The History-Making Shot
Howie Stern describes photographing Jasmin Paris finishing the 2024 Barkley Marathons
Last Friday afternoon, photographer Howie Stern captured arguably the greatest image in our sport’s history to date. This is the story of how he got that shot, and what led up to it.
You’ve probably seen this photo and perhaps video of 40-year-old Jasmin Paris of Scotland becoming the first woman ever to finish the Barkley Marathons, just 99 seconds before the 60-hour cutoff, because her accomplishment made international news. It’s also up to 47,000 likes on Howie’s instagram and has been shared online by countless people and media outlets.
I’m not here to explain the Barkley; you can read elsewhere about the logistics, location, and history of what most consider the world’s hardest ultra, which only 17 others had finished in its first 37 years. You also can read a recap of this year’s event here or here.
Instead, I’d like to focus on the now-iconic photo and on Howie’s perspective from behind the camera.
I wrote about Howie last February in this post about his role as a photographer in a sport where video and live-streaming are gaining supremacy. You can read that post for Howie’s remarkable background as an ultrarunner and photographer.
He’s uniquely suited to photograph the Barkley because he attempted it in 2011 and made it one loop, but over the time limit. He therefore knows the nearly impossible terrain known as “out there” and the challenge of orienteering to find the hidden books along the way. This was his seventh year photographing the event.
He contacted me while driving back from Tennessee from the Barkley because he wanted to talk and to process “by far the greatest moment in sports I’ve ever witnessed.”
Like so many, I can’t stop looking at his photo, which I find so much more powerful than the multiple videos available online of Jasmin running to and reaching the yellow gate, then collapsing. Howie’s still photograph captures and preserves the feeling and significance of that moment as no video can.
Let’s take a close look before getting to Howie’s conversation. Here is the wide-angle view of his original photo, lesser known than his cropped Instagram version:
The photo shows Jasmin’s momentum, her hair flying, her string of spit swinging sideways. It communicates exhaustion and pain through her grimace, her furrowed brow, and her closed eyes. It magnifies her grittiness with the touches of dirt, most notably on her hands and under her wedding band. She appears to grasp and lean on the gate both for support and for proof that she made it. The photo thereby also immortalizes the yellow gate, which is every Barkley participant’s touchpoint, and gives it a place in history.
Behind her, the man in blue—her husband Konrad, the father of her young daughter and son—is serious, not smiling. He is surging forward to make sure she is all right. The celebration will come later. For now, he is entirely focused on his role as her crew chief and caregiver. He has been at her side through her stunning athletic rise, including her record-smashing outright win at the grueling 268-mile Montane Spine Race in 2019, when she was still nursing their year-old first baby. By reversing traditional husband-and-wife roles, this photograph shows us the significance of a supportive partner for female athletes, especially those who are working mothers (Jasmin also has a career as a veterinarian).
In the background stand Barkley’s two best-known veterans, who had finished their five loops shortly before her. Jared Campbell, with the dark hair, made history himself just a half hour earlier, becoming the first person to finish Barkley four times, but he and everyone around him became entirely caught up with witnessing Jasmin and this defining moment. Everyone looks overjoyed but shocked that she emerged from the woods to beat the clock, given that the timing of her appearance at the prior viewpoint a little more than three hours earlier suggested she had hardly any chance of finishing under 60 hours.
Next to Jared, John Kelly—who finished his third Barkley 15 minutes ahead of Jared—looks delightfully goofy with his sucked-in cheeks and mouth in an O, as if he’s about to shout “wow!” His expression distills how bonkers the entire scene is.
Presiding over it all like a sage with a cane, part deity and part demon, is the creator Gary Cantrell, aka Laz. He didn’t think a woman could ever be tough enough to finish his race. But he said he’d be excited if one did. This is the moment when one proved him wrong. It’s the end of an all-male era.
