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Notes -
Barkley is deliberately non-commercial though. If there was money in ultra running, Gary Cantrell/Lazarus Lake wouldn't take it, and the infrastructure to get east Africans entered into his events would never come into being.
The (relatively small by first-world professional sports standards, but large by Sub-Saharan African middle-class income standards) money in marathon running is needed to maintain the infrastructure that finds fast runners in what is still darkest Africa. Part of how we got the 2-hour marathon is by sending a talent scout into the kind of remote village in the Kenyan highlands where nobody even dreams of being able to afford $500 trainers in order to find boys like Sabastian Sawe.
From looking, Comrades and UTMB both have total prize purses at least on the magnitude of B-tier marathons. But a couple big races in the whole sport doesn't justify whole training cycles and injury risk.
It's tempting to compare to gravel bike racing, though: at first it was a scrappy, self-driven sport where everyone nominally toed the same start lone, but it seems to be rapidly commercializing and a number of ex-ProTour riders have decided to retire there and keep riding at a high level.
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