The Endurance Artist

A rare look into an enigmatic accountant from Tennessee’s backwoods who morphs into Lazarus Lake, the world’s most notorious race maker.

The Endurance Artist is an all-access pass to the world’s most extreme races and the mastermind behind them, where we witness firsthand the gears, the machinations, the egos, the surprising humanity.

The most grueling and ingenious races in the world are the creation of Gary Cantrell, better known by the nom de guerre Lazarus Lake. He has been described as a “hillbilly genius” and the “Leonardo di Vinci of pain.” His Barkley Marathons is known as the most difficult ultramarathon ever devised, a fight club in the wilderness run in secret. With books hidden in the woods, condolence letters, a cigarette-start, and elevation gain that amounts to summiting Mount Everest twice, it defies convention. Big’s Backyard Ultra pushes human beings to their absolute limit on a four-mile loop that is run every hour, starting on the hour until there is just one runner standing—most recently, a high school teacher who ran 450 miles without sleep.

Author Jared Beasley ferrets his way into the world of a recluse hell-bent on rewriting the rules to reveal a life reimagined and failure reinvented. Laz calls into question our obsession with winning and fairness, success and failure, and whether these ideas handicap potential.