Man spent 60 hours completing sadistic torture race with insane rules but came to heartbreaking realisation at end
A man who spent 60 hours trying to complete an impossibly difficult race was left heartbroken when he failed to complete it.
Gary Robbins from Chilliwack, in Canada, spent 60 hours running in all kinds of weather conditions to become the first Canadian to complete the notorious Barkley Marathons.
The event is one of the world's toughest - and almost impossible - challenges to finish.
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The race is composed of five 20-26 mile loops with 12,000 feet of climbing in each, with no marked route to follow.
That's the equivalent of going up and down Everest twice, and runners have 12 hours to complete each loop.
To better understand just how brutal it is, since the race started in 1986, only 17 people have completed it.
Before the marathon, runners are presented with a cake that reads: "Good luck, morons".
Runners aren't told when the race is beginning, and are kept on high alert from noon to night.
They only get the go-ahead to start running once a race official lights a cigarette.
In fairness, they get an hours warning - when a conch sounds.
Earlier this year, British contender Jasmin Paris became the first woman to cross the finish line - doing so with just under 100 seconds to spare.
She told the BBC: "I only had like a few minutes to get up that hill. So I ended up sprinting at the end of the end of 60 hours of burning through the forest, which felt really hard."
Sadly for Gary, who tried to complete the challenge back in 2017, although he did manage to complete the race, he was six seconds short.
At the finish point, he could be seen collapsing on the ground. In a video of the event, one person asked: "Did he make the time limit?"
To which another race organiser, Lazarus Lake, responded: "No." Lake explained he had missed the mark by six seconds.
A few years later, Gary explained he would not be competing again.
"I removed myself from the Barkley Marathons starters list this morning. Why? Because it's the right thing to do," he said on Instagram in 2022.
"If nothing else, this pandemic has taught me what is meaningful and what is not. "It's allowed me to step back and to recognize what brings me happiness and joy, and within that, what is sustainable and what is not.
"I've long since come to terms with the fact that the race does nothing to define me, and a finish will bring nothing more than exactly that, a race finish.
"It will not validate anything, it won't make me someone or something I'm not already, and though it would be nice, it's also not necessary for me to be able to move on. (I've long since moved on).”
Lucy Devine