In the ultrarunning world there can be few characters as interesting or important as Gary Cantrell – aka Lazarus Lake – so it’s both long overdue and very welcome that we finally have the first authorised biography of the 70-year-old.
Through in-depth reporting and interviews with Cantrell and his inner circle, New York Times journalist Jared Beasley reveals what shaped this extraordinary innovator and formed his beliefs about human endurance and failure, while pushing the world’s toughest runners to new limits.
He’s best known for the infamous Barkley Marathons or ‘The Race That Eats Its Young’ as it was dubbed by the award-winning 2014 Netflix documentary which catapulted both the event and Laz to a global audience.
But before even opening the book it’s obvious that ‘The Endurance Artist: Lazarus Lake, The Barkley, and a Race with No End’ actually gives equal billing to Laz’s other great creation, Backyard Ultras.
It was ‘Big’s Backyard Ultra’ which started what is now a worldwide phenomenon – people running just over four miles every hour on the hour. Keep going for 24 hours and you’ve run 100 miles but there is no set end point – it comes when there’s just one person left standing.
Fact or fiction?
And author Beasley, after he was finally given access-all-areas passes, does a terrific job in taking readers inside both those races in a way that will engage both committed fans and those who are new to these maverick races.
He highlights just what makes them so special, while also rewinding pretty much to the beginning of Laz’s life to gradually explain the thought processes which ultimately set those races in motion.
There is so much mystery surrounding Laz that it’s hard to separate fact from fiction but this book finally reveals many of the missing pieces of the jigsaw.
Indeed games, puzzles and tests are a central theme of Laz’s life and Beasley’s own interaction with it, making for a fitting and seriously multilayered biography.
That echoes the 40 selected runners in the Barkley each year who all have to first find Laz’s contact details and then submit an essay as to why they merit a place before they are unleashed on the fiendishly difficult territory around the former Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee.
Pathway to ultrarunning greatness
As Jared told us when we caught up with him and Laz to discuss the writing of the book, “nothing was off limits” but equally he wasn’t thrown many freebies and had to work hard to find the real nuggets.
“There was never anything that I asked that he said, no, I don’t want to go there,” says Beasley. “But you’re going to get scraped in whatever it is that you do that’s connected to his races unless you make the effort yourself to prepare, ask, research and try to dig these things up.”
In the book we find out for the first time all about Laz’s desperately challenging childhood when a tumour discovered behind his nose led to yearly surgeries.
We hear how he drifted towards the fringes of society before showing incredible humanity as a hospital orderly and volunteer coach.
And we start to see the first signs of what was to come.
His own experiences as a high school cross-country and track athlete would plant the seed for the Backyard Ultras and then in his early twenties he organised his first race: a trail marathon held on a near-unnavigable course in Tennessee which had a nominal entry fee and very few finishers. Sound familiar?
If you build it…
There are lots of film parallels too. In the past the Barkley has been compared to ‘Fight Club’ or ‘The Blair Witch Project’ but Beasley is much more in the know and goes with Willy Wonka (and the Chocolate Factory) and Field of Dreams, both very different comparisons.
It also becomes clear that these days Laz’s greater focus is much more on the Backyard Ultras rather than the Barkley.
Carl Laniak has effectively taken over as race director for the Barkley but Laz remains incredibly hands on at Big’s.
He’s clearly fascinated by what makes people – not just runners – quit and his Backyard Ultras put a laser focus on that, with the chance to bail out every hour.
He passionately believes failure has to hurt – but not in a cruel way, only so it can then make things more rewarding in the long run. Whether that’s Jasmin Paris finally becoming the first woman to finish the Barkley or Beasley himself eventually getting this book published after multiple rejections.
And it’s clear that’s what Laz sees as arguably his most important role, a coach helping runners achieve far more than they ever thought possible as they tread that thin line between possible and impossible.
Beasley himself clearly gets emotionally attached to Laz himself, who he’s crewed recently on his latest trek across the United States, and his insights have now allowed the wider world to have a much better idea of what makes him tick. This is a fantastic biography – worthy of its subject – and highly recommended.
‘The Endurance Artist: Lazarus Lake, The Barkley, and a Race with No End’ is published by 80/20 Publishing.
