Dude, where’s my finish line? With such a commanding lead in a 4.2-mile race that he lost sight of other runners and officials, Chris Barnicle, the “World’s Fastest Stoner,” had to slow down and ponder where to go.
But a casual observer might wonder whether his current confusion had less to do with his speed than with the marijuana coursing through his body.
Barnicle, wiping the sweat-matted hair out of his face, ran at a pace that challenged the stigma of the stoner as sloth-like and stationary.
By the time he cross the finish line taking first place, the former NCAA All-American had burned through an extra quarter-mile and ended up crossing the finish line from the wrong direction!
For the second time, Barnicle won a championship in the pot-themed 420 Games. If Red Auerbach celebrated a big Boston Celtics victory with a stogie, the 29-year-old Boston native celebrated his by smoking a joint in his van.
In his own way, Barnicle felt like he added another win on his mission to show that habitual marijuana users can be peak physical performers and not just the lazy, unmotivated, Netflix-transfixed, junk food-gobbling Lotus eaters they’re often portrayed as in film and TV stereotypes.
But Barnicle also knows that his weed habit is keeping him from the professional ranks. If he smoked as much as he did before his 420 Games race before he ran in the U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Los Angeles, he would have been bounced from the race or his time would have been voided.
“I don’t want to be disqualified,” he said, pleading the Fifth when asked whether he used marijuana in any way, shape or form before the Olympic trials.
Barnicle covered the grueling 26.2 mile Olympic trial course in three hours and 45 minutes, well ahead of the average finishing time in the 2016 L.A. Marathon.
Though he finished last in the Olympic trials, Barnicle’s well-known embrace of cannabis brought positive attention to his campaign to quash the lazy stoner stereotype.
“There’s a lot of people, even here in L.A., that are afraid to admit they use cannabis because there is that negative stigma against it still,” said Barnicle, who moved to California in 2014. “I feel like there needs to be more people like me, God knows, there are tons of athletes … that are using cannabis. But because of their contracts they can’t say anything.”
(Photo Credit: LATimes)
