There are no winners in Baltimore’s newest endurance race, only pavement and sun.

The inaugural Barclay Marathons, an unsanctioned footrace that loops along a particularly scorched stretch of North Baltimore, didn’t begin Saturday until the heat of the afternoon, when the sun was already high in the sky and the temperature felt around 100 degrees.

Runners received no official start time. Instead, they began at the whim of the race director, local academic and ultra-marathoner Mac McComas, only after he took his first sip of beer at Peabody Heights Brewery, between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m.

Totaling 32.5 miles up and down Barclay Street’s roughly 34 blocks, the race is a hot take on the infamous Barkley Marathons in the mountains of Tennessee. That ultra-marathon has no real course, only checkpoints hidden in Appalachian highland underbrush, and is organized by an eccentric man known variously as Lazarus Lake, Laz and the “Leonardo Da Vinci of Pain.”

The Barkley, which begins only once the tip of Lake’s morning cigarette glows orange, is so difficult that, some years, nobody finishes.

So was the case Saturday in Baltimore, where 16 people toed the line for the Barclay Marathons and no one completed it.

“I think it’s impossible,” said Graham Peck, the presumptive favorite, when he arrived at the start.

Considering the heat, Peck predicted he’d make it through eight of 10 laps (each 3.25 miles), or roughly a marathon, before the race’s strict time cutoffs caught up with him.

Along with a pure endurance test, the Barclay brings added challenges. At the north and south ends of Barclay Street, McComas hid books (thrillers aptly titled “Devil Bones” and “A Tip for the Hangman”). Competitors had to find them, tear out a page matching their assigned number and return them to McComas to prove completion of each lap.

Because it was an unsanctioned race, Baltimore’s streets remained open, so runners had to slow for cross traffic, gamble on yellow lights or squander precious time at intersections.

All of this was made harder by a series of increasingly tight time limits. Runners had a comfortable 45 minutes to complete lap one before the cutoff dropped by five minutes on each subsequent loop.

With zero minutes allotted for the 10th and final lap, banked time was necessary: Anyone who didn’t start fast enough had no shot at getting under the wire in the grueling eighth, ninth or 10th laps.

In all, runners had 3 hours and 45 minutes to finish — for an average pace of 6:55 minutes per mile, including ripping book pages, crossing busy intersections and, of course, weathering the blazing sun. (Only the fast need apply.)

But to what end?

McComas, who frequently runs 100-mile ultra-marathons, has a penchant for dreaming up hare-brained endurance challenges. He said he gravitates toward races that seem just beyond the limits of what’s possible.

So he wondered: What would an urban version of the legendary Barkley Marathons look like? The answer, he decided, is a race that subjects its competitors to the worst the city has to offer: traffic, direct sun and the heat of a July afternoon.

When it comes to the hazards of urban heat, McComas is no amateur. As a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University, McComas manages an initiative studying adaptation to Baltimore’s environmental challenges. This year, he released a first-of-its-kind survey into Baltimoreans’ climate anxieties.

This irony wasn’t lost on his race participants.

Jeff Basting, who dropped out after two laps, observed that the course itself served as a fitting metaphor for the hubris of human-driven climate change. Each lap began with a gentle downhill and occasional shade from scrawny trees.

“You’re kind of like, ‘Maybe this is the Industrial Revolution. It’s all good.’ Then you get to the bottom of a hill and you’re like, ‘f---, I gotta run up in the sun.’ ... The bottom of the hill is like the ’80s,” said Basting, referring to the decade when people began to appreciate global warming’s threat.

For McComas, exposure to a Baltimore heat island was the point.

“Cities are becoming a challenge to live in,” he said. “So this is like: Experience the suffering of the world we’ve created.”

The race director wasn’t about to subject himself to this misery, though.

“I absolutely hate running in the heat,” he said.

Instead, McComas held down a picnic table at Peabody Heights, sipping cold beers through the afternoon.

When he sent runners off, Barclay Street was baking. As competitors jogged by formstone rowhouses, many stuck to the sidewalks where they could glean occasional shade.

After four loops, half the field had called quits.

Courtney Wallace took home the day’s only prize, reserved not for the fastest runner but for the first to quit. She dropped after just one lap and received a $25 gift certificate to a running store with locations in Columbia and Sykesville, set to expire a little more than four hours after the race start.

Peck, meanwhile, pressed on, opting to run on the sunny pavement, where he had a better line of sight on any cars about to blow through the next intersection.

Peck, 36, has finished a standard marathon in a nearly elite-level 2 hours and 24 minutes. But he’s wrestled with injury in recent years and devotes himself to less conventional feats.

To commemorate his 34th birthday, he ran 34 loops around Camden Yards. He’s run a beer mile — a mile run with a beer chugged before each quarter — in under 6 minutes. And, over the course of 40 hours in July of 2020, he finished 40 miles and 40 beers (this challenge actually took him only 35 hours, including two naps).

One day, Peck hopes to become one of the few people to have run a marathon in less than 3 hours in all 50 states. He’s done 26.

A transportation engineer by day, Peck also possesses a better-than-average understanding of Baltimore’s traffic lights. He worked out Saturday that, after a light turned red, he still had at least three seconds to get through the intersection before oncoming traffic got the green.

“I’m gonna hit this hard,” he said, a good 20 meters out from the six-lane North Avenue intersection when the light blinked yellow during one early lap. An older woman was already walking across, which Peck figured bought him extra seconds.

He kicked, clearing the intersection just in time.

“Boom. Worth it,” he said, and he surged up the hill.

In the end, Peck, too, dropped out. As he predicted, he completed eight laps. It took him three hours and 36 minutes, leaving just 9 minutes on the clock to get through the ultra-marathon’s remaining 6.5 miles.

McComas guessed there may be two or three people in Baltimore capable of completing the Barclay Marathons under the time limits. He plans to bring the race back next year and hopes that, one day, someone will conquer his challenge.

And when that happens, he said, he’ll make it little bit harder.