This August, the Sidwell Friends cross-country team traveled to Camp Nock-A-Mixon to participate in their annual pre-season away-from-home training. This trip was meant to prepare Sidwell runners for the season ahead,strengthen bonds amongst the team and start the season with a bang.
The team left on Aug. 18 and stayed at the camp for four days before returning to Sidwell on Aug. 22. Despite the short trip, the team’s schedule was filled with training, recovery exercises and other afternoon activities. Coaches Murat Kayali, Martin Suresh, David Silver, Michael Stember and Joe Korth chaperoned the trip.
Camp Nock-A-Mixon is located in Bucks County, Pa., about two hours from Hershey Park. Established in 1938, the camp works hard to instill a sense of community within students, making it an ideal place for a team bonding experience.
Junior Maddie Devant attended the camp for the first time this summer, and said she was thrilled to connect with her teammates before the official season started.
“I think it was really fun, definitely great for team bonding. I regret not going in my first two years of high school and definitely want to go next year,” she said.
The runners would wake up at 6:15 a.m. every morning and be out by 7:00 a.m. for their first run. Typically, days would consist of about three hours of running in both the morning and the afternoon. Other training activities included yoga, stretching and inspirational speeches given to the runners.
Sophomore Alana Templeman, a first-timer at the camp, described her running experience on the trails. She said she “was surprised to find out we wouldn’t be training on the track. We ran on many hills and around the lake surrounding the camp.”
Templeman added that the trails were “very scenic and made the running a lot more fun. Earlier in the summer, I went to a Nike running camp in Oregon, and it reminded me of the experience I had running there due to the … nature around us.”
However, according to freshman Allegra Carter Angeltti,“The runs were super challenging. The hardest day was probably when we did 400 repeats.”
Senior Nnedi Nwosu said that although the “cabins themselves were in a very scenic area of the camp,” and she “enjoyed waking up to the sun shining on my face,” she was “not prepared to find a mouse in the cabin and be responsible for trying to coax it out.”
“I was also not too thrilled to be the senior who was given a plunger to unclog the toilet,” Nwosu added with a laugh. “The camp itself was great for team bonding! One might even call it trauma bonding.”
Templeman added that she ordered food to the camp six times, and the food was not up to taste.
To finish out the preseason training week, the cross-country team made their way to Hershey Park as a reward for their hard work earlier that week.
Kayali saw the trip as a “fantastic opportunity for the team to get to know each other as well as make them feel part of a group that is very welcoming,” citing the cross-country team’s “very supportive” culture.
He adds that a benefit of the timing was that “since [the trip is] during the summer, there are no distractions and stress of the school year or extracurriculars.”
Since this was only the second summer of the pre-season running camp, Kayali expressed his wishes for it to continue.
“From this camp, I feel like the team has become much closer in terms of these kinds of bonds, which makes them much more likely to perform better for themselves and for each other.”
