North Vancouver’s Gary Robbins became an instant sensation earlier this month when he just missed becoming a finisher at the ridiculously hard Barkley Marathons, known by many as the toughest foot race in the world.
Images of the highly decorated ultra-marathoner lying motionless beside a yellow gate – the event’s finish line – went viral, along with the story that he came in just six seconds late in a 100-plus mile race with a strict 60-hour cut-off limit.
That wasn’t the whole story, however, as Robbins also took a wrong turn in the final two miles of the five-lap course in Frozen Head State Park in eastern Tennessee. That mistake caused him to come in on the wrong trail – barely surviving a swim across a river to get there – meaning regardless of the time he clocked, he would have been deemed a non-finisher because he did not complete the correct route.
This was a huge deal because only 15 people – including John Kelly this year, who teamed up with Robbins for the first four laps – have ever finished the Barkley since it was first held in 1984. Robbins didn’t complete the race according to the Barkley’s devilishly tough rules, but his agonizing finish may well have made him the most famous participant in the event’s history.
This week Robbins was finally well enough to conduct extensive interviews about the race and the North Shore News caught up with him on a day that also saw him sharing his story with media outlets across the country.
Here’s what he had to say about his famous finish:
North Shore News: How is your body feeling? What feels worst?
Gary Robbins: It’s tough to distinguish what feels the worst. Everything just feels horrible. The hardest part in the days following is that you’ve gone from the strongest you’ve been in your entire life to pretty much the weakest you have been. Everything hurts – you can’t do anything but baby steps. Everything is swollen. You can hardly do anything but sneeze without it hurting your body somewhere.
NSN: This was your second time at the Barkley Marathons. How much more comfortable were you this time?
GR: It’s actually quite difficult to go back to an event this challenging a second time because the first time it’s like ignorance is bliss a little bit – you just kind of let things unfold and everything is new. This time I had to remind myself that three laps at the Barkley is harder than any 100-mile race I’ve ever done. That was my observation a year ago and it stayed true this year. I had to remind myself while I was in it that I had to go through the second, if not the hardest, race of my life just to get to the fourth and fifth laps of the race. I found through the first couple of laps I was wavering a little bit mentally and I had to really buckle down and I had some internal conversations about how to start blocking things out and focusing on the task at hand.
NSN: So you can never assume that you’ve got things figured out?
GR: No, not at all. The benefit this year was having seen the course last year. My navigation was much more dialed, I understood what things looked like and how to get between books (used as check-in points) a little bit better. But certainly the physical challenge, no matter how fit you are, it takes a toll on you pretty quickly.
NSN: You talked last year about the hallucinations you had on the course. Racing for 60 straight hours, obviously it’s going to get really tough. Did it start going wonky for you at some point this year?
GR: I used music this year, really got a loud beat-style music going in my ear, and that helped to focus the mind a little more. The hallucinations I did suffer from on the fifth lap were I started seeing bright flashes of light in my peripheral as I was blinking. And then when I was listening to this music, which was very much beat-based and not lyrically-based, all of a sudden I started hearing this voice overlaid on the music. It took me a second to realize that my mind was construing this, but it was the voice that you hear when you call in to get your messages on your cellphone. She was just chatting away about something.
NSN: Was she following the beat?
GR: No, she was just talking over it, just getting in the way.
NSN: Have you figured out how you got lost there at the end?
GR: Basically what happened was I had been pushing hard for not only three days, but my extreme limit for the last four hours of the race because halfway through the last lap fog had set in and I lost an hour at one of the books. I had no time left to make any errors – with four hours left in the race I found myself where I had to move as fast or faster than I moved on the very first lap to have a chance to finish the race. I managed to pull that out of myself and I collected the final book.
As I collected the final book, there’s one small climb you go up and over, then you intersect with a trail and you run down to the finish to the left. It’s pretty straightforward. And as I got the final book I saw the fog rolling in on top of me and it just was a whiteout. I went over the final knoll … I was a few degrees too far to the west – or to the right – of the trail, and when I hit the trail I drifted into it from the wrong side and then in the fog I was on the trail and I saw blazes on the trees and I started running on the trail.
I was running and wondering why things were taking so long, why things weren’t unfolding as they should, and before I knew it I came to a staircase on the course and at that point I realized that I had gone the wrong way on the final trail and did not have time to turn around and go back up and over the mountain correctly to get to the finish in under 60 hours. I had blown my finish.
NSN: How much time was left?
GR: From that exact moment I think there was 20 minutes left on the clock.
NSN: Did you know that you were done or did you tell yourself that you could possibly figure out a way to do it?
