“Sometimes, I was tackling rhododendrons and crawling on my belly to get through undergrowth,” says Jasmin. You’ve also got the elevation to deal with – 60,000 feet if you complete all five 20 mile loops of the race. The terrain is rough, navigation is tough because you’re in forests, and the weather in the park can change dramatically – from excessive heat, to storms, to snow. The Barkley Marathons are a notorious challenge. Everything gets meticulously organised the night before to allow for time efficiency in the morning. On a typical day, she trains before work and before her family are up.
With both a family and professional life to juggle, it takes a mammoth amount of organisation for Jasmin’s training, work, childcare and family time to run smoothly.
The dog thought I was crazy, he learned quite quickly that we were going up again, so he just waited for me in the middle.” “That’s like 5500 meters of ascent in one run and it was one of those days we had the winter storms and that’s pretty bad weather as well. “I ran 22 times up Castlelaw, which is a hill in the Pentlands,” she says. Jasmin began training specifically for Barkley back in autumn 2021, with a massive focus on increasing her levels of ascent, tallying up between 10 and 11,000 metres of ascent in one particular week.
Taking place in the hills of Tennessee, specifically the Cumberland Mountains within Frozen Head State Park, the race goes massively ‘off-piste’ through wilderness and woods, seeing runners return bruised, battered and thoroughly scratched. Jasmin recently ran the Barkley Marathons, known as one of the hardest (some might say the craziest) races in the ultra-running world. She is also a very successful ultramarathon runner, and was the first ever woman to win the gruelling 268 mile Montane Spine Race (smashing the course record) in 2019. Jasmin Paris is a vet in the Hospital for Small Animals (Easter Bush), a researcher in the Henderson Lab (Centre for Inflammation Research, QMRI) and mum to two young children. I’m ready to feel small and insignificant in the wilderness, and I’m excited to find out what I can achieve, when I believe in the impossible.” – From Jasmin’s application essay for the Barkley Marathons. ‘I’m looking for a new challenge, an adventure that will push me to the limits of what I can endure, and beyond.
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