'She looked like a corpse' - how trailblazer Jasmin Paris was almost pulled out of the Barkley Marathons
Laz Lake Facebook post reveals what the first woman to finish the formidable Frozen Head State Park ultramarathon overcame to reach immortality
It’s a finish most parkrunners would have been proud of.
Arms pumping, legs driving forward, a look of absolute determination - interlaced with pain and anxiety - etched across her face, Jasmin Paris is approaching the finish line.
But as so many people outside the running world have learned for the first time, Jasmin doesn’t run ordinary races.
This wasn’t a fast finish at a 5k, but a desperate, final push to complete the gruelling, almost impossible Barkley Marathons.
For those who don’t know, the Barkley is a formidable ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee, America.
The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five off-trail loops totalling 100 miles through the most brutal terrain.
Before this year’s event only 17 people had finished the ultramarathon in its history. Jasmin became just the 20th and the first woman to do it.
She did so with just 99 seconds of the 60-hour cut-off to spare.
I’m not going to go through the various bizarre and wonderful rules and quirks that make up the Barkley. People should go and watch The Race That Eats Its Young, Where Dreams Go To Die, or any of the other host of documentaries chronicling the involvement of conches, numberplates, chronic fatigue and sacrificial lambs.
But on Jasmin’s epic finish, it is telling just how close organisers of a race sometimes criticised for ignoring health and safety rules came to pulling out an athlete who has previously won and broken records at endurance events as famously tough as The Spine.
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Writing on Facebook, Barkley creator Gary Cantrell, aka Laz Lake, said: “Jasmin Paris achieved the impossible. And to achieve the impossible you have to do the impossible.
“That stirring, emotion-charged finish is only a fraction of the real story. Jasmin went out too fast.
“If you want what you want, you have to do what it takes to get it. And what it took to get what she wanted was to go out too fast. And then to transcend human limitations to hang on.
“As a race director you have a responsibility not to let an athlete put their self in danger. At the Barkley, that can be a tough call. The standing joke is that every runner starting lap five would be pulled off the course in any other event.”
He added: “Jasmin was damaged when she left on the third lap. Between three and four, it looked like an open question if she would be able to continue. But between four and five, she initially looked like a corpse.
“She perked up briefly getting her stuff together to start the last loop. Then her stomach rebelled. Watching her try and get things under control to leave, I had an internal debate going on.
“Carl (Laniak, who filled much of Cantrell’s traditional role as race director this year) was really in charge but he was occupied. And I was supposed to step in and help him when needed. I couldn’t abrogate my responsibilities on a technicality.
“So, I needed to give the situation serious consideration. Normally it might be advisable to tell her she should get her stomach settled before leaving.
“But this wasn’t normally. The clock was running and every second had counted for a long, long time.
“Jasmin was not just some ordinary athlete. She had proven herself many times over. The weather was not life threatening.
“But most of all she was on the verge of a transformative performance. She deserved to decide the outcome of her race ‘out there’ so I just watched her head out into the darkness.
“The rest of the story the world knows.
“Or knows most of it. If you have not been ‘out there’ your mind cannot create an image of just how hard it is, nor of the sheer horror that is that course.
“Whatever superlative you went to apply to her performance, it was better than that.
“But that applies to four other athletes as well.”
Cantrell is referring to this year’s other finishers; Ihor Verys, John Kelly, Jared Campbell and Greig Hamilton.
Paris’ powerful finish has been correctly identified across the world as a sign of her commitment, force of will and sheer determination - built on a bedrock of superb natural ability and hours of training.
This is true, but perhaps the real secret to her incredible success was in digging deep to transcend those human limitations.
And that’s something we can all embrace, whether we’re taking on one of the toughest races ever invented or charging home at our local parkrun.
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