One of running’s toughest events just ended — without anyone earning the right to stand on a podium. The 2025 Barkley Marathons concluded this week with no finishers of its 100+ mile course. There was just one completion of the Fun Run by U.S. athlete John Kelly.
Going back a year, the 2024 Barkley Marathons saw a record number of finishers — five in total, including Jasmin Paris, the event’s first-ever female finisher. This unprecedented result left many speculating that the 2025 Barkley Marathons course would be the hardest yet — and that expectation appears to have been met.
The Barkley Marathons is an unmarked ultramarathon at Frozen Head State Park, Tenn., consisting of five 20-plus-mile loops. Past competitors report covering up to 26 miles on a single loop. Navigation by GPS is not allowed, and runners must use a map and compass to navigate to locations on the route and collect pages from hidden books in lieu of a more traditional dibber system.
The route and book locations vary from year to year. Over time, race organizers purportedly make the race more difficult to finish.
“They made the course significantly harder this year and I missed the cutoff by two minutes for finishing Loop One,” runner Kelly Halpin told iRunFar. “But it was really fun. Hands down, the hardest course I think in history.”
The original version of this article appeared on iRunFar.
60 Hours to Finish 100+ Miles
In order to be awarded an official finish, runners must complete the five loops in less than 60 hours. Runners who don’t make the interim cutoffs still have the opportunity to complete a Fun Run, if they can finish three loops inside of 40 hours. This year, that seemed about as much as anyone could aspire to.
The event has no set start time, only a 12-hour start window. During that window, organizers blow a conch shell to signal the event will start in an hour.
For 2025, the race began on Tuesday, March 18, at 11:37 a.m. EDT, under relatively cool weather and partly cloudy skies, as race director Gary Cantrell, a.k.a. Lazarus Lake, lit his ceremonial cigarette. This was the latest start time on record for the event.
The Barkley Marathons entrants list is kept secret, and the names of participants aren’t generally mentioned in the organization’s coverage until the event’s advanced stages. This makes understanding the race dynamics, let alone the basic race roster, largely speculative. In this article, we share what we’ve been able to gather took place.
2025 Barkley Marathons Men’s Race
The attrition rate at this year’s Barkley Marathons was higher than ever, with what we believe only 10 of roughly 35 men making it through the first lap within the allotted time. Early reports from the race’s lone media feed, Keith Dunn, indicated that the race was already behind schedule: “The first runner has come through the Fire Tower in [circa] 7:00 hours, over an hour slower than last year.”
While details remain vague, we understand the first person back after Loop One was three-time Barkley finisher John Kelly. Next after that was French orienteer and trail runner Maxime Gauduin, followed by France’s Sébastien Raichon and Japan’s Tomokazu Ihara.
As Loop Two commenced with nine runners remaining in the race — one of those Loop One finishers opted to retire — it already appeared doubtful that we would see a finisher of the entire event.
The remaining hope dissipated when the 24-hour mark arrived, and no runner had returned from the second lap. For comparison, more than 10 folks finished two laps in under 24 hours, both in 2023 and 2024.
There were reports of bewildered runners returning having failed to navigate the loop, with one of Dunn’s posts reading, “Two runners have come back after wandering around Stallion Mountain and a few other places before coming back.”
With 10 minutes to go, John Kelly arrived back at the infamous yellow gate that marks the start and finish of each loop, stopping the clock at 39:50:27. That earned Kelly a Fun Run finish, and rounded out his eighth appearance at the Barkley Marathons. Ihara and Raichon tried and failed to finish four loops in time to earn a Fun Run finish.
Over at Bluesky and X, the Barkley Marathons’ lone media entity Keith Dunn made his traditional declaration: “The 2025 Barkley Marathons is over. There are no finishers.”
2025 Barkley Marathons Women’s Race
This year’s roster seems to have included a small number of women, but among them, some have the potential to become the second Barkley Marathons women’s finisher. We believe these women included Kelly Halpin, Christiana Rugloski, Claire Bannwarth (France), Dena Carr, and Isobel Ross (Australia). The race, however, had other ideas, and we understand that this year, no woman made it as far as Loop Two.
For Ross, this was her third effort at the Barkley Marathons. In 2019, she finished the first loop in 16 hours, 50 minutes, almost 5 hours over the cutoff to continue, but was not put off, and returned in 2022 for another attempt. Her luck did not improve, however, as the two-time Australian trail champion failed to complete a single loop.
Bannwarth also would have looked like a promising hopeful. She specializes in the longest, most grueling of races, and has twice won the U.K.’s 268-mile Winter Spine Race.
She also set a self-supported fastest known time on the 500-mile Colorado Trail, just a couple of weeks after her fifth-place finish at the 2023 Hardrock 100. This was her Barkley debut, and like Ross, she failed to finish the first loop.
We understand Halpin was the top woman finisher and came the closest to finishing a loop. She came to the race with some Barkley experience, having tapped out on loop two in the 2024 edition. Even by the event’s normally tough standards, this year was “brutal,” said Halpin.
“As a comparison, I finished my first lap last year in 10.5 hours,” Halpin told iRunFar. “This year, I finished in 13 hours, 22 minutes. And that was with all my knowledge from last year’s course and almost perfectly navigating the course and finding the books this time. It was nuts.”
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