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Toronto Sun
5 days ago
- Sport
- Toronto Sun
4 ways women are physically stronger than men
Four things women's bodies do exceptionally well: Pain tolerance, immunity, resilience and longevity Published Jun 05, 2025 • Last updated 0 minutes ago • 7 minute read Tara Dower in September 2024, when she became the fastest person to complete the Appalachian Trail. Photo by Pete Schreiner / Washington Post Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. In September, Tara Dower became the fastest person ever to complete the Appalachian Trail. Her record — 40 days, 18 hours and 6 minutes — was 13 hours faster than the previous record holder, a man. That same year, 18-year-old Audrey Jimenez made history in Arizona as the first girl to win a Division 1 high school state wrestling title — competing against boys. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Across a variety of sports, women are not just catching up after generations of exclusion from athletics — they're setting the pace. In ultramarathons, women regularly outperform men, especially as distances stretch toward the extreme. Jasmin Paris in 2024 became one of only 20 people ever to finish the brutal 100-mile Barkley Marathons race in under 60 hours — while pumping breast milk. In long-distance swimming, female athletes now so routinely excel that within the community, their records are just part of the sport. In climbing last year, Barbara 'Babsi' Zangerl became the first person, man or woman, ever to 'flash' — climb without prior practice and sans falls — the towering Yosemite rock formation El Capitan in under three days. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. These aren't just athletic feats. They're cultural resets. Experts say we're finally waking up to what women's bodies are capable of. And it's not just young women blazing new physical trails. 'In the Masters 70-plus, they just set a record for the women's deadlift,' says exercise physiologist Stacy Sims, who teaches at Stanford University and the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. 'Older women are demonstrating that 'I am strong and I can do this.'' – – – Built to endure Generally, discussions of 'strength' have meant brute force and speed over short distances – qualities historically associated with male physiology. But stamina, recovery, resilience and adaptability are as essential to athletic performance. And in those areas, female physiology holds real advantages, experts in sports science, human physiology, and biological anthropology have found. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The myth of female fragility is relatively modern. For most of human history, women were hauling gear, tracking prey, and walking eight to 10 miles a day – often while pregnant, menstruating, nursing or carrying children (one estimate found that hunter-gatherer women covered more than 3,000 miles in a child's first four years of life). That evolutionary foundation undergirds today's feats, experts say. 'Female bodies have superior fatigue resistance,' says Sophia Nimphius, pro-vice-chancellor of sport at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. In test after test, female muscles outlast men's when doing repetitive, if lower-weight, work, according to the pioneering research of Sandra Hunter, an exercise physiologist at the University of Michigan. Hunter's research – and others since – has shown that women's muscles fatigue more slowly than men's, so they can knock out more reps, more consistently. Men might start strong with heavier lifts, but when the workout gets long? Women can keep going, sometimes twice as long, or longer, outlasting even the most jacked guys. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. That endurance capacity is likely due to female bodies preferentially using slow-burning fat over quickly exhausted carbohydrates, in both athletes and less sporty people, studies have shown. In addition to using fat for staying power, fatigue-resistant slow-twitch muscle fibers are generally more common in women's bodies (though all bodies vary in their proportion of muscle fibers according to individual genetics). This muscle type is also more efficient than fast-twitch, which are generally higher in men's muscles. 'Our muscles do more with less,' Nimphius says. – – – Tara Dower set a record for completing the Appalachian Trail, finishing 13 hours faster than the previous record-holder, a man. Photo by Pete Schreiner Recovery and resilience Beyond endurance, several small studies on sprinting and heavy weightlifting have shown that women also recover from hard workouts more quickly. Slow-twitch muscles inherently have a higher capacity to recover, but the female advantage may also be explained by faster healing: A study shows two times faster muscle repair rates for female mice (though mice studies don't always translate to humans). The reason? There's strong evidence that estrogen reduces inflammation and supports muscle repair (one reason that Sims recommends postmenopausal women get targeted training support and recovery time). This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. However, some studies show that women are more prone to other kinds of sports injuries, especially certain kinds of knee and ACL injuries, but it's not yet known whether that's explained by biomechanical differences in bodies, hormones, or poor training. Some researchers say the greater injury rates in women are because existing research is based on men's bodies: 'Female bodies are different – I tell [women] the protocols you're applying aren't meant for your body,' says Sims. Feats of bodily strength – in both ordinary women and trained athletes – are more than just purely physical. Many experts on competitive strength remark on this mental aspect of female endurance: 'I do think that there is a mental grit, a resilience factor that helps women go to a place in their mind – a state that allows them to continue to push to the limit,' says Emily Kraus, director of the Female Athlete Science and Translational Research (FASTR) Program at Stanford University. