JetGirlArt

The Barkley Marathons - But For Writing

There were several marathons and races going on this weekend, but the coolest one was the Barkley Marathons. You can google what they are, it's pretty interesting but I have no interest or time to get involved with distance running.

The difficulty of it is what I found interesting. In 40 years only 20 people have finished all five loops and only 1 woman a few years ago. (It seems the course has been made more difficult to ensure this never happens again. lol) The video on youtube I watched about it said that the course is a little over 130 miles, and the goal is to do 5 laps of the course within 60 hours. There are other ultramarathons that go on for 200 miles but they don't involve climbing up and down the mountains of Tennessee in unmarked paths off the main trails.

It gets pretty absurd. Your first lap is done clockwise, with all 40 participants, and the veterans help you figure out what to do. Your second lap is counter clockwise. Your third is clockwise, fourth counter, then if you make it to the fifth each runner has to go the direction opposite of each other. To make sure you actually follow the path they place books in lunch baggies along the trail. When you get to a book you pull out the page corresponding to the number on your bib. (Your bib changes every lap) When you make it back they check your pages and you're free to go on your second lap.

But most people don't make it to the second, or third, etc. The first loop knocks out folks who get hurt/exhausted/etc due to terrain.You have to use a compass and paper maps, no GPS. They don't clear out the path so you have to run through brush and thorns. You can see folks who have run it come back with their legs absolutely shredded. The loop is just under 30 miles which would take a normal marathon runner 3 hours to finish. These loops take around 10 hours each to complete due to the climbing and finding the books etc.

The limitations on time make it even more fun. The whole race is 60 hours total. But you can't go over 12 hours per loop. Making it through loop 3 under 40 hours is considered a "fun run". Which only 1 person managed to do this year due to the weather.

So all of this talk about numbers and miles and time and such got me thinking of writing exercises. I used to do NaNoWriMo every year back in mid 2000's. I only finished it maybe twice. Probably because they held the event in the middle of November and there is kind of a holiday weekend that eats up several of your days. But it wasn't impossible.

NaNo is now long gone. They dropped the ball hard on it. You can still do the event on your own if you wanted but the whole bit where you log into the site and track your hours and see where your friends were at and try to keep up with them is digital dust. You really can't expect anything online to last.

But anyway, I was thinking about NaNo and remembered that I would see users who had already finished the entire thing in like a week. 50k words in one week is like, 7k words per day. There is no way that anything they wrote was publishable, but at that pace you aren't trying to be. You're getting the idea down and going back to it later or something.

But what if there was a writing competition that was as ridiculous and difficult for authors as the Barkley is for runners? What would it need? I came up with a concept:

The 3 Day Manuscript

Fill 5 spiral notebooks by hand in 72 hours. No blank pages, no double spacing, normal pens. Ink only. No whiteout or starting over. Everyone is handed a fresh 1 subject normal old spiral notebook along with an index card or something with a prompt point/genre/trope/etc written on it. That spiral must incorporate what is on that card. When you complete a spiral the text is checked for gaps and scribbles then you are given the next spiral with another card.

You may be given new cards at random throughout the event, this increases as you continue. Each spiral must be completed in a timely manner:

You can give up at any time. This would obviously work best in a physical location that all the writers can attend in person at like a library or school with desks and such to sit at. The host could then come by and hand out cards or tap out people who fall asleep. Perhaps at a writers convention or college.

I don't think this would work online unless you and your group were on like a 72 hour zoom chat together. I could spool up an app that keeps your time and offers the prompt cards but I don't think this should be done by typing on a keyboard. It needs to be an ordeal.

Perhaps there should be an online version? A website that lets you do the event alone and you type it all in the website. It would be much much harder because the site could spellcheck and test for grammar and time you out if you stop typing for longer than 30 minutes. People could live stream it on youtube or twitch, raise money for schools. I dunno. Making it a live typing thing means you can't copy/paste from chatgpt and if you live streamed your screen, no earbuds, etc folks could tell you weren't cheating/looking at things.

I think the handwritten manuscript would be way harder because most of us don't write by hand anymore and a chunk of new writers probably stopped writing by hand in elementary school.

What do yall think?