever to finish the five-loop course.
For Dunn, the experience of witnessing Paris’s finish was thrilling and nerve-wracking. As he waited, he heard spectators shouting before he spotted her as she charged to the gate with less than two minutes to spare. Dunn had been fixated on perfecting his post to announce her finish—after three days of coverage, he was tired and wanted to make sure the information he communicated to thousands of followers around the world was correct. As of this writing, there have been 2.6 million views of that post, and CNN cited it in an article covering Paris’s achievement.
Dunn has witnessed many incredible moments at Barkley over the years, and announcing Paris’s finish was very special. The Barkley Marathons was designed to test the limits of human endurance, and Dunn continues to wonder and anticipate what the race has in store for participants before the conch is blown. It remains a question that only the Barkley course can answer.