“Honestly, it’s probably the most important photograph of my entire career,” Howie said. “I have a lot of photographs I’m proud of, but that one is truly history, and there’s so much meaning and symbolism behind it.”
Howie in his own words
Howie described the stress of waiting for Jasmin on the participants’ fifth and final loop when he was shooting at the one other viewing point, called the fire tower. He realized he had to leave before Jasmin came through so he could get back to camp in time to shoot the first finisher, Ihor Verys. (The following excerpts of our conversation have been edited slightly for length and clarity.)
“I was like, crap, I need to go. You’re doing the math in your head and thinking, geez, if she shows up now, she only has four hours. Ihor had passed through, and it’s an hour-plus later, and I had a certain cutoff time on my watch to get back to camp; I didn’t want to miss the first finisher. Time was ticking away, and I’m looking in the forest and I don’t see her, fuck. You’re kind of starting to give up hope. And we haven’t seen Damian [Hall] either, and he was ahead of her, so we’re like, ‘Oh shit, did they both get lost?’
“So I left [the fire tower] without seeing her, because at that point in my head, I know I have tons of good pictures of her, so if I miss her here it’s not the end of the world, but if I miss the first finisher, I’ll be really disappointed. Just before I left, I put my cameras in my bag on this wooden table, and that’s when I saw the little ladybug. In my head I thought, ladybugs are good luck. It happens that this ladybug has the exact same color scheme that Jasmin is wearing, that kind of reddish-orange top with black pants. I’m not superstitious—well, maybe I am a little—but I actually said out loud to that ladybug, ‘I don’t know what magic powers you have, but if you can do something to help Jasmin, please send her help and make her get to the tower soon and get to the finish.’ Then I took a picture of the ladybug and said thanks for all your help, and I took off.”
“A little further down when I got cell service, I saw Jacob had posted a picture of her that said she had passed the tower and had like three hours and 40 minutes. I did the math thinking, she’s got about three-and-a-half hours, and I was like—you don’t even know what to think. I realized she’s gotta run it as fast as she did on the first loop. It’s kind of like you want to stay numb to it; you didn’t want to say she’s not going to make it. You wanted to hold out hope.”
Howie on what the last segment of the route is like, which Jasmin had to run faster than she had in prior loops to make the 60-hour cutoff:
“From that point at the fire tower, you have to go down Rat Jaw, where the navigation is a no-brainer because it’s a power line cut through the woods. It’s loaded with huge briars, so you get shredded, but you’re basically following power lines all the way down to the prison. It drops a couple of thousand feet. It’s steep but you get to make time because you’re running downhill. Then you get to the prison and have to go up a climb known as Bad Thing, and you have to know where to go. Finding the next book—as long as you find the right confluence of creeks, the next book is easy. Just so you have an idea, some of these climbs they’re doing are 1600 feet vertical in a half mile. I remember going up Bad Thing, pulling on every tree to get up the hillside. My arms were sore for a week from pulling on trees. It’s brutally steep, and there’s no footprints, no trail.
“The final climb, known as Big Hell, is actually the easiest climb to navigate. I can’t give away details, but it’s very, very steep. You come to some capstones, and the last book is in the capstones, and then after a short cross-country, you pick up the candy-ass trail that takes you back to camp. I forget how long that trail is, but for me it was like it never ended; I was running as hard as I physically could, and it felt like forever.”
Howie on what makes Jasmin Paris special and able to finish Barkley’s five laps, when the other women who’ve attempted it haven’t completed more than three loops, and many participants of either sex fail on the first loop:
“Laz has designed this event so that during the race, you will be stripped absolutely to your core—complete ego death—and you’ll really see what’s inside of you, on an absolute primordial level. And to be successful at Barkley, you really have to do your homework and practice everything beforehand. There’s a skill set involved, and you have to master all the facets. Even if you’re strong, fit, and determined as can be, you can only follow somebody for four loops, and when you get on that fifth loop, you’re alone. [Each participant starts the fifth loop in the opposite direction as the prior participant started it, so they can’t team up to help each other with navigation on the final loop.]
