August 5, 2024
Greetings from the traveler,
You might go all of your life and not know the name Lazarus Lake. It’s not even the man’s real name, so you might be forgiven. Laz, as most call him, is principally famous for creating the most challenging long distance run in the world: The Barkley Marathons. I won’t say all I want to about the Barkley, other than to mention that only twenty people have finished it in thirty-eight years. Thousands are on the waiting list every year, just to try it.
Laz is a remarkable character with an interesting pedigree. He was a pioneer ultra distance runner, and was inspired by the lack of organized hundred mile plus races, or ‘journey runs’ as he called them. And so he began changing the landscape of running.
In the forty plus years since then, he developed several life challenging running events, including the Last Annual Vol State Road race, a 500 kilometer run with no aid stations or support, just a generous ten-day cut off. But his most amazing experience is the Barkley, the design of which is changed regularly to keep its place teetering at the apex of achievability. “It’s easy to design an impossible race, and it’s easy to make a race everyone can finish,” Laz says. “It’s really hard to find that point where impossibility is just so close.”
I don’t know Laz, other than through the loose connection that joins all runners. I have watched him in my periphery, curious about him and his bizarre race. Then I read that he was going to walk across the United States. No fanfare, no big announcement, just wrapped up the last Barkley excitement and then started walking. And something clicked between us.
Laz turned 70 on this walk, and he is a long way from the conditioning of his early years. He deals with a variety of age-related struggles, and a few he’s brought on himself. The kindest thing I can say about that is that he does not cut a figure you would expect to walk 3000 miles.
It is a strange adventure to read about, fueled by pizza and Dr. Pepper and cigarettes. In one interview on the road, Laz mentioned: “I don’t smoke on the uphills.”
If I’d known earlier, I would have found a way to link up with the volunteers who dotted his path across the country. The trip has echoes of some of my own adventures but that’s only part of it. There is something interesting, inspiring, in Lazarus Lake’s attitude toward life, a glimmer of humility, and this self-possessed optimism.
You have to believe in possibilities if you set out to walk across this country, at almost any age. Laz, whose real name is Gary Cantrell, did it once before, six years ago, so there was a basis for his confidence. I have to admit that I am tickled at the idea of a race director who creates an event that seems to be designed to defeat all competitors, and is at heart an optimist.
It delights me that this story, and the legacy of Lazarus Lake, made it to me. This one character in an obscure play on a stage that is far removed from my life, and somehow it weaves its way into my day.
Laz has mattered to me in recent weeks, thinking of his adventures, but also his observations about the world we are in. It was interesting to read something he wrote about people he met on his walk, which sounded so familiar from my own experiences on the road nearly fifty years ago, and John Steinbeck’s twenty years before that. I was moved to tears.
“how would i describe our people? kind, generous, friendly. do we not realize how good those around us are? everywhere i went people loved their home, they had good relationships with their neighbors. they thought they lived in a great place. but the rest of the country was in a mess...because they read every day what a mess it is in. stop believing that crap! here is the truth no one seems to want to tell you: you live in the best place there is, in the best time there ever was to be there.”
I will tell you the secret to seeing this kind of truth: slowing down. I’ve known it all my life and ignored it most of those years, but it remains true. Slow down enough to see every new experience and every person in the fullest. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. The other fundamental that is linked to this is that this is the path to longer, richer days, filled with new people and new thoughts. These days become so full, it slows down the passage of your life, until the point you fall asleep each night exhausted and happy because you can’t believe all that happened in those waking hours.
It wasn’t tragic, but Laz didn’t make it across the country. His feet gave out somewhere in Oklahoma. When I read his posts on-line from those last days it was heartbreaking, but not without the brilliant light that comes from someone who believes in possibilities.
He said: “our journey is not over until we have no more goals. and i am not yet ready to sit at home and wait to die.”
Years ago in an interview with Outsider magazine, one of the early runners of the Barkley, John Kelly, said this about the race: “The important piece is not necessarily whether you fail or succeed,” says Kelly, “but how far you were able to get and what you found out about yourself in that process. That’s an opportunity that’s difficult to find elsewhere.”
It is not a perfect philosophy to transfer into daily life, but I think you will find the connection. We don’t know the number of days we’ll get, and in that mystery is an exhortation to make the most of each of them. It may not be in long walks or challenging runs, but the potential is nearly unlimited. We just have to slow down and look.
Hope this finds you seeking the opportunity,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
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