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. – – – A changing future Men have usually defined strength by what their bodies tend to be good at, but max bench presses or fastest sprint times, both of which men tend to excel at, are just a few ways to test the human body. If we instead focused on endurance, resilience, longevity and recovery, the narrative of who is 'strong' would probably have a female form, many experts say. Currently, young female athletes still don't receive the same level of encouragement, training, and scientific attention as boys, Nimphius says. Research into girl's and women's health, while slowly improving, still lags – just 6 percent of sports and exercise research has looked exclusively at female bodies, according to a 2021 study. Considering all the wins for women already, what would the landscape look like if we designed sports science around female physiology – rather than downsizing routines created for men? The current generation of women athletes is challenging the very architecture of athleticism. Soon, experts say, they will have better information to help female athletes understand and train, and that will be true for weekend warriors and 5k racing types as well. Ongoing and anticipated sports science studies will be 'a game changer for girls and women – not just now, but in five, ten, fifteen years from now,' Kraus says. 'And that's really exciting.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. – – – Four things women's bodies do exceptionally well – Pain tolerance Human bodies endure all kinds of pain – from menstrual cramps and childbirth to back injuries and broken bones. Pain is subjective, so difficult to measure, but most research agrees with your grandma – women seem to handle pain better. Athletes are pain experts, and numerous studies show that they have higher pain tolerance than non-athletes – and when you break it down by sex, the limited research shows that female athletes don't differ from their male counterparts' pain tolerance despite higher pain sensitivity and that women are more likely to play through injuries. This is probably due to both biology and experience, says Sophia Nimphius, pro-vice-chancellor of sport at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. A 1981 study put it plainly: 'Female athletes had the highest pain tolerance and threshold.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Among mammals, including humans, it is widely accepted that females have stronger immune systems than males. That's due to the power of estrogen, and also of the XX chromosome carried by women but not men, which provides more variability in immune function. As the University of Minnesota evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk wrote in a 2009 article, 'There is no contest about the identity of the sicker sex – it is males, almost every time. Everyone knows that old age homes have more widows than widowers, but the disparity extends far beyond the elderly.' (There is a downside though; the majority of autoimmune disease patients are female. It's the cost that women bear for an aggressive immune system.) – Resilience Women's bodies seem better built for the long haul – less wear and tear, more staying power, according to the limited research. The data on long-term exercise suggests women may also pay a lower price for physical strain. For instance, the British Heart Foundation studied the vascular condition of 300 Masters' athletes (meaning over age 40), that included a mix of long-distance runners, cyclists, rowers and swimmers. In men, vascular aging increased among the athletes – by some markers up to 10 years, increasing their risk of cardiovascular issues. Among the female athletes, the reverse was true, they had biologically younger vascular systems, lowering their risk of heart problems. – Longevity Arguably, the truest test of any body is longevity. And with rare exceptions, no matter the species or culture, women live longer. That's partly behavioral – men tend to take more risks that can kill them – but it's also biological. Women tend to survive disease, starvation and injury at higher rates than men do. Studies have shown that the Y chromosome, which is unique to men, can degrade over time – a phenomenon known as mosaic loss of Y. This degradation has been linked to a range of health issues in men, including increased risks of heart disease and cancer. NHL Columnists Columnists Sunshine Girls Celebrity
Yomiuri Shimbun
02-06-2025
- Science
- Yomiuri Shimbun
4 Ways Women Are Physically Stronger Than Men
Pete Schreiner Tara Dower in September 2024, when she became the fastest person to complete the Appalachian Trail. In September, Tara Dower became the fastest person ever to complete the Appalachian Trail. Her record – 40 days, 18 hours and 6 minutes – was 13 hours faster than the previous record holder, a man. That same year, 18-year-old Audrey Jimenez made history in Arizona as the first girl to win a Division 1 high school state wrestling title – competing against boys. Across a variety of sports, women are not just catching up after generations of exclusion from athletics – they're setting the pace. In ultramarathons, women regularly outperform men, especially as distances stretch toward the extreme. Jasmin Paris, who in 2024 became one of only 20 people ever to finish the brutal 100-mile Barkley Marathons race in under 60 hours – while pumping breast milk. In long-distance swimming, female athletes now so routinely excel that within the community, their records are just part of the sport. In climbing last year, Barbara 'Babsi' Zangerl became the first person, man or woman, ever to 'flash' – climb without prior practice and sans falls – the towering Yosemite rock formation El Capitan in under three days. These aren't just athletic feats. They're cultural resets. Experts say we're finally waking up to what women's bodies are capable of. And it's not just young women blazing new physical trails. 'In the Masters 70-plus, they just set a record for the women's deadlift,' says exercise physiologist Stacy Sims, who teaches at Stanford University and the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. 'Older women are demonstrating that 'I am strong and I can do this.'' Built to endure Generally, discussions of 'strength' have meant brute force and speed over short distances – qualities historically associated with male physiology. But stamina, recovery, resilience and adaptability are as essential to athletic performance. And in those areas, female physiology holds real advantages, experts in sports science, human physiology, and biological anthropology have found. The myth of female fragility is relatively modern. For most of human history, women were hauling gear, tracking prey, and walking eight to 10 miles a day – often while pregnant, menstruating, nursing or carrying children (one estimate found that hunter-gatherer women covered more than 3,000 miles in a child's first four years of life). That evolutionary foundation undergirds today's feats, experts say. 