“To finish Barkley, you’re redlining all five loops and have to be able to navigate nearly perfectly while redlining. The mental stress of running Barkley is so far beyond anything. You don’t always know you’re on the right track, and the only time you know you’re safe is when you’re at one of the books, and as soon as you step away from one of the books, doubt steps back in.
“Jasmin is the first woman I’ve seen out there that has the perfect storm of the skill set required to finish Barkley. There’s a certain personality type. I’ve noticed that some finishers tend to be sort of asocial, not very talkative. There’s a hyper-focus, almost machine-like-ness, to their personality, and when they show up in camp, they’re not milling around and mingling. She goes to check in, gets her number, talks to Laz, goes to the map, copies the map, and disappears to learn the map, learn the course, and do what you need to do. So she fit that mold of very tunnel-vision. Some people come to Barkley giddy, excited to be there and chatting with others and joking. Jasmin’s not that way, John Kelly’s not that way. And other people who’ve finished, they’re all business.
“And knowing her from the other races she’s done in the UK—she’s won the Spine Race—you knew this was a woman who has raced in absolutely brutal miserable conditions and beaten everybody. Her home turf is just tough. You can tell, she’s just tough. And she’s an ace navigator. That’s the rare quality in the women who show up to Barkley, being an ace navigator while in the midst of horrible terrain.
“So many other people are so big on social media and like, ‘me me me,’ and a trait you find among Barkley finishers is they’re not huge social media hounds, not big spotlight people. They’re very focused, driven, machine-like, and they go and execute. And a lot are very well educated, high achieving.”
Howie on the scene when Jasmin approaches the finish of the yellow gate:
“I wanted the straight-on shot of her. I assumed she was going to come somewhere near where the sign on the gate is, so I positioned myself to get the most straight-on shot for the gate.
“You look at your watch and think, OK, ten minutes. Then five minutes. Everyone was chatting nonchalantly. I think we were all trying not to think about the unthinkable, that she wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t want to think about that outcome, so I put it out of my head as a possibility. But you knew it was a probability.
“And then all of a sudden, I remember starting to hear some commotion from the far end of camp. Then some people started to say stuff like, ‘There she is’—but you couldn’t see her yet. Then I saw people running. And I could see my friend Larry running with his dog, but you’re just kind of looking, going, ‘I don’t see her yet.’ Then you finally—[Howie pauses and chokes up with emotion]—then you finally see her shirt. Then I looked down and could see, it’s three minutes. And I said out loud, ‘Fuck! She’s going to fucking finish!’ [He pauses and chokes up again.] ‘She’s going to fucking do it!’ Then of course all of us start screaming to cheer her on.
“When I first got eyeballs on her, you just knew you’re watching history, seeing history unfold in real time of something that really seems almost impossible, because no woman had come close. From when I saw her, there was no doubt she was going to finish.
“I was in place, so that wasn’t a problem, it was just, ‘Which camera do I want to use first?’ As she gets close enough, I’m kneeling down to get one camera to see the gate blurry and see her behind, and I was using the long lens, and I knew at a certain point I had to switch to my other camera, which was a bit wider, because I wanted to get all of her at the finish, not just her torso touching the gate. I wanted to be able to get all of it, because who the fuck knows what’s going to happen when she hits the gate? Turns out, I didn’t take many pictures with my first camera because I was so nervous about missing the other stuff, so I quickly got my other camera, didn’t even use the tracking feature, just put the focus point right on her, and just held the trigger down once she got close enough and didn’t let up until she had stopped.
“In 2017, when John finished, I remember trying to get the shot as he was coming to the gate, and my camera was kind of freezing, and it’s easy to think you got the shot so you stop shooting, but then the runner does something else. When Jasmin got right before the gate, I started shooting and was like, ‘I am not going to stop shooting.’ I never stopped, just kept shooting because I didn’t know what was going to happen.
