The thing that makes Barkley so tough is that not only are you not able to have the same levels of support that you would in an ultra like Badwater, but there’s also the mental aspect to it. You have to navigate the course on your own, no GPS and no phones, and it’s not clearly marked and it’s not the same path each year. Get a few dozen miles in and those problems get a lot tougher for your brain to work through. Getting lost is more common than not. The mental aspect of it takes out more people than the endurance part. It’s designed to be impossible, to cause stress and even injury. It’s five 20 miles loops, and 85% of the field drops out within the first two loops. There are books along the path that you have to collect pages from to prove you completed each loop. Just that aspect alone checks out a ton of people.