Andrea Larson: Mom Versus the Race that Eats its Young
Chris Schotz
The following story first appeared in the January 2023 edition of Silent Sports Magazine. Subscription choices, averaging $2 an issue or less, are via 715-258-4360, or online at/clicking on:
Editor’s Note: There is no doubt in this managing editor’s mind that each of our hundreds of contributors have lived silent sports lives easily meriting a profile story of their own. This includes achievements in racing, race creating and directing, community involvement and volunteerism, trail/waterway developing and maintaining, and more, and often many of the above. Most of all, a humble quality in which, despite their own personal achievements, they seek to shine the light on others. All of this defines our own Andrea Larson, and it was a combination of Chris Schotz and Jennifer Thorsen, as well as this Editor, that led to what you are about to read; Andrea had demurred, but her resistance turned out futile!
Any time between midnight and noon. Restless runners won’t know the start time until endurance race designer and director Gary Cantrell, known as Lazarus “Laz” Lake, blows the conch with an hour to spare.
Thus begins the Barkley Marathon, Laz’s hundred-miler in the mountains outside of Knoxville that has stretched to 130 harrowing miles, with more climbing than two Mount Everest summits. This is the race conceived as a taunt to James Earl Ray, who escaped the adjacent penitentiary and only managed 12 miles through the steep terrain before the hounds closed in. Laz jested that he could have made it a hundred, and the world’s toughest ultra was born. No wonder it’s been called “The Race that Eats its Young.”
Laz Versus Larson
Laz’s annual tweaks have made the Barkley into more than just a running race. It is a nearly impossible test of will and preparation, with a 1 percent finisher rate—by design. It took ten years before anyone navigated all five laps under the 60-hour limit. But that finish just wrecked it for everyone else because Laz answered by making the next course more difficult and confusing, pushing the limits of human endurance further to the brink of impossibility.
Since 1986, the Barkley has had only fifteen finishers, all men well past the 50-hour mark. No woman has ever finished, but it’s just a matter of time. Wisconsin’s Andrea Larson could be the one.
Larson has enjoyed running since joining her grade school cross country team in Marathon, Wisconsin. She walked on to the Michigan Tech team and fell in love with trail running around Houghton. Her best event seemed to be the 1500, at least until she tried the 2008 North Face Ultra down in the Kettle Moraine and won the Women’s 50K. A few years later, she won that 50-miler and entered the high-altitude (Colorado) Leadville 100 with a goal of breaking 30 hours; she stunned herself with a finish under 24 hours, good for 5th among women. She was left shivering without spare clothes, waiting for a ride that was not due until dawn. That 4 AM finish was such a revelation. And Larson is not built like a Yeti, so battling temperature swings would be a constant challenge for many all-night mountain runs for years to come.
Larson finished 3rd at Leadville in 2011, close to 21 hours for 100 miles. That, however, would be her last ultra for eight years. It wasn’t that the altitude was a problem, but the massive downhills were punishing on her quads and it was hard to get to the next level of ultra marathon competition without living in the mountains. She’d already been training an unsustainable 700 hours per year when life intervened. The next year, she was too busy getting married to register for Leadville, but still managed to get her mountain bike to the Wausau24 (http://wausau24.com), coming in second. Returning in 2018, she won the Wausau24, while still nursing 13 weeks after her third child was born.
During this time, with three small children to take care of, she was on a hiatus from brutal ultras. Knowing when to step back and focus on higher priorities is one of the secrets to her longevity and recent ascendance. Not that chasing three toddlers isn’t physically draining, but she was spared the long-term toll on her body that hundred-milers can levy.
Mom, Community, Adventures & Ultras
Now everything is falling into place and Larson is energized for a second act just as her support crew comes of age. She has a compatible 8-year-old riding companion chasing her up the singletrack, and a job as the executive director of IRONBULL, the multi-sport non-profit that hosted a 20-minute kids run at the base of Rib Mountain in conjunction with the Ultra Trail held for adults.
Watching the kids keep going around the racetrack for the whole 20 minutes made it her favorite moment. Larson, with an impressive engineering degree to her résumé, would rather stay in Wausau to promote adventure sports than travel the world on engineering projects as she did in her first career. She’s become the stay-at-home mom she never expected, and she has time with her kids instead of rushing them off to daycare just to rush back home to race through playtime before bed. She’s prepared to be a role model for independent kids in running and in life, with the discipline and balance to keep it lifetime-steady.
Since her last ultra, however, Larson has never let her fitness wane. She still trained almost every day, but rarely over three hours. She skied competitively and was talked into adventure racing (AR) by the elite Rib Mountain Racing Team (ribmountainadventurechallenge.com), and started her first AR when her second daughter was four months old. All the while, the hours racked up in the training log kept on a spreadsheet since 2005. She’s past that 10,000-hour threshold that makes her an outlier ready for something amazing.
The encore began in 2019 when she was intrigued by the notorious Marji Gesick 100 (marjigesick.com / 906adventureteam.com/about) trail run in Marquette that few women had ever finished. By mile 20, she was alone in front, and despite some errors in navigation, she still managed a new course record.
