Episode 40 - Will Cooper | The Last Annual Heart of the South. 7 Starts. 6 Finishes. 67 Years Old.

You pay your entry fee. You drive to a cornfield in Bryant, Georgia, and you park your car. You get on a tour bus. Nobody tells you where the bus is going.

That's how the Last Annual Heart of the South begins. Somewhere out there — for Will Cooper, it was three hundred and fifty-five miles away this year — the bus stops. The route arrives by email the night before. There is no crew, no aid, no course markings, no pacers. There is a rolling cutoff called the Grim Reaper. And there is your own car, waiting where you left it, ten and a half days away on foot.

Will Cooper is sixty-seven years old. He has two artificial hips. He gave up running more than twenty years ago and walks every step of every race he enters. He has started the Heart of the South seven times — every edition there has ever been — and finished it six, most recently this June in ten days and ten hours, with roughly two and a half hours to spare.

He came in second from last. It was the third time he's done that. He tells you so without a trace of apology.

This is the first episode of The Last Annual Podcast Series, a limited series about the runners who take on Gary Cantrell's journey races. Cantrell — better known as Lazarus Lake — created the Barkley Marathons, the Barkley Fall Classic, Big's Backyard Ultra, Little Bigs Backyard Ultra, Strolling Jim, A Race for the Ages, the Last Annual Vol State Road Race, and the Last Annual Third Circle of Hell. He starts his races by lighting a cigarette. His runners call them journey races, and there is no better word for what they are.

Will walks through all of it: the eight-pound pack and what's in it, the food deserts where the next resupply is thirty-seven miles out, the rookie year he spent three days swearing he'd never come back, and the woman he met on the road who told him he was signing up again.

He talks about the last fifteen miles, the naps in the briars, and the cliff a quarter mile from the finish. He explains the mental arithmetic that breaks people long before their legs give out — and why the Barkley Fall Classic, a 50K, has beaten him four times when three hundred and fifty miles has not.

He's joined by Tim Hardy, returning to the show for a third time. Eighteen years of an unbroken daily run streak, five Vol State finishes, three at the Heart of the South, and a pack carrying more cigars than food — which he uses to stay awake in the small hours and to run off loose dogs. Tim is the reason this series exists. He started making calls to people over sixty who are out there doing these races, and the calls turned into a series.

"Don't mistake my enthusiasm for my ability. Because I just barely get by in everything I do."

A few days after this episode drops, Will Cooper stands on another start line — the Last Annual Third Circle of Hell. Four hundred and twenty miles. Thirty-four entrants. Eight of them over sixty.

For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.