'Female bodies have superior fatigue resistance,' says Sophia Nimphius, pro-vice-chancellor of sport at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. In test after test, female muscles outlast men's when doing repetitive, if lower-weight, work, according to the pioneering research of Sandra Hunter, an exercise physiologist at the University of Michigan. Hunter's research – and others since – has shown that women's muscles fatigue more slowly than men's, so they can knock out more reps, more consistently. Men might start strong with heavier lifts, but when the workout gets long? Women can keep going, sometimes twice as long, or longer, outlasting even the most jacked guys. That endurance capacity is likely due to female bodies preferentially using slow-burning fat over quickly exhausted carbohydrates, in both athletes and less sporty people, studies have shown. In addition to using fat for staying power, fatigue-resistant slow-twitch muscle fibers are generally more common in women's bodies (though all bodies vary in their proportion of muscle fibers according to individual genetics). This muscle type is also more efficient than fast-twitch, which are generally higher in men's muscles. 'Our muscles do more with less,' Nimphius says. Recovery and resilience Beyond endurance, several small studies on sprinting and heavy weightlifting have shown that women also recover from hard workouts more quickly. Slow-twitch muscles inherently have a higher capacity to recover, but the female advantage may also be explained by faster healing: A study shows two times faster muscle repair rates for female mice (though mice studies don't always translate to humans). The reason? There's strong evidence that estrogen reduces inflammation and supports muscle repair (one reason that Sims recommends postmenopausal women get targeted training support and recovery time). However, some studies show that women are more prone to other kinds of sports injuries, especially certain kinds of knee and ACL injuries, but it's not yet known whether that's explained by biomechanical differences in bodies, hormones, or poor training. Some researchers say the greater injury rates in women are because existing research is based on men's bodies: 'Female bodies are different – I tell [women] the protocols you're applying aren't meant for your body,' says Sims. Feats of bodily strength – in both ordinary women and trained athletes – are more than just purely physical. Many experts on competitive strength remark on this mental aspect of female endurance: 'I do think that there is a mental grit, a resilience factor that helps women go to a place in their mind – a state that allows them to continue to push to the limit,' says Emily Kraus, director of the Female Athlete Science and Translational Research (FASTR) Program at Stanford University. A changing future Men have usually defined strength by what their bodies tend to be good at, but max bench presses or fastest sprint times, both of which men tend to excel at, are just a few ways to test the human body. If we instead focused on endurance, resilience, longevity and recovery, the narrative of who is 'strong' would probably have a female form, many experts say. Currently, young female athletes still don't receive the same level of encouragement, training, and scientific attention as boys, Nimphius says. Research into girl's and women's health, while slowly improving, still lags – just 6 percent of sports and exercise research has looked exclusively at female bodies, according to a 2021 study. Considering all the wins for women already, what would the landscape look like if we designed sports science around female physiology – rather than downsizing routines created for men? The current generation of women athletes is challenging the very architecture of athleticism. Soon, experts say, they will have better information to help female athletes understand and train, and that will be true for weekend warriors and 5k racing types as well. Ongoing and anticipated sports science studies will be 'a game changer for girls and women – not just now, but in five, ten, fifteen years from now,' Kraus says. 'And that's really exciting.' Four things women's bodies do exceptionally well – Pain tolerance Human bodies endure all kinds of pain – from menstrual cramps and childbirth to back injuries and broken bones. Pain is subjective, so difficult to measure, but most research agrees with your grandma – women seem to handle pain better. Athletes are pain experts, and numerous studies show that they have higher pain tolerance than non-athletes – and when you break it down by sex, the limited research shows that female athletes don't differ from their male counterparts' pain tolerance despite higher pain sensitivity and that women are more likely to play through injuries. This is probably due to both biology and experience, says Sophia Nimphius, pro-vice-chancellor of sport at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. A 1981 study put it plainly: 'Female athletes had the highest pain tolerance and threshold.' – Immunity Among mammals, including humans, it is widely accepted that females have stronger immune systems than males. That's due to the power of estrogen, and also of the XX chromosome carried by women but not men, which provides more variability in immune function. As the University of Minnesota evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk wrote in a 2009 article, 'There is no contest about the identity of the sicker sex – it is males, almost every time. Everyone knows that old age homes have more widows than widowers, but the disparity extends far beyond the elderly.' (There is a downside though; the majority of autoimmune disease patients are female. It's the cost that women bear for an aggressive immune system.) – Resilience Women's bodies seem better built for the long haul – less wear and tear, more staying power, according to the limited research. The data on long-term exercise suggests women may also pay a lower price for physical strain. For instance, the British Heart Foundation studied the vascular condition of 300 Masters' athletes (meaning over age 40), that included a mix of long-distance runners, cyclists, rowers and swimmers. In men, vascular aging increased among the athletes – by some markers up to 10 years, increasing their risk of cardiovascular issues. Among the female athletes, the reverse was true, they had biologically younger vascular systems, lowering their risk of heart problems. – Longevity Arguably, the truest test of any body is longevity. And with rare exceptions, no matter the species or culture, women live longer. That's partly behavioral – men tend to take more risks that can kill them – but it's also biological. Women tend to survive disease, starvation and injury at higher rates than men do. Studies have shown that the Y chromosome, which is unique to men, can degrade over time – a phenomenon known as mosaic loss of Y. This degradation has been linked to a range of health issues in men, including increased risks of heart disease and cancer.
Style Blueprint
21-05-2025
- Style Blueprint
TN's Frozen Head State Park Hosts the World's Hardest Race
Share with your friends! Pinterest LinkedIn Email Flipboard Reddit Most people visit Frozen Head State Park in East Tennessee for the peaceful trails, remote campsites, and sweeping views of the Cumberland Mountains. They have no idea that tucked deep in the misty backcountry is one of the most brutal, elusive, and bizarre ultramarathons on the planet: the Barkley Marathons. And in 2024, something extraordinary happened. The First Woman in History to Complete the Barkley Marathons Jasmin Paris, a 40-year-old mother of two from Great Britain, became the first woman ever to complete the Barkley — all five grueling loops — within the punishing 60-hour time limit. She crossed the finish line in 59:58:21, joining an elite club of 20 finishers in the race's nearly 40-year history, and doing it with just 99 seconds to spare. Pin What Exactly are the Barkley Marathons? The race itself is part myth, part madness. Dreamed up in 1986 by Gary 'Lazarus Lake' Cantrell and his friend Karl 'Raw Dog' Henn, the Barkley began as a darkly comedic response to a failed prison escape. When James Earl Ray — the man who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — fled the nearby Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in 1977, he only managed about eight-and-a-half miles in nearly 55 hours before being caught. Laz joked he could do at least 100 miles — and so, the Barkley was born. Pin Pin Since then, more than 1,000 people have attempted the race. Most don't make it past the first loop. Why? The Barkley is five loops of unmarked trail over near-impossible terrain with about 60,000 feet of climbing (roughly equivalent to summiting Everest twice). There are no aid stations, no GPS devices allowed, and no cheering crowds. Just a compass, a map, and a touch of madness. To prove they've completed a loop, runners must rip a page from a hidden book at each checkpoint — books planted by Laz in twisted, hard-to-reach places across the forest. Pin Even getting into the race is cryptic. There's no official website or signup form. Hopefuls must figure out the secret application process, pay a $1.60 entry fee, and bring whatever strange item Laz demands that year — from flannel shirts to a pack of Camels. Newcomers must also bring a license plate from their home state or country, which is nailed to the infamous 'Tree of Shame.' Pin Into this strange, punishing world stepped soft-spoken and humble, Jasmin Paris. Who is Jasmin Paris? Paris lives just south of Edinburgh, where she balances a career as a veterinarian while raising two young kids. She grew up between the Peak District in England and the Šumava National Park in Czechia, and didn't take up running seriously until her twenties, when a colleague talked her into a local fell race. Fourteen years later, she's a veteran of some of the most grueling endurance events on earth. In 2019, Paris won the 268-mile Montane Spine Race outright, shattering the course record by over 12 hours. She had given birth just 14 months earlier — and famously stopped during the race to pump milk for her infant daughter. Paris flew under the radar heading into the 2024 Barkley, but that didn't last long. She quietly ticked off each loop, and as the clock wound down on her final lap, a crowd gathered at the yellow gate — the race's iconic finish line — holding their breath. With grit, humility, and just 99 seconds left on the clock, Jasmin Paris didn't just finish the Barkley. She rewrote its story. About Frozen Head State Park Frozen Head State Park spans more than 24,000 acres of pristine, rugged wilderness. It's named for a 3,324-foot peak that's often iced over in the winter, and it's a haven for hikers, campers, and nature lovers. The park offers 50 miles of trails, scenic overlooks, and a sense of raw mountain solitude that feels untouched — the perfect setting for a race that seems designed to break the human spirit. But now, it's also the backdrop of one of the most inspiring feats in ultrarunning history. Pin ********** For a daily dose of Style + Substance, delivered straight to your inbox — subscribe to StyleBlueprint! About the Author Kate Feinberg Kate Feinberg is StyleBlueprint's Associate Editor & Sponsored Content Specialist, based in Nashville. Kate is a plant-based foodie, avid runner, and fantasy reader.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lazarus Lake, the ‘Leonardo da Vinci of pain' behind the world's cruelest race
For over a century, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary was the end of the line. Built in the shape of a Greek cross, the pale limestone structure had housed the worst of the worst – murderers, madmen, monsters – its bulk hunched beneath a crown of scarred mountains the guards called the fifth wall. Now it sits empty – cracking and molding and dying. But each spring around April Fool's, on a cold, crisp day like today, a retired accountant appears at its gate. He carries a book with an ominous title and plants it against the back wall. Then sometime between midnight and noon the next day, he lights a cigarette, and the world's most grueling footrace begins. Advertisement He came at dawn, in a large U-Haul coughing diesel smoke into the Tennessee frost. After crawling out, he leaned on a cattle prod and lit a cigarette in front of the prison gate. He wore faded flannel, red-and-black checked, and a bright sock hat that said Geezer. The rest of him was almost deceptive: a tangly grey beard, perfectly manicured nails, and eyes like two-way mirrors – they observed everything and revealed nothing. Related: The Barkley Marathons: the hellish 100-mile race with 15 finishers in 36 years To some he is Lazarus Lake. To others 'the Leonardo da Vinci of Pain.' His Social Security comes to Gary Cantrell. Most just call him Laz. A rumor has it he'd been shot in a marathon. Another that he'd pulled his own teeth. Many are convinced he's diabolical, a man who breaks people for the fun of it. Others see a 'bearded saint' who pushes limit-seekers in a way that borders on genius. Advertisement In an already eccentric sport, his