Target: Laz’s Barkley
Larson ran strong 100K races in Texas and Arizona, but she was thinking about the Barkley already. In 2021, Wausau hosted an ultra in the backyard format. Every hour on the hour, racers must start a 4.16-mile lap, and repeat until only one person is able to keep going. The circuits ascended 500 feet on the tubing hill, with no trekking poles allowed. Support crews got to know each other and runners reunited at the start line every hour. After 24 hours, only Larson and three others remained, logging 100 miles.
The baseball team that had been practicing at the top of the hill on day one was back for a game. As people got on with their lives, she had been running the whole time, while the lawn had visibly grown since the start of the race. The backyard format pushed many runners to break their previous distance records, including Larson, who was pushed by runner-up Travis White after 162 miles of that hilly course. At that point, it was the farthest tally by any woman in the world in an outright win outside of the Big’s Backyard World Championships. She’d run 39 laps and never got bored.
She was thinking about Barkley then, and she was thinking about it during the Kettle Moraine 100 (https://www.kettlemoraine100.com/) last summer. Her hope was to feel effortless through the first half, and then really start racing. Larson was able to pace and chat with eventual winner, Michelle Magagna. Midway, she managed her sore quads with rollers, stretching, ice, and electrolytes. She’d learned about Bag Balm from the Gear Junkie Adventure Racers and got through the 100 in the same pair of shoes with no problem. Adventure racing has taught her that she can tolerate up to 28 hours in wet feet. Larson’s finish in 18:51 was second for women, the 5th fastest ever, doing so without a pacer.
Barkley was still the goal all along. It’s held in spring but, every September, Laz and Frozen Head State Park also host the Barkley Fall Classic 50K. This tamer event still covers some of the iconic Barkley terrain, including the 2,000-vertical-foot scramble to the Rat Jaw Fire Tower. Wisconsin blackberry brush seems like daisies next to the sawbriars that tangle and shred as runners blunder over, under, and through. Larson has now won this women’s 50K Fall Classic twice in a row, a fact that Laz must have in mind as he reviews the application essays before sending condolences to the 40 chosen runners.
Not a single person has finished the Barkley since 2017. Accordingly, some speculate that 2023 might be the year for Laz to relent and not lay out the toughest course ever. It’s more than just timing that has to come together, though. It’s everything. Navigation is critical because the course reverses direction, is unmarked, and often off-trail. Runners must follow their map and decipher Laz-Speak to find the numerous books that are hidden under rocks, inside trees, or taped to a fence outside the penitentiary tunnel. An odd-numbered bib number corresponds to the page that every runner must tear from each book to deliver back to the unremarkable yellow gate that is a Barkley monument. Turn in the pages. Get a new number. Head back in the opposite direction, alone.
Larson has read the reports and knows that mountain micro-climates mean the temperature can swing 60 degrees, with rain, mud, and blinding fog likely. She has two packs of clothes ready so her crew won’t have to repack during those infrequent inter-loopal periods when support is allowed every twelve hours, with good luck. She’s decided it’s better to carry a bit too much clothing rather than go numb finding a discarded novel in the dark atop some windswept summit.
Prepped, Ready, & Not Waiting
After surviving 39 hours of the Backyard Ultra on mostly cantaloupe, Larson has her nutrition dialed in. She’ll consume 250 calories per hour, half of which comes from Tailwind liquid. She’d rather have juicy pears than bananas, and she loves nut rolls and those airline cookies that melt in her mouth. There might be some noodles with cheese waiting between laps from her lone crew member, but the rest will have to travel with her because no support is allowed on the course. If crews wish to hike several miles up a mountain, there is a single summit they are allowed to visit, but they can’t offer their runners support beyond a few hardy claps.
With 60,000 vertical feet of climbing over 60 hours, Larson has focused her training on scrambling 600 feet up Rib Mountain, over and over. That’s bound to turn tough once snow-making starts on the ski hill. She’s even bought a treadmill for those days—Torture!
She seeks out the most unforgiving bushwack terrain in northern Wisconsin. When it rains, she hits the puddles because she’s already soaking wet. Roller skis are for strength training, but she will run through this winter with trekking poles more than ski.
Barkley has her undivided attention. For Larson, there will be no other races until that day. The biggest training week will take place a month before the 2023 Barkley, with the final two weeks of serious taper, delivering her to Tennessee as tough as she’s ever been, right on time.
No woman has ever finished more than the three laps that Laz sarcastically calls the “Fun Run,” but that doesn’t prove anything. Male Barkley finishers have been beaten by women elsewhere. There’s no predicting how those final two laps will expose a greatest weakness or deepest grit when sleep deprivation has left many bumbling off course or collapsing into the leaves.
Larson is as ready as anyone to enter that unknown realm this spring. Everything within her control is aligned. But the legend of Barkley is written by those uncontrollable circumstances that seem fated to befall a weary soul alone in a dark Tennessee hollow.
We don’t always know the right place at the right time until we’re right there.
Final Editor’s Note: You’ve finished your long, slow distance run, ski, or bike; or completed an intense hill repeat workout. Now . . . how about sitting back, or while doing your stretches or yoga, and watching a movie-length presentation on the Barkley. Nothing is ever short about the that race, but it, and the film, are extraordinary, for better or for worse! Check it out: