ANTIGO — In the summer of 2023, Sam Stimac was running well.
More than well, actually.
After exceeding expectations in several major ultra marathons the previous two years, she had been accepted to a team of Olympic hopefuls, and was set to travel to Europe with them, free of charge, to compete in perhaps the most iconic ultra marathon in the world: the UTMB, short for the Ultra-Trail of Mont-Blanc, a beautiful — and treacherous — 109.3 mile section of the Alps that winds itself through France, Switzerland, and Italy.
Then, two weeks prior to the trip, she was diagnosed with lyme disease.
“It was really a big letdown because it was just one of the biggest races that you can do,” said Stimac, who believes she likely contracted it from a tick while trail running. “But it was horrible — I have never been so sick. I don’t miss work ever, but I missed work. Normally, I bounce back from things pretty quickly, but I ended up taking almost a month off of running completely.”
But despite last summer’s unlucky interruption, with this summer — with just roughly over a week of this summer, even — she seems to have more than made up for it.
It began Aug. 24, when Stimac, a 2012 Antigo High graduate, got married to her longtime boyfriend Andrew Berg on a mountain in Vermont, where they now live.
The following weekend, after a year of waiting, she did what she had set out to do the previous year: complete the 109.3 mile gauntlet that is the UTMB.
After beginning the race at 6 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 30, she finished exactly 32 hours, 29 minutes, and 11 seconds later, just before 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning on Sept. 1, good for 35th best among all women in the competition.
According to her best friend Mary Prunty, Stimac routinely finishes races alongside runners sponsored by outfits such as The North Face and Adidas, and — in one more not inconsiderable feat — placed in the top three at another high-level ultra in California just to qualify for the UTMB.
Prunty, who ran with Stimac on Antigo High School’s cross country and track teams, has by now watched — and, as a frequent leader of her race day crew that tends to her at aid stations along the course, been a part of — many of her friend’s ultra marathon successes.
“At the race itself, she’s running for 20 to 30 hours, so whether it’s changing shoes, changing clothes, wiping down their feet with vaseline while you’re changing their socks, there’s a lot that needs to be done to ‘crew’ them. It’s a very community-oriented sport around supporting this person doing remarkable things,” Prunty said. “We did an ultra marathon where she started puking at mile 20. She puked three times. We couldn’t keep anything in her body. We always loved blue gatorade in cross country, so I ran to a gas station, got her blue gatorade, and she literally subsisted on blue gatorade and chicken broth for 80 miles and took second as a female. It was just wild.”
Berg suggested his wife’s grit in trying moments of races has been borne partly through a deadly serious work ethic.
“She runs or works out in one form six days a week,” Berg said. “Her runs usually consist of six to ten miles a day with a long run on the weekend. She hikes on a treadmill three days a week on max ascent, so we max it out to 15 degrees up and she hikes on the treadmill for a half an hour or hour three times a week just to train her ankles and calves for as much climbing as this race took. Even here in Vermont, the mountains just aren’t steep enough to train enough [for the UTMB]. I’m a cyclist, so this year she also started riding bike with me at least one to two days a week. So most of her evenings are about two to three hours of training.”
Finishing as highly as Stimac did in this summer’s UTMB likely would have proved impossible without that type of obsessive dedication: the course, essentially, was nothing but mountain climbs, accumulating, by the end, to something like 33,000 feet, higher than Mt. Everest. Of the 2,700 total runners who began the race, over 1,000 failed to finish.
According to Berg, Stimac’s path to the finish line in Chamonix, France (the same location as the starting line — the race essentially circles Mont Blanc), likewise, was no picnic, particularly due to the steepness of the hillsides.
“That much ascent is hard to train for — your feet slide around in your shoes a ton when you’re going that steep up and down. She was dealing with blister issues pretty early on due to that. You’re pretty much constantly on cliff edges, and as you’re doing these ascents or descents, you’re trying to run, but you’re jumping two feet down, two feet down from rock to rock. It is pretty technical terrain, similar to the Rockies where it’s from big boulder to boulder,” he said. “The one point where she said she was actually a bit scared was at the 30 hour mark. When you’re that tired and it’s night time and trying to tackle those types of ascents and descents when you’re 30 hours in without sleep, that’s a little bit worse than the rest of the race.”
Stimac confirmed that the end of the race was the most challenging for her as well.
“I had honestly a great race until mile 102 — then I was throwing up and feeling really terrible. Some nice man, I think from Spain, gave me some Zofran (anti-nausea medication) and I felt better and was able to finish. In most races, at some point, everybody goes through really dark moments, and then at some point, you’re going to bounce back — most of the time. Then you see different people at different phases of that. So somebody may fly by you and they’re feeling great, and you may fly by somebody that’s feeling really terrible, but in this race, that last ten miles, nobody was happy. Everybody was just like, ‘Where is this finish line?!’” Stimac laughed.
Because race organizers did not allow outsiders to drive themselves due to the high volume of traffic in the area during the race, Berg — this race serving as the sole member of Stimac’s crew — was forced to follow her from aid station to aid station on shuttle buses. On one occasion, a driver made a mistake, and Berg was confronted with what might be considered his first great test of spousal loyalty. He passed.
“He actually dropped me and a bunch of other crew members off at the wrong location,” Berg remembered. “It was like two miles up a mountain on top of the town we were supposed to be at. So everybody found their way down there — I ran down the mountain in order to get there in time.”
Berg said that despite the mix-up, being a part of the event, especially because of its location, was incredibly memorable.
“It was stunning,” Berg said. “We travel a lot. We see a lot of mountains for races. I used to live in Seattle. She used to live in Seattle and Colorado. But the mountains there, they’re special. They’re just massive. And to go through all of these cool little mountain towns with so much history…it’s an unbelievable experience to be on the outside the mountain, let alone what I can imagine she was seeing on the trail. Year-round, people travel around the world just to backpack that route, so for her to run it in 32 hours, you get to see a lot of things really quick. In the running community, it is the mecca. It is the race everyone seeks to do at some point if they aspire for that kind of distance. It’s pretty much the Tour de France, but for trail running.”
Stimac also spoke effusively about the beauty of the course she traversed, and said that while the race was punishing, it was equally meaningful, as well as evocative of the “human spirit on the ultra running scene” — especially given that she had missed it the previous year.
“It was honestly the most amazing trip I think we’ve ever had,” Stimac said. “My race itself, with my last year being a struggle to run at all when I got sick, I was able to soak in the experience. Even though it’s not easy to run 109 miles, my mantra was, ‘Soak this in. I get to do this. This is such a privilege that a lot of people can’t do.’ Just to be healthy and to be on the starting line was incredible. The starting line in and of itself was the craziest thing ever. People come hours early to get in line, because there’s 2,700 people on this tiny little European street that you have to line up in. The first night, you’re all bunched up yet and climbing into these mountains and it’s dark. You look ahead of you and there’s miles of little headlamps. Then you look behind you and there’s miles of little headlamps. You’re all on this journey, and it’s super cool.”
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