The Endurance Artist

The most grueling and ingenious races in the world are the creation of Gary Cantrell, better known by the nom de guerre Lazarus Lake. He has been described as a “hillbilly genius,” “a master of sadomasochistic craft,” and the “Leonardo da Vinci of pain.”

His Barkley Marathons is known as the most difficult ultramarathon ever devised, a fight club in the wilderness run in secret among a devoted, cult-like group of STEM professionals and intrepid orienteers. With books hidden in the woods, condolence letters, a cigarette-start, and elevation gain that amounts to summiting Mount Everest twice, it defies convention.

Big’s Backyard Ultra is meant to push human beings to their absolute limits on a four-mile loop that is run every hour, starting on the hour until there is just one runner standing. It’s in Laz’s own backyard that a high school teacher runs 450 miles without sleep.

Author Jared Beasley ferrets his way into the world of a recluse hell-bent on rewriting the rules to reveal a life reimagined and failure reinvented. Laz forces each of us to ask hard questions about our obsession with winning and fairness, success and failure, and whether these ideas ultimately handicap potential. The Endurance Artist is an all-access pass to the world’s most extreme races and the mastermind behind them, where we witness firsthand the gears, the machinations, the egos, the surprising humanity.