Nathan Moore

Running Adventures

Barkley

I don’t know how I first became interested in the Barkley Marathon. It’s a fascinating race in the Appalchian mountains with a secret entry process, a quirky race director, and unknown route. It’s happening again soon for 2024, but no one apart from those organising and taking part know when it’s going to happen.

After a quick search to find different videos, run247 has a number of recent articles giving background and a preview of 2024. There are plenty of onward links from that article. There’s also this list of documentaries, which are fascinating insights in to the toil and likely failure of a nearly impossible race. “The Race That Eats Its Young” and “Where Dreams Go To Die” are apt titles for these captures of human suffering endeavour.

An aside, that I found while looking for Barkley documentaries, linked to from the run247 posts: John Kelly (two time finisher of the Barkley) has a great blog with info on How to apply to Barkley and How to get in to Barkley. He also has a post on the Grand Round which is a nice segway into the next link.

Bob Graham

As a result of watching lots of ultramarathon videos on youtube I got recommended this video from Canadian Jeff Pelletier doing the Bob Graham Round. I really enjoyed it so wanted to include it here.

First run by Bob Graham in 1932 (aged 42), the 42 peaks of the round need to be visited within 24 hours. There is now a whole community and website and awards dinner (!!) every year.

Ireland

That brings me to the next part of my post. Again, I think I just stumbled across these one day. There are two rounds in Ireland, one older and one newer.

Wicklow is older, having been run since 2009. https://www.imra.ie/rounds/view/id/1 gives course information, completed rounds, rules, and records. With the help of Grid Reference Finder I created a google maps route, in the vague hope that I might one day be able to even think about completing the challenge.

There’s also the Connemara round: https://www.imra.ie/rounds/view/id/2 has only one completion, in 2023! Again, I created a google maps route. This is a wonderful part of Ireland that I have been to but not explored enough.

And just for good measure, I created an Auckland Volcano Round. Future task: create a script to find the shortest route between a selection of the volcanos in a Travelling Salesperson fashion.

All this is to say, I love the idea of these runs, it is two and a half years until I am 42, and maybe I should do something about putting these dreams into reality.