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The crowd at the yellow gate saw Gary Robbins running toward them. Some of them cheered instinctively, though it was not necessarily something to cheer about. Robbins, of North Vancouver, was approaching the finish line from the wrong direction.

After running nearly 160 kilometres for almost three days straight through the woods in Tennessee, Robbins was expected to become one of the few people, and the only Canadian, to ever finish the storied Barkley Marathons on Monday.

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“I was momentarily confused,” says Gary Cantrell, the founder of the race, who is better known in ultramarathon circles as Lazarus Lake.

At first, Cantrell thought Robbins was coming at the yellow gate from the wrong direction because he had dropped out of the race. But then, why would he be running so hard?

“It dawned on me that he had to have taken a wrong turn,” Cantrell said.

Then I realized my error and I knew I didn’t have enough time to come back over the mountain

Robbins reached the yellow gate and collapsed. He was speaking in high-pitched bursts between breaths, though most of it was incomprehensible.