How Jasmin Paris defied odds to become first woman to finish world’s toughest race

Organisers of the 100-mile Barkley Marathons thought a woman would never finish the appallingly difficult course

In the video clip of Jasmin Paris finishing the Barkley Marathons, we see her coming uphill through the woods, in a bright red top, a running stick in each hand. Either side of her, spectators and fellow runners cheer her on. She doesn’t look like she hears them. There is only one thing in her world: the wooden gate marking the end of the route. At last she runs into it and bends almost double over it before collapsing. In the picture of her slumped by the gate, she looks a little like Bernini’s Agony of Saint Teresa.
In the 35 years the Barkley Marathons have been run in their current form, only 20 runners have finished. After 60 hours of running without sleep, finishing five loops of the 20-mile course through unmarked woods, and 20km of vertical gain, Paris, 40, had become the first woman to do so, finishing with 99 seconds to go before the cutoff. There is unlikely to be a more impressive British sporting achievement this year.
What an incredible achievement #JasminParis pic.twitter.com/LVFDDUee2d
“I took myself into a new level,” Paris says over the phone a few days later, safely back home in the UK, after a few decent sleeps and some hot meals. “Everything in me was screaming to stop. Then when I actually stopped it took me a few minutes before I wasn’t breathing super hard. I’d never had that experience before. I was so focussed on getting to that gate that everything else became blurry. I was half-conscious of it, but I was focussed on getting to the end. I was so desperate not to have to do the five loops again. My mantra was to give it everything, and either collapse or make it to the gate.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, by quite a way,” she adds. “There’s not many races that take you 60 hours without sleep. And you don’t usually sleep well the night before, so if you want to finish essentially you are talking about three or four days awake.”
The reaction has been global. Thousands of fans followed her progress on X and she has been inundated with media requests. “I suspected it would be a big deal,” she says. “But it has been even crazier than I thought it was going to be. Hopefully it inspires women and girls to get out there and be active and believe in themselves.”
Even within the extreme world of ultrarunning, where competitors scoff at a mere 26 miles, the Barkley’s fearsome difficulty and many quirks have given it a cult reputation. It came to wider attention thanks to a 2014 documentary, The Race That Eats Its Young. In a world of multimillion-pound sponsorship deals, GPS trackers, wall-to-wall TV coverage and single-use shoes, it is defiantly different.
It was founded in 1986 by Karl “Raw Dog” Henn and Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, who still presides over it. Cantrell, who is referred to universally as “Laz”, is the closest ultrarunning has to a philosopher guru: a bearded iconoclast and a writer with a wicked sense of humour. In his words never more than a “mediocre” runner himself, he has spent a lifetime coming up with innovative races to test the mind as well as the body. The Barkley Marathons take place in Frozen Head State Park, middle Tennessee, not far from Laz’s hometown. Only 35 runners are admitted every year. Applicants must apply with a covering letter. If they are successful, they receive a letter of condolences. The entrance fee is $1.60. On their first attempt, entrants bring a licence plate from their home state or country. The race has no fixed start time, occurring between midnight and noon on race day. Laz blows a conch shell to signal one hour till the start, then lights a cigarette to start the race proper.
The course itself comprises a largely unmarked trail of around 20 miles through dense, hilly woodland. Runners must orient themselves using only a simple map and a compass. To prove they have completed the course they collect pages, corresponding to their entry number, from books hidden around it. There are no marshalls, no helicopters, no GPS trackers. If runners injure themselves, as several have over the years, they must make their own way out of the woods, although in interviews Laz has conceded that if they were missing for several days they might go and look for them.
“The Barkley is unique,” Paris says. “I am trying to reduce my carbon footprint and advocate for fewer flights to races. But the Barkley is the one exception. It has this this crazy appeal of what you can possibly put yourself through. Laz designs the whole thing with uncertainty at every level, to confuse and challenge you and bring you down mentally, and on top of that the course is challenging physically as well.
“Very little of it is on a trail. And most of the park you’re not allowed to be off the trail the rest of the year. Nobody’s walked here. It’s completely wild. There’s fallen trees, areas with lots of brambles, and thick briars which claw you. The ground is steep so you often slide back down as you’re trying to move upwards. You’ll be grabbing onto things and pulling yourself up. Sometimes it’s better to do that. Then you get to the top and you have to go back down again straight away. It’s mentally hard because you put yourself through this awful loop of terrain and wilderness, and then you have to do the same thing again, knowing how awful it’s going to be. People who don’t know about this race don’t have a feel for how hard that is. Even good orienteers struggle. It’s all forest, and then it’s dark, so you’re running through the forest in the dark, looking for these books.” 
Although none of the hills is enormous, their cumulative effect is brutal: to complete the race is the equivalent of ascending Mount Everest twice, from sea level.
Paris had given notice of her promise. She was already one of Britain’s leading ultramarathon runners. In 2019 she set a race record in the Spine Race, a 268-mile run along the Pennine Way, which she completed in 83 hours 12 minutes. In 2022 she had become the first woman in nine years to complete a “fun run”, the euphemistic nickname given to three loops of the Barkley course. Last year she attempted a fourth loop, but was cut off by the time limit. As added motivation, Laz had been on the record as saying he did not think a woman would ever complete five loops.
“I think he definitely wanted a woman to prove him wrong,” Paris says. “It was exciting to be able to prove him wrong. He was pleased. He saw how deep I had to dig. He saw me being sick before I went out for loop five. He saw what I was putting myself through to do it.”
Barkley’s counter-cultural ethos is a big part of its appeal to her. She gave up a sponsorship deal in 2022 as part of Green Runners, the organisation she co-founded, which aims to encourage runners to make positive changes to the environment.
“It’s so different from something like the UTMB [the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, the biggest trail running event]” she says. “That’s all about sponsors, everybody’s flashing all their gear. Barkley’s the opposite. There’s no brands. It costs $1.60. The food is this chicken the guys make over the campfire. The elite athletes often don’t do very well because it requires so much more than being able to run fast. But it gets back to the basics of what sport should be about. It’s about looking after yourself in the wild and nature, challenging yourself and progressing through the landscape in a more back-to-basics way. Cut away the stuff that surrounds us in everyday life that makes it comfortable and see who you are and how you react.”
Paris grew up in Hadfield, near Glossop in the Peak District, the daughter of Jeff Paris and Alena Vencovska, who is Czech. She has a brother, who is also a keen runner. The family was always outdoorsy. “I did a lot of hiking with my brother,” she says. “We’d take all the stuff we needed and go for 7-10 days to the most remote mountains in Europe. We’d be happiest if we couldn’t find anyone else. The rucksacks were heavy but the tradeoff was getting to be in real wilderness.” 
Running came later, after university, where she studied to be a vet. She still works full-time as a vet specialising in small animals, mixing clinical work with teaching and research. Then there are her two children: Rowan, 6, and Bryn, 3. Her training tends to be in the early mornings, although the months leading up to the Barkley involved long sleepless schleps round fens.
“Now that I work and have two small children, the whole day is a chaos of going from one place to the other and to-do lists,” she says. “When I’m out running, it’s time for me to just be me, and go back to who I was before all the madness of adult life. It gives you perspective. Things that seemed very huge don’t seem as important any more. I feel at peace.”