GR: I knew that I didn’t have time to go back over the mountain and I knew that that was the only way to finish. But in that moment of being hyper-focused – and exhausted and sleep deprived – I took a bearing and shot down the mountain to get to the gate for 60 hours.
There’s a part of me that believes I only had 60 hours of energy and resolve in me and if I had gone over that margin by even a couple of minutes I would have just collapsed. I got myself to the finish in 60 hours and six seconds, from the wrong direction, and I did not finish the race.
My two regrets are I wish I would have turned around and gone back over the mountain and finished in maybe five minutes over time, and then the discussion would be that Gary Robbins finished the Barkley five minutes over, not he came in the wrong direction. And going the wrong direction I came to a river crossing and made a terrible decision in that moment to swim the river, which thankfully didn’t play out negatively but certainly could have. Those are the things I would change if I could.
NSN: How close did you come to losing it in that river?
GR: It was sketchy. The river was definitely chest-deep, and when I jumped in to swim I started getting washed downstream right away. I recognized that I wasn’t moving across the stream and I had kind of a tree that was protruding on the other side a ways down from me and that was going to be my only shot at getting through. I managed to put in enough of a kick to grab that tree and pull myself out of the river.
From an experienced backcountry enthusiast perspective, that is the worst possible thing you could think about doing and I would never do that on a clear state of mind. And I would never do that again even on a deprived state of mind.
NSN: Even after all that, you were sprinting in. How did you manage to sprint to the finish line?
GR: With three minutes left on the clock I was probably over half a kilometre away with an uphill climb. I still was somehow convincing myself that I needed to get there for 60 hours and I was running every step of those final three minutes.
I could see when I was going through the park I was about to run out of time, and I managed to dig a little deeper still and sprint to the gate. And then once I hit the gate I had absolutely nothing left.
NSN: When you touched the gate, were you thinking at all that there was a chance that you’d done it?
GR: There was like a two per cent thing in my head. I was 98 per cent certain that it was done and it didn’t count, and two per cent of me was like, ‘Oh well, maybe. You’ve gotten here.’ That two per cent evaporated in about 10 seconds.
NSN: What was the moment like when Laz (race organizer Lazarus Lake) said the words “six seconds”?
GR: I was six seconds over, and both of us kind of regret that because it made it sound like I had missed the finish by six seconds.
It’s certainly a flood of emotions then, and even now, to have come that close to things and to still have been so far away. Incredibly difficult to process and just juxtapose the feeling of pride and accomplishment with the knowledge of absolute failure at the last moment in time on the course.
NSN: The story took off in a huge way. Are you more famous now because of the way the race finished than if you’d just been a finisher like John Kelly?
GR: Definitely the story has taken off because of that. That’s the interesting part about it. I would rather have gotten a lot less press and just finished the race. … I just wanted to finish and then be able to walk away.
NSN: People in Canada and around the world were following along on Twitter, and there was a huge response after the finish. What do you think of the way people attached themselves to this year’s event?
GR: Last year was a shock. It was incredible and unexpected. This year to have it even more has been surprising – it feels like it’s been 10 times the attention that we had a year ago.
It’s pros and cons. It’s wonderful that it has spoken to so many people, and so many people got to follow along and share the journey with me, but it’s also nice sometimes to be able to just go about your post-race by yourself, rather than having it be so public.
NSN: Speaking of that, how did you manage to write such a lovely and precise blog post explaining what happened so soon after the race?
GR: I literally woke up the next morning after one night’s sleep, like seven hours, and I just felt compelled because of how it had all played out. I did it off my phone. I told my wife it was going to take five minutes and it was obviously like an hour before it was done. I was happy I did. It was nice to be able to clarify some of the details right away before it snowballed in the wrong direction.
NSN: You’ve been interviewed by everyone in the last couple of days. Are you Canada’s ultra-marathoner now?
GR: If anybody in the country knows nothing about ultra-marathoning, it involves knowing me.
NSN: Are you going to go back to the Barkley? When?
GR: My wife and I have had that discussion, and we’re definitely going to return. … It’s going to take about two months to feel my toes – I don’t think I need to make this decision before I can feel my toes again. When I wake up and all of the sensation is back, I’ll know that day whether I want to go back and do this again next year, or wait a year.
NSN: Do you love the Barkley? Hate the Barkley?
GR: I 90 per cent love the Barkley. I don’t think anybody can love the Barkley with all their heart, but I do love what it is and how it is structured and the people that are involved with it and what it takes out of you and gives back to you while you are pursuing that elusive finish line.
NSN: Is it the toughest race in the world?
GR: Yeah, 100 per cent. It’s the fact that it gets harder every year and it has a 60-hour cut-off. That’s what makes it the hardest race in the world.