ultramarathon creations defy convention: tour buses, ferry rides, conch shells, a chair of honor called a 'thrown,' races with no finish lines, and races where older runners beat the pants off competitors half their age – Lazarus Lake filled a gap few realized needed filling. But it's here, at his Barkley Marathons, that he tests the limits of human endurance – physical, mental, and otherwise. Prospective runners send an application to 'Idiot,' include $1.60, and write an essay on why they should be allowed in. What they endure if accepted is legend. Shredded legs. Separated clavicles. Exposed kneecaps. One runner hopped 20 miles on a broken ankle just to get to a place where he could quit. Over the past five years, no one had even finished the Barkley. In its 36-year history, only 15 ever had. Laz looked on while a grey truck pulled up to the gate and sat gurgling. When I mentioned the polarizing attitudes toward his races, he just shrugged. 'Most people think fair is what's best for them. If you don't fail,' he said on a long sigh of cigarette smoke, 'how will you know how far you can go?' A young man climbed out, gave a nod, and worked the lock with a hoop of keys. They rattled against the metal gate until the whole thing, all two stories of it, screeched and unfolded like a zipper. Advertisement Laz slipped back into his truck without a word and headed toward the prison. I followed. Outside my frosty car window, the mountains loomed up to a series of tall ridges, dull like the color of deer in winter. They were strewn with jeep roads and blown-down timber. You had to think – 40 of the world's toughest trail runners against mountains the Cherokee deemed too inhospitable to mess with. The U-Haul circled a parking lot the size of a football field before lumbering to a halt in a puff of exhaust. Laz leaned against the front fender and began to piss. It steamed and splattered till it formed a dark patch on the concrete. 'I do two things well,' he said. 'I sleep well, and I piss well.' I looked away and thought about how I'd convinced The New York Times to let me profile him, then traveled here on my own dime. Nothing came easy with Laz. For three years, I'd tried to get him on his least favorite subject, himself. Instead, he teased me with small openings, false starts, and strange little trials – one of them, a math problem, nearly broke me: Advertisement ABCDE x A = EEEEEE The equation glared at me from my inbox, haunted a notepad on my desk, and ran on a loop in my head. After a few days of overclocking my brain, I panicked and passed it off to my wife. She solved it in fifteen minutes, and I was saved. Almost … Laz's reply was almost too quick, written in his all-lowercase style. 'did you give it to somebody?' Full of dread, I told him the truth. His response was predictably blunt. 'you always let someone else do your homework?' That could have been the end of it. Yet here I was in 2023, possibly on to the next test – trailing him toward the back of the prison, where he limped past a towering wall of sandstone and stopped at a conjunction of metal pipes. He produced the book, Last Will and Testament, and with little fanfare duct-taped it to the center. Advertisement To prove you'd run his Barkley course, he had you bring back a page from each book, 13 this year. The order of the books formed one loop – five loops total – 60 hours to finish. 'Sixty hours of Hell,' wrote one magazine. He added sections every year, mostly off-trail, yet the official distance somehow remained 100 miles. Those in the know say it's nothing short of 125. Not knowing, Laz maintains, is part of the fun. After lighting another cigarette, he moved to a break in the earth where a swollen stream barreled into a tunnel beneath the prison. Naturally, he sent the runners through it. At night, they reported hearing radios, television sets, even voices calling their names. They swore they were being watched, though no one ever mentioned by whom. 'They'll come up through here,' Laz said with some glee and pointed to a shaft lined with slick, glistening stones. Getting up or down would require a chimney climb, wedging feet and arms against opposing walls. 'Then, they'll head up that,' he said and gestured with his cattle prod to a sheer wall of Tennessee jungle. The slope didn't rise, it lunged at the sky – 60 degrees of winter-stripped trees so densely pushed together they seemed to fight each other for air. There was a flare in Laz's eyes as he studied it. 'We call that The Bad Thing.' Advertisement Once, a deer tumbled off the cliffs and into the prison yard. The inmates kept it and named it 'Geronimo.' It became one of the boys, a guide told me, and claimed he could still hear its footsteps. 'The whole place is haunted,' he said, his voice dropping. He described the six-by-six dungeon, the hooks where they'd hang inmates by their thumbs, and the mines in the mountains where hundreds were buried alive. When they collapsed, the guards would just leave them. 'No, no,' he said, shaking his ball-cap-covered head. 'This is not a good place. And I don't do night tours.' 'Jesus, you'd need a rope,' I whispered, craning my neck up at The Bad Thing. Related: 'I don't smoke on the uphills': Lazarus Lake walks across America (again) A thick, congested laugh burrowed up from Laz's chest. 'Aw hell,' he said. 'That's just the first pitch.' Advertisement Most big trail races have a monster, that one signature, gut-sucking climb. At the Barkley, there are a dozen, each loop, and The Bad Thing isn't even one of the worst. The total elevation gain soars over 68,000ft, roughly two Everests and a Kilimanjaro – from sea level. Many of the climbs are littered with long thatches of briars – the kind country people used to call 'wait-a-minutes' because it wasn't until you got a step past them that you realized you'd been snagged. 'God, one wrong move and you'd come down it alright, like a bowling ball,' I thought but actually said out loud. 'Oh, you'd smack into a tree long before you hit the bottom,' said Laz, without a hitch. 'It'd mess you up a bit. But you'd live.' He laughed till he groaned, then stilled for a moment before fixing his eyes on me. 