None of the 40 runners who attempted to finish the 100-mile Barkley Marathons in the mountains of eastern Tennessee completed the race, the first time since 2007 that the endurance test had no finishers.

“The mountains won,” said Gary Cantrell, who created the event in 1986. “I was pleased with the outcome. It’s a competition between the humans and the mountains.”

In 30 years, 14 out of about 1,100 runners have completed the race, made up of five loops around a mountainous 20-mile course.  The 60-hour time limit passed Monday with no one having completed the race. A search began for the final runner on the course — Jamil Coury of Phoenix. He showed up before dark.

“I got a little confused where I was,” Coury said upon returning to camp, explaining that he took an eight-hour nap on a mountaintop after getting lost. “Thanks for waiting.”

Passed Out

Matt Bixley traveled from Dunedin, New Zealand, to compete. He said his goal was to see what he could find out about himself. Instead, he found himself passed out on the ground after completing more than 48 miles in about 28 hours of running and climbing through the mountains of 24,000-acre Frozen Head State Park.

“I passed out or collapsed,” said Bixley, 42, a quantitative geneticist with New Zealand’s AgResearch. “Something happened. It wasn’t sleepiness. I don’t know. I spent some time thinking about what that might mean and where I was going. It was a boundary I wasn’t prepared to cross, and I quit.”

‘It’s Eerie’

No woman has finished the race. This year a record nine attempted it, including Nicki Rehn, a 40-year-old Australian who is an assistant professor of education at Ambrose University in Calgary. Rehn completed 1.5 laps this year before succumbing.

“You don’t come here to be victorious, you come here to be humiliated,” she said. “It’s lonely out there. It’s eerie. You have to be comfortable being inside your own head. Everyone comes back pretty broken. That’s the goal. To break people […]”