“It’s crazy, I have one picture of her where she’s folded in half over the gate, with her head practically touching the ground, and I didn’t realize how short that moment was until I saw a video, and somebody was like, wow, you captured that moment, and watching on video, it’s a split second.
“I was just firing away. She was coming straight at me, and as soon as she finished, she collapsed on the ground, and I said to everybody, come on, we can move closer now, because the race is over. I took a few more shots and thought that since the race is over, I can go under the gate and get a frontal angle, because she’s lying down. I was never trying to get on top of her or super close, just wanted to get a different angle, but that’s when Laz started yelling at me and waving his stick, and I took a shot or two more, then went around and was right in front of her, next to the gate and the stone pillar on the outside, and people were concerned.
“Laz was like, ‘Do you need medical?’ because she was in bad shape when she first finished. Every fiber of her being she had to put into running as fast as she could from the fire tower all the way to the finish line. Imagine you’re running a 400-meter race, but extend that for three-and-a-half hours; she had no leeway to slow down. She had to go faster than she had been going for the last two loops, which is insane, and the finish is uphill when you come up through camp. She had a big string of spit that had come out of her mouth, so she was probably gasping. There was just nothing left in her when she was on the ground; I don’t know if she was about to pass out from exertion, but she was just cooked.”
On Laz’s reaction:
“What I’ve noticed is, when it comes to people finishing, he looks at his watch to record an exact time; then the next thing he does—because he’s very businesslike—is get pages, to make sure all 15 pages are there. If you don’t have all your pages, you didn’t finish. All I remember is he was focused at first on the time, then quickly he was saying, ‘Do we need to get medical?’ After she crossed the line and he checked the time, his immediate 100 percent concern was her health and that she was safe.”
Final thoughts:
“It was awesome all the guys finished, but everybody with every fiber of their being was hoping for Jasmin to get there, and it couldn’t have been a more storybook ending than coming down to the wire.
“Barkley has always been just barely attainable, and that’s the way Laz designed it. Everybody almost gave up hope, and then to go from that—when you’re sort of in this numbed feeling of flatlined emotion because people were thinking, ‘Damn, she’s not going to make it’—then all of a sudden to go straight into the stratosphere to, ‘Oh my god, she’s going to do it,’ and then she did it, it’s like, this was larger than life. This was bigger than a race.
“Maybe it’s like the four-minute mile; now that she’s proved it’s possible, I don’t know who’s going to fill her shoes, but I know there’s women out there and it’s going to be fun to watch who shows up now, and hopefully there will be many many more.”
Howie Stern’s photos have been used widely without payment or permission. If you’d like to show appreciation for his work, please consider making a donation to his Venmo, @Howie-Stern. Huge thanks to Howie for sharing his story and photographs here!
I was there at the finish line of the Western States 100 in 2015 when 70-year-old Gunhild Swanson finished just under the 30-hour cutoff. Watching it unfold in real time felt surreal, and I found myself sobbing and cheering at the same time. Howie's description of watching Jasmin sprint to the yellow gate despite all odds sounds very much like what I felt watching Gunhild -- two remarkable women proving a huge point that seemed out of reach just minutes earlier. Sarah, what a wonderful interview! I loved your spot-on dissection of the photo, especially your reflection on the husband-wife, crew-runner dynamic. I can't wait to share all of this with my students, many of whom are well-versed in Barkley lore thanks to their teacher and coach (me) who insist on showing them clips about Barkley every April. So many found me on Monday morning to excitedly tell me that "a woman finally finished Barkley!" Ha! I have done my job. Thank you, friend, for sharing this fantastic conversation with Howie.
Thanks for sharing. This is the best article I have read so far about what it was like at camp when Jasmin finished. Such an incredible achievement and I agree the photograph captures that moment better than any video I have seen.