Undaunted in Ultra Test

About a week after returning from the 24-hour Spartan Ultra World Championships in Iceland, Anthony Daunt said, during a conversation Friday morning at Groundworks Landscaping in Amagansett, that he was beginning to feel okay again.

When talking with the quiet-spoken 26-year-old former Montauker, who now lives in Springs, you don’t immediately appreciate the enormity of what he underwent to become a world Spartan Ultra champion in the 25-to-29-year-old age group. 

This kind of competition, which involves running up and down mountainous — and in Iceland’s case, windy — terrain and satisfying during the course of each loop (6.6 miles in this case) the demands of 25 obstacles, requires speed and strength, not to mention stamina.

“There were guys there who were built, but they weren’t necessarily fast, though some were. I’m usually the smallest guy there.” 

Daunt, who sees to Groundworks’ maintenance division, came to Spartan Ultras by way of long-distance running, having found half-marathons and marathons “very boring.” 

In the months leading up to Iceland, he won his age group in the North American championships in West Virginia, and placed third in his age group at another world competition at Lake Tahoe.

A number of family members, including his wife, Erica, his in-laws, Linda and Andy Silich, and his sister, Lacey, with her boyfriend, Steven Bahns, as well as Kady Field, made the trip.

“They saw me start and they were there when I finished. The race started with a 5K in the town they held it in. It wasn’t Reykjavik, it’s hard to pronounce, I couldn’t tell you the name [Hverageroi]. . . . The idea was to do as many 6.6-mile loops as you could within 24 hours.”

“What’s Iceland like? Awesome, beautiful, mountains and geothermal rivers 

. . . they get heat from volcanic activity. It’s the third-windiest place in the world. The two places ahead of it are uninhabitable. It was really cold and windy when we were there, though it didn’t rain.” 

“There was snow on the mountain, 1,400 feet of elevation. You ran up to the top on every lap, went across a ridge, and then down a steep, slippery slope, hanging on to ropes that were nailed into the ground. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. We started at noon and had to finish by noon the next day. There were only three hours of daylight. The rest I did with a headlight. I did seven loops, 49.3 miles with the 5K figured in, in 21 hours. I didn’t have enough time for another lap.”

As for the obstacles placed about the course, a list from Spartan’s competitors guide ought to suffice: pipe hurdle, hurdle, sandbag 1, sandbag 2, ice cube carry, barbed wire crawl, Atlas carry, bucket brigade, eight-foot lattice wall, A-frame cargo net, plate drag, Yokohama tire drag, cargo bridge, rope climb, monkey bars, vertical cargo 1, vertical cargo 2, bender 1, bender 2, Olympus, Tyrolean traverse, twister, spear throw, Hercules hoist, and multi-rig.

“You swing from one hoop to the next, three feet off the ground, you climb ropes, you carry 60 to 70-pound sandbags a quarter-mile . . . each lap has 25 obstacles, and if you fail at some of them they make you do 30 burpees. I try not to do them.”

After two laps in the freezing wind he had wanted to stop, but was impelled by his sister to go on. He’d raised money online to help pay for surgeries his grandmother’s 1-year-old great-grandson, T.J., was undergoing in Florida, and didn’t want, he said, to let his donors or his entourage down.

As aforesaid, Daunt’s family and friends saw him off, “and they came back for the end of the second lap.

Then they left and came back in the morning. Meanwhile, they’d been tracking me the whole time.” 

“It was crazy timing: I was coming out of the woods and running toward the finish line with only a couple of obstacles left when I saw my sister and her boyfriend walking up to it. They ran alongside me on the sidewalk. It was still dark at this point; the sun doesn’t come up there until 10:50 in the morning. At 9 a.m. it’s still dark. . . .”

“People did drop out. I was fourth in my age group for a while, but I passed two, and then another one dropped out. There were only two people in my age group that did seven laps.”

He agreed that just to finish one of these arduous races was quite something.

“You keep telling yourself to keep going, that there’s one more lap. And then at the end of that loop, you say, ‘One more lap. . . .’ The guy who came in second to me did it in 22 and a half hours.”