Navigating unmarked wilderness through a storm in the Tennessee mountains sounds like the existential dread of a software developer in the latest wave of artificial intelligence (AI). At the Barkley Marathons, it's just the first loop.
The endurance race consists of five loops, over 100 miles of unmarked terrain, and 60,000-plus feet of elevation gain.1 No Global Positioning System (GPS)—just a map, a compass and your will to keep going. At each checkpoint, runners must find a book hidden in the backcountry and rip out the page matching their bib number as proof they were there. Miss a book or a cutoff and you're done. At its core, it is human vs. nature—no amount of technology can substitute for knowing the terrain under your feet. In nearly 40 years, only 20 people have reached the finish line. For the past two years, not a single person has.
In his latest reflections, the infamous race director "Laz" made an observation that resonates well beyond ultrarunning: while equipment and training methods have improved dramatically over 40 years, navigation skills have cratered.2 GPS, he argues, has atrophied parts of the brain responsible for spatial memory. Runners show up physically prepared but unable to locate a book after being shown where it is, searching for hours on the wrong ridge. The book locations are marked precisely, but the race requires athletes to copy and internalize the map, forcing them to study the terrain in detail. Those who skip doing the map work and absorbing the navigation details ahead of time end up fit, fast and completely lost.
The parallel to AI is hard to miss. Agentic coding tools, spec-driven development frameworks and Ralph loops are extraordinarily powerful techniques—ones we’re actively learning and putting to work ourselves. But without sufficient backpressure (tests, domain knowledge, clear specifications, human context)—the equivalent of drawing contour lines—they do exactly what an unprepared Barkley runner does: cover ground with confidence in the wrong direction.
Howard Marks has noted that he writes his investment memos as much for the discipline of thinking as for the people who read them.3 The practice of articulating your reasoning sharpens the reasoning itself. Preparation isn't overhead; it's the skill. And when things inevitably go sideways during a race, what you fall back on is the training you’ve already done.
See you at the yellow gate!
Important Disclosures & Definitions
1 Wikipedia contributors. (February 17, 2026). Barkley Marathons. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 20, 2026.
2 Lazarus Lake. (February 18, 2026). [Status update]. Facebook.
3 Fund Evaluation Group. (n.d.). Memorandum of Understanding with Howard Marks. FEG Insight Bridge Podcast.
AAI001107 02/24/2027