'Failure has to hurt.' I let that roll over in my head for a moment. 'Doesn't it usually?' Advertisement He didn't respond to that but scanned the hillside with his large, green eyes. 'What makes people quit?' he said, blowing a long column of smoke back toward the prison. 'Everybody is born a quitter. It's the default setting. Hell, even fish quit! You can put 'em in an artificial stream with a fake scene, and they'll swim upstream as long as it looks like they're moving. But make it stationary, and they'll quit and go with the water.' He turned to head back to the parking lot but paused. 'Life can be a damn good metaphor for sports,' he said. 'Adapt or die.' *** The U-Haul was moving again, this time along a tight patch of pavement deep inside Frozen Head State Park. The road curved and rolled into a tunnel of trees toward the trailhead. There, the next phase of the Barkley would begin, checking in those Laz had called at various times penitents, fools, and sickos. Advertisement The farther we went, the more the forest seemed to want its space back – dark patches of moss slowly overtook the road and boulders crowded the edges. Laz liked to talk about the park's mercurial microclimate, how the air compressed through the gaps like a thumb held over a garden hose. Temperatures could swing from 80 to 15 degrees in a single loop. 'First-timers think it's hyperbole,' he said, 'but you only have to get caught by it once.' Soon, the bars on my phone dwindled to an 'x,' and the road began to climb. Finally, a smudge of yellow appeared ahead and became a gate. Set between two stone pillars, this flaking pole was where the ordeal would begin and end. Here, Taps would play on a squeaky bugle for the fallen. Like most things in Frozen Head, one got the sense it was sentient. A cracked sign adorned its middle: 'Do Not Block Gate.' By early afternoon, the ritual check-in was underway. A line of 40 trail runners twisted up to a large, white tarp, a virtual who's who of ultrarunning. The veterans carried items for Laz that he was in need of: cigarettes, socks, shirts. The virgins (first-timers) produced license plates from their home states and countries. Hundreds of these plates hung from yellow ropes strung between the trees – a dangling gallery of far-flung places like Liberia, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica. There were also unfamiliar faces in line, wide-eyed and wrapped in weather-faded gear. They stood quietly, taking it all in. Every so often, one would lean forward for a glimpse of Laz. You got the sense they weren't here for the mountains. Not even the pain. They were here for him – for Laz and his gate and his cigarette, daring them to come undone. Advertisement His gravelly laugh echoed through the trees from behind a picnic table, where he greeted the entrants. 'We look forward to seeing you suffer,' he said to one, before 'You might as well go ahead and hit your head on a rock' to another. The runners and crews got green and blue wristbands. The media got pink. 'Any advice?' a runner asked. 'Go home,' Laz laughed and handed him his complimentary shirt. On it was an illustration of a runner, terror etched across his face as he dashed up a tree. A monstrous black bear charged him from behind, while above, a cougar crouched on a limb, ready to pounce. At the bottom was this year's theme – The worst-case scenario is just the starting point! After the last runner checked in, they studied the master map. Laz made one of the course each year, and once it was set out, the runners and crews did their best to copy it by hand. They were also given a creatively useless set of instructions. Even the veterans got lost. One runner was heard to say, 'I'm not sure where I was, but it was hard as hell to get to.' Advertisement No one knew the start time, only Laz, and at some point in the next 12 hours, he'd blow a conch shell. If you heard it, you had one hour to get to the gate, where he'd start the ordeal by lighting a cigarette. Secrecy in all things; no one outside the camp – save close family members – even knew we were here. A clammy breeze stirred the air and made me glance back toward my SUV. A laminated sign caught my eye –one I could've sworn wasn't there before. It was taped to a pole with words written in black magic marker. MEDICAL, it read, for instances of DEATH, near-dying, and other assorted life-threatening injuries. Below was a phone number. Why do they do it? I thought, as I revved the engine of my rental and held my numbed hands over the vents. Why does he do it? I remembered something ultra-phenom Courtney Dauwalter had told me. One of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, she'd managed only one loop here but insisted Laz didn't want to torture people. 'He makes these crazy-hard events,' she said, 'because he thinks we all have more than we think is possible.' I was just beginning to feel my fingers again, when the weather shifted. The clouds darkened, and a blistering wind came barreling off the mountains. It whipped and tossed the trees. It was like an unseen hand had pulled a lever. The temperature plummeted, then sleet began to thud off the tarps, tents, and scrambling runners. Advertisement I spotted Laz by the license plates, gazing up at the sky and sipping a chilled can of Dr. Pepper, a Tennessee license plate swinging in the wind beside him. Its bolded letters read, SURVIVE.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lazarus Lake, the ‘Leonardo da Vinci of pain' behind the world's cruelest race
