ROAD WARRIORS

500-KILOMETER RUN, FOR FUN?

People who run often have goals — weight loss, cardiovascular health, bragging rights or valuable prizes are all reasonable rewards sought by marathoners and distance athletes.

Then there are runners of a more extreme variety — ultrarunners, those who trek for days on end across the length of multiple southern states in mid-summer.

Their ambitions tend to be unique.

“I have always wanted to have a hallucination,” says White Rock area resident Novle Rogers.

To become weary and sleep deprived to the point of delirium would be but a by-product of the paramount physical, spiritual and mental experience.

Pain and exhaustion-induced visions are a common side effect of tackling a 500-kilometer run — that’s 314 miles — something Rogers and his friend Oak Cliff resident Steven Monté did this past summer.

The race lasted in excess of a week for them and most participants, beginning with a ferry ride across the Mississippi River, from Missouri to Kentucky. Once there, the race director, an eccentric Tennessean named Gary Cantrell, better known as Lazarus Lake, signals the start by lighting his cigarette.

Cantrell recently became famous with the release of a popular Netflix documentary, “The Barclays Marathons,” about his crazy, secretive 100- (well, maybe 130-) mile footrace through the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee — the course offers a cumulative elevation gain of 60,000 feet (equivalent of climbing Everest twice from sea level). To date, just 12 men, of 800 competitors since 1985, have completed The Barclays Marathons. Mystery shrouds its registration process, just a forshadowing of the complexities of the actual event.

“There is no website, and I don’t publish the race date or explain how to enter,” Cantrell told the New York Times. “Anything that makes it more mentally stressful for the runners is good.”

There is a glimpse into the brain behind Monté and Rogers’ quest, titled The Last Annual Vol State Road Race (it’s not the last, this time, but someday it will be — that’s Cantrell’s reasoning behind the tongue-in-cheek name).

By comparison, Cantrell’s 314mile Last Annual Vol State — “on foot, along highways and back roads, from one small town to the next, over hills and across rivers, up mountains and down long valleys, all the while accounting for all of their most basic needs such as food, water and sleep,” as he describes it — it is the gentler endeavor.

“Oh absolutely it is easier [than Barclays],” Monté says.

Both Monté and Rogers are experienced ultrarunners who have tackled multiple 100-mile races through hills, extreme weather and mud, but running 314 miles was like nothing previously imagined, they agree.

With each passing year, the Vol State race’s popularity increases,