Erik Simonsen isn’t one to let obstacles get in his way, so when, toward the end of a recent 31-mile hike through the Vermont wilderness, for something called the Killington Spartan Ultra 50K, it was just a 60-pound sandbag between him and the finish line, OK, that one almost got him.
“Just cruel, yeah, I think that they put it at the end was the cruel part. You know, in the middle, I could have done it fine and gotten through it. But the very last thing is just this huge sandbag carry, and it’s, oh, why is it here?” said Simonsen, a 33-year-old Waynesboro High School alum, who got past the sandbag carry to finish the Sept. 13 Killington Ultra in 12:26:12.
Just finishing the Killington Ultra, which is contested at Killington Ski Resort, on a peak that tops out at 4,241 feet of elevation, and puts competitors through 16,000 feet of elevation gain as they make their way up and down, up and down, up and down, is an accomplishment.
“It’s mostly just climbing up and down huge ski slopes,” Simonsen said.
A journey begins with one step
Erik Simonsen’s journey to Killington began three years ago, when Erik and his wife, Karren, joined a local gym to try to get themselves in shape.
Erik said he weighed in at the time around 300 pounds – he’s at a lean, mean 210 now.
Talk with him for a few minutes, and you get the sense that he’s the kind of person who wants to test his limits, so setting a mission to drop nearly 100 pounds is the kind of thing you’d expect.
And then there’s the thing about obstacles, like the sandbag that he had to cart up one more ski slope before finishing the Killington.
A few months into his fitness journey, Simonsen had another, potentially life-changing – indeed, life-threatening – obstacle to overcome.
“It was something similar to a stroke,” Simonsen said, a little too nonchalantly for an otherwise healthy guy in his early 30s, if you ask me.
The consensus opinion, after a battery of tests, was that whatever he had experienced, “it was just kind of a freak thing,” Simonsen said, so as he recovered, he got back to normal life, which for him included his first Spartan event, in 2023.
That one whetted his appetite to want to do more, and he set his sights on Killington, regarded by many in the Ultra community as the most challenging course on the circuit, because of the elevation gain.
Before he could get there, though, another sandbag.
“December 2024, I had a stroke, a full-blown stroke, the MRI showed a big stroke, you know, ambulance to the hospital, you know, whole thing.”
Again, Simonsen was almost detached in relaying the details.
“Still trying to figure out why it happened. We’re doing some things still to try to figure it out. But yeah, at that point, it was, you know, one time is a freak thing, two times is kind of a pattern of sorts. It’s like, oh, so there’s something wrong, you know. What prevents this from happening again? We’re not sure,” he said.
This guy is wired differently
All but a couple of us reading this far would be thinking to ourselves, OK, we don’t know what’s going on here, but maybe it would be a good idea to lay low for a bit.
The Killington Ultra is almost impossible for already incredibly fit people who train for it for years; it’s not uncommon for even the fittest among us to try and fail three, four, five times before finishing one.
“We talked a lot about, you know, what the future might look like, or, you know, kind of the realization that life’s short and, yeah, like we need to do things we love and focus on the important things in life. Because, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen. I could have another stroke, you know, in a month or a year or 10 years, who knows. So, on my bucket list was to run this race, and so in the spring, I was like, you know what, we’re gonna do it this year.”
Wow, just, wow.
It took Simonsen a few weeks to recover from the second stroke, delaying the beginning of his training, which was focused on hikes at Humpback Rock, a few minutes south of Waynesboro, elevation: 3,080 feet.
“That was my training ground,” said Simonsen, who did the math, and figured out that 19 trips up and down the length and the elevation of Humpback is similar to the elevation gain of Killington.
His spring and summer had him completing 78 Humpbacks, in addition to thousands upon thousands of box jumps – the box in question being 20 inches tall – along with a mini-excursion to Colorado to tackle the infamous Manitou Incline, which features a gain of more than 2,000 feet of elevation in less than a mile, in 2,768 steep steps.
Attacking the mountain
The hardest part of the year, it turns out, was the week before the race, when the training plan called for Simonsen to taper – basically, do the basics to keep the blood flowing, but emphasize resting up for the grind of the Killington.
With all that free time, he started doubting himself.
“In my head, I’m like, why am I doing this? Like, am I even going to finish? Like, we’re spending all this time and effort, you know, to go to Vermont and run this race, and am I even going to finish? I don’t know. Like, you know, the goal was to finish, that was it. I was feeling so unsure of myself,” Simonsen said.
Once he was out on the course, though, the doubts all went away.
“There’s something about just being in the woods on your own journey, on your own, you know, time frame, not worrying about anything else in life, just whatever’s in front of you, the next obstacle, the next, you know, path of the woods you have to run through,” Simonsen said.
There would be one more obstacle – about seven miles in, he started experiencing some pretty serious cramping in his legs, “and I was like, oh, crap, this is, you know, I’m only, you know, not even a quarter into the race, and I’m cramping, and this is gonna get worse, and it’s, you know, not going well.”
The cramps would wear off, and Simonsen started to realize something.
“The first cut off was at 2:30 p.m. You had to finish the whole first lap. I came in about one o’clock, and I was pretty shocked. I’m like, oh, I’m an hour and a half ahead of schedule. This is far better than I thought,” he said, and admitted that his thoughts went from doubting whether he would finish to, “what if I do really well, like, what if I, you know, finish faster than I think?”
“And then it’s quickly, after you’re climbing these big uphills, and you’re like, no, my goal is just to finish, like, and I need to not change that goal, because this is crazy. Like, yeah, yeah, there were definitely times where I felt myself slowing down considerably, just wondering when it will end,” Simonsen said.
After the sandbag surprise at the end, he saw his wife, who was waiting at the start/finish line, “and I just kind of have this look of, like, I’ve made it, you know, this is, I’m doing it, I’m going to finish, I’m right here at the finish line.”
“There are a lot of emotions at the end, for sure,” Simonsen said. “And then the kicker of it is that, in order to go get your medal after you finish, you’ve got to go back to the registration tent to get your medal, to verify, you know, that you completed it all.
“When I got my medal, they told me that I got first for my age group, which was absolutely shocking to me, because I had no idea. You know, you don’t know who’s in your age group and who’s not, and there were a lot of people that were ahead of me, obviously in other age groups, but I had no way of knowing that, and so I was completely shocked that I got first in my age group, so that was kind of just, you know, bonus feelings and emotions and all that good stuff.”
Simonsen told me next that it “felt really crazy and really surreal to finish and get first in my age group on my first go-round,” which got me to ask him – you know, “first go-round” implies that you’re thinking about doing this again.
“I’m someone who, I love to reach for very challenging goals. I like to find my limits, which is, you know, obviously, why I chose this, and man, this race, you will find a limit, like, it’s very certain that there’s a limit somewhere, and you will hit it. This definitely satisfies my thirst for that. So, I’ll very likely do it next year,” Simonsen said.
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Chris Graham
