22// Leaning into the Absurdity of the Barkley
On the need for absurdity in ultrarunning coverage
Hey pals,
My screen time peaked this week after constantly refreshing Twitter for Barkley updates.
I’m sure you’re all feeling the same way and want a break from screens, but before you dash off I thought it would be good to reflect on what we can learn from the popularity around the Barkley.
One takeaway for me is that ultrarunning needs to lean into why we get public attention in the first place - for being an awe-inspiring endeavour thats full of weird and humourous people.
Hope you enjoy,
Matt
For a race with few contestants and an even smaller number of tweeters and photographers on location, the Barkley draws in a lot of attention.
To put the race in perspective, there were 505 mentions of #BM100 reaching 2.8 million people on Twitter and Instagram. Some people started Twitter accounts just to follow the Barkley. The international participants meant people were commenting on the event in Spanish, Dutch and French. To top it all off, there was a New York Times race report embedded in an article on the Lazarus Lake.
The race has always caught attention due to its unique challenge, but the majority of coverage has come from the chronicler of the event, Keith Dunn.
When people say they’re following the Barkley, they often mean they’re following Keith’s tweets. From the pre-race campsite goings-on to the race cut-off, Keith reports on everything. As such, the tweets cover a combination of simple event based reporting with rich detail that builds a detailed picture of the race.
Take the shower burrito. On day two, Keith tweeted about one participant who upon tapping out of the competition was craving both food and a shower, so they decided to cook and eat an egg burrito whilst in a shower. It’s obscure to say the least, but this tweet received the 4th highest reach out of all of his tweets - 646k.
The shower burrito then took on a life of its own, with one person trying to understand the logistics of cooking in a shower by illustrating it, and others simply using this as a jumping off point to talk about their own shower or eat first dilemmas.
Sports commentary often tries to amp up the excitement around the competitive element of the event, create a tension that often doesn’t exist. If we can learn anything from Keith’s coverage of the Barkley, its that leaning into the obscurity of ultrarunning is just as important as giving the blow by blow race details.
This insight became clear to me after I chatted to David Roche about what we could learn from the Barkley. “Trail running can be objectively silly and ridiculous, when you really think about what it entails” David said “In my opinion leaning into that is better than leaning into melodrama”.
You can take this one step further and think about what caught other peoples attention when you’ve had conversations with friends, family or work colleagues about ultrarunning. Do they perk up when you talk about your time or the distance and vertical gain you ran? When you go on to talk about your slice of pizza and burrito at the third aid station, are they still looking at you in a mixture of bamboozlement and awe? If we want to capture the imagination of the general public, we need to talk about the absurdity of our sport with the seriousness of the competition.
For David, if we try to compete with other sports just on competitions and rivalries, we’ll fail. “I think if running plays at the same spectator-gathering game as other sports, it’ll lose” David said. Ultrarunning is best positioned in the sports landscape to mix competition with humour, lap times with shower burritos.
Part of knowing how to talk about the competition in an event, is knowing what is most interesting about the competition to your audience. As the NYT article highlighted, the Barkley is a race against time. With so few people finishing the Barkley, the focus of Twitter’s attention was on the physical challenge of the event, rather than who will finish the fastest.
At the heart of every Barkley is a tale of humans pushing themselves to the limits against an almost insurmountable challenge that has no guarantee that anyone will complete it. A modern day David vs Goliath. It’s inspirational to follow regardless if anyone finishes. If Keith was just reporting lap times and pace, it wouldn’t have attracted as much attention.
That isn’t to say that lap times and pace don’t matter. For the dedicated fan, these details are important markers of progress and comparison between competitors. For the person who likes running but doesn’t consider themselves a fan, the human element of the sport is more interesting.
If anything, the lesson we can take away from the Barkley and Keith’s coverage, is that there is more to ultrarunning than who finishes on the podium. Our coverage sometimes forgets about the physical challenge of the events, the human brilliance required to finish and the sometimes absurd things we do to complete the race. For most people following, the shower burritos are just as compelling as the lap times.
Thanks for this wonderful Barkley recap!