For over a century, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary was the end of the line. Built in the shape of a Greek cross, the pale limestone structure had housed the worst of the worst – murderers, madmen, monsters – its bulk hunched beneath a crown of scarred mountains the guards called the fifth wall. Now it sits empty – cracking and molding and dying. But each spring around April Fool's, on a cold, crisp day like today, a retired accountant appears at its gate. He carries a book with an ominous title and plants it against the back wall. Then sometime between midnight and noon the next day, he lights a cigarette, and the world's most grueling footrace begins. He came at dawn, in a large U-Haul coughing diesel smoke into the Tennessee frost. After crawling out, he leaned on a cattle prod and lit a cigarette in front of the prison gate. He wore faded flannel, red-and-black checked, and a bright sock hat that said Geezer. The rest of him was almost deceptive: a tangly grey beard, perfectly manicured nails, and eyes like two-way mirrors – they observed everything and revealed nothing. To some he is Lazarus Lake. To others 'the Leonardo da Vinci of Pain.' His Social Security comes to Gary Cantrell. Most just call him Laz. A rumor has it he'd been shot in a marathon. Another that he'd pulled his own teeth. Many are convinced he's diabolical, a man who breaks people for the fun of it. Others see a 'bearded saint' who pushes limit-seekers in a way that borders on genius. In an already eccentric sport, his ultramarathon creations defy convention: tour buses, ferry rides, conch shells, a chair of honor called a 'thrown,' races with no finish lines, and races where older runners beat the pants off competitors half their age – Lazarus Lake filled a gap few realized needed filling. But it's here, at his Barkley Marathons, that he tests the limits of human endurance – physical, mental, and otherwise. Prospective runners send an application to 'Idiot,' include $1.60, and write an essay on why they should be allowed in. What they endure if accepted is legend. Shredded legs. Separated clavicles. Exposed kneecaps. One runner hopped 20 miles on a broken ankle just to get to a place where he could quit. Over the past five years, no one had even finished the Barkley. In its 36-year history, only 15 ever had. Laz looked on while a grey truck pulled up to the gate and sat gurgling. When I mentioned the polarizing attitudes toward his races, he just shrugged. 'Most people think fair is what's best for them. If you don't fail,' he said on a long sigh of cigarette smoke, 'how will you know how far you can go?' A young man climbed out, gave a nod, and worked the lock with a hoop of keys. They rattled against the metal gate until the whole thing, all two stories of it, screeched and unfolded like a zipper. Laz slipped back into his truck without a word and headed toward the prison. I followed. Outside my frosty car window, the mountains loomed up to a series of tall ridges, dull like the color of deer in winter. They were strewn with jeep roads and blown-down timber. You had to think – 40 of the world's toughest trail runners against mountains the Cherokee deemed too inhospitable to mess with. The U-Haul circled a parking lot the size of a football field before lumbering to a halt in a puff of exhaust. Laz leaned against the front fender and began to piss. It steamed and splattered till it formed a dark patch on the concrete. 'I do two things well,' he said. 'I sleep well, and I piss well.' I looked away and thought about how I'd convinced The New York Times to let me profile him, then traveled here on my own dime. Nothing came easy with Laz. For three years, I'd tried to get him on his least favorite subject, himself. Instead, he teased me with small openings, false starts, and strange little trials – one of them, a math problem, nearly broke me: ABCDE x A = EEEEEE The equation glared at me from my inbox, haunted a notepad on my desk, and ran on a loop in my head. After a few days of overclocking my brain, I panicked and passed it off to my wife. She solved it in fifteen minutes, and I was saved. Almost … Laz's reply was almost too quick, written in his all-lowercase style. 'did you give it to somebody?' Full of dread, I told him the truth. His response was predictably blunt. 'you always let someone else do your homework?' That could have been the end of it. Yet here I was in 2023, possibly on to the next test – trailing him toward the back of the prison, where he limped past a towering wall of sandstone and stopped at a conjunction of metal pipes. He produced the book, Last Will and Testament, and with little fanfare duct-taped it to the center. To prove you'd run his Barkley course, he had you bring back a page from each book, 13 this year. The order of the books formed one loop – five loops total – 60 hours to finish. 'Sixty hours of Hell,' wrote one magazine. He added sections every year, mostly off-trail, yet the official distance somehow remained 100 miles. Those in the know say it's nothing short of 125. Not knowing, Laz maintains, is part of the fun. After lighting another cigarette, he moved to a break in the earth where a swollen stream barreled into a tunnel beneath the prison. Naturally, he sent the runners through it. At night, they reported hearing radios, television sets, even voices calling their names. They swore they were being watched, though no one ever mentioned by whom. 'They'll come up through here,' Laz said with some glee and pointed to a shaft lined with slick, glistening stones. Getting up or down would require a chimney climb, wedging feet and arms against opposing walls. 'Then, they'll head up that,' he said and gestured with his cattle prod to a sheer wall of Tennessee jungle. The slope didn't rise, it lunged at the sky – 60 degrees of winter-stripped trees so densely pushed together they seemed to fight each other for air. There was a flare in Laz's eyes as he studied it. 'We call that The Bad Thing.' Once, a deer tumbled off the cliffs and into the prison yard. The inmates kept it and named it 'Geronimo.' It became one of the boys, a guide told me, and claimed he could still hear its footsteps. 'The whole place is haunted,' he said, his voice dropping. He described the six-by-six dungeon, the hooks where they'd hang inmates by their thumbs, and the mines in the mountains where hundreds were buried alive. When they collapsed, the guards would just leave them. 'No, no,' he said, shaking his ball-cap-covered head. 'This is not a good place. And I don't do night tours.' 'Jesus, you'd need a rope,' I whispered, craning my neck up at The Bad Thing. A thick, congested laugh burrowed up from Laz's chest. 'Aw hell,' he said. 'That's just the first pitch.' Most big trail races have a monster, that one signature, gut-sucking climb. At the Barkley, there are a dozen, each loop, and The Bad Thing isn't even one of the worst. The total elevation gain soars over 68,000ft, roughly two Everests and a Kilimanjaro – from sea level. Many of the climbs are littered with long thatches of briars – the kind country people used to call 'wait-a-minutes' because it wasn't until you got a step past them that you realized you'd been snagged. 'God, one wrong move and you'd come down it alright, like a bowling ball,' I thought but actually said out loud. 'Oh, you'd smack into a tree long before you hit the bottom,' said Laz, without a hitch. 'It'd mess you up a bit. But you'd live.' He laughed till he groaned, then stilled for a moment before fixing his eyes on me. 'Failure has to hurt.' I let that roll over in my head for a moment. 'Doesn't it usually?' He didn't respond to that but scanned the hillside with his large, green eyes. 'What makes people quit?' he said, blowing a long column of smoke back toward the prison. 'Everybody is born a quitter. It's the default setting. Hell, even fish quit! You can put 'em in an artificial stream with a fake scene, and they'll swim upstream as long as it looks like they're moving. But make it stationary, and they'll quit and go with the water.' He turned to head back to the parking lot but paused. 'Life can be a damn good metaphor for sports,' he said. 'Adapt or die.' The U-Haul was moving again, this time along a tight patch of pavement deep inside Frozen Head State Park. The road curved and rolled into a tunnel of trees toward the trailhead. There, the next phase of the Barkley would begin, checking in those Laz had called at various times penitents, fools, and sickos. The farther we went, the more the forest seemed to want its space back – dark patches of moss slowly overtook the road and boulders crowded the edges. Laz liked to talk about the park's mercurial microclimate, how the air compressed through the gaps like a thumb held over a garden hose. Temperatures could swing from 80 to 15 degrees in a single loop. 'First-timers think it's hyperbole,' he said, 'but you only have to get caught by it once.' Soon, the bars on my phone dwindled to an 'x,' and the road began to climb. Finally, a smudge of yellow appeared ahead and became a gate. Set between two stone pillars, this flaking pole was where the ordeal would begin and end. Here, Taps would play on a squeaky bugle for the fallen. Like most things in Frozen Head, one got the sense it was sentient. A cracked sign adorned its middle: 'Do Not Block Gate.' By early afternoon, the ritual check-in was underway. A line of 40 trail runners twisted up to a large, white tarp, a virtual who's who of ultrarunning. The veterans carried items for Laz that he was in need of: cigarettes, socks, shirts. The virgins (first-timers) produced license plates from their home states and countries. Hundreds of these plates hung from yellow ropes strung between the trees – a dangling gallery of far-flung places like Liberia, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica. There were also unfamiliar faces in line, wide-eyed and wrapped in weather-faded gear. They stood quietly, taking it all in. Every so often, one would lean forward for a glimpse of Laz. You got the sense they weren't here for the mountains. Not even the pain. They were here for him – for Laz and his gate and his cigarette, daring them to come undone. His gravelly laugh echoed through the trees from behind a picnic table, where he greeted the entrants. 'We look forward to seeing you suffer,' he said to one, before 'You might as well go ahead and hit your head on a rock' to another. The runners and crews got green and blue wristbands. The media got pink. 'Any advice?' a runner asked. 'Go home,' Laz laughed and handed him his complimentary shirt. On it was an illustration of a runner, terror etched across his face as he dashed up a tree. A monstrous black bear charged him from behind, while above, a cougar crouched on a limb, ready to pounce. At the bottom was this year's theme – The worst-case scenario is just the starting point! After the last runner checked in, they studied the master map. Laz made one of the course each year, and once it was set out, the runners and crews did their best to copy it by hand. They were also given a creatively useless set of instructions. Even the veterans got lost. One runner was heard to say, 'I'm not sure where I was, but it was hard as hell to get to.' No one knew the start time, only Laz, and at some point in the next 12 hours, he'd blow a conch shell. If you heard it, you had one hour to get to the gate, where he'd start the ordeal by lighting a cigarette. Secrecy in all things; no one outside the camp – save close family members – even knew we were here. A clammy breeze stirred the air and made me glance back toward my SUV. A laminated sign caught my eye –one I could've sworn wasn't there before. It was taped to a pole with words written in black magic marker. MEDICAL, it read, for instances of DEATH, near-dying, and other assorted life-threatening injuries. Below was a phone number. Why do they do it? I thought, as I revved the engine of my rental and held my numbed hands over the vents. Why does he do it? I remembered something ultra-phenom Courtney Dauwalter had told me. One of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, she'd managed only one loop here but insisted Laz didn't want to torture people. 'He makes these crazy-hard events,' she said, 'because he thinks we all have more than we think is possible.' I was just beginning to feel my fingers again, when the weather shifted. The clouds darkened, and a blistering wind came barreling off the mountains. It whipped and tossed the trees. It was like an unseen hand had pulled a lever. The temperature plummeted, then sleet began to thud off the tarps, tents, and scrambling runners. I spotted Laz by the license plates, gazing up at the sky and sipping a chilled can of Dr. Pepper, a Tennessee license plate swinging in the wind beside him. Its bolded letters read, SURVIVE. The Endurance Artist by Jared Beasley will be out September 16th and is currently available for preorder at Simon & Schuster.
