Notable Neighbors
August 20, 2021 at 11:34 a.m.
Notable Neighbors
By Dean M. Laux
Mike Schyck is not exactly an unknown around these parts. For one thing, he’s lived here most of the time since moving to Englewood with his family 40 years ago. For another, he was the star of Lemon Bay High School’s nationally ranked wrestling team in the late 1980s and went on to become a two-time All-American wrestler at Ohio State University. “I’ve been wrestling since I was five years old,” he says. “My older brother Doug was a phenomenal wrestler, and he was winning all kinds of awards, so that got me interested. Sibling rivalry, I guess. I wanted to be a national champion.”
After getting a B.S. degree in business and a master’s degree in sports management at OSU, Mike eventually replanted his roots here in Englewood in 2000, and in 2010 he became the Wellness Director of the Englewood YMCA, where many locals have had the pleasure of training under him.
Many more people may know Mike as the head coach of Lemon Bay High School’s wrestling squad, a responsibility he took on in 2015 to oversee the creation of another powerhouse wrestling team. Not by accident, Mike’s son Lance now happens to be the team’s top star. “A big part of my taking the job was to be able to coach my son once he was old enough to be on the team, and to get the wrestling program up and rolling,” he says. “We’ve built a pretty good program here. We’ve won the regional and district individual championships in the last four years, and we’ve been in the final four of the state dual championship for three of those years. My son Lance was our first state individual champion this past year. I’m proud of what we’ve done. We’ve got a good thing going, and we’re really excited about this year.”
In order to accomplish all of this, money had to be raised to send the kids to camp for training and pay for their trips to compete in tournaments. And one of the ways to raise money was to get interested folks to pledge support of a worthy event on behalf of the team. Mike had already established the Lemon Bay Wrestling Club of Englewood, Florida, a 501(c)3 organization, with the help of some friends in town. He used it to partner with a company called pledgeit.org. For an interesting event he thought of taking on a physical challenge. “I considered climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa,” he says, but he got intrigued about doing something closer to home. He decided to take a walk up the Appalachian Trail. Not just a piece of the trail, but the entire length of it: “2,193.1 miles,” he says, emphasizing the “point 1” loudly.
The Appalachian Trail is not something to take on lightly. From the south, it runs from Springer Mountain, Georgia through 14 states to Mount Katahdin in Maine. According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, it is the longest hiking-only trail in the world, coursing mostly through mountainous terrain, with a high point of 6,643 ft and a low point of 124 ft above sea level. Its difficulty rating is “easy to strenuous,” mostly through wilderness, and a complete traverse of the trail, called a thru-hike, normally requires five to seven months.
Mike made it in 95 days, starting on March 22 and ending on June 24. “There were about 3,200 thru-hikers already on the trail when I started, and at the end I was the 31st to reach Mount Katahdin and sign in.” he says. That means he passed 99 percent of the hikers during his trek. That’s a lot of people. Yet the trail seemed deserted much of the time. “I could walk an eight-hour stretch some days without seeing any people,” he says. “It was like being in a crater on the moon.”
“Getting my trail legs was the most difficult thing early on,” Mike says. First he had to get used to walking an average of 22 miles every single day, much of it up steep inclines, carrying a backpack that added about 30 lbs to his weight. “In wrestling you learn to be stubborn and competitive,” he says. That helped him to fight through the pain better than the average hiker.
But it was not easy. “Some time after that first day up in the Smoky Mountains, roughly 170 miles into my journey, I thought I was done. But I was in touch with a bunch of people, friends and family, by cell phone, and they encouraged me to keep going. After that I gave myself a challenge: Each day I would set a target to achieve and give myself a reward if I did it, like going off trail and staying at a hostel.” There are many locations along the trail where hikers can go off the route to stay at an inn or hostel, eat, sleep and obtain provisions.
“Especially early on I was worried about bears, and I didn’t get much sleep for the first month or so,” he says. He’d start out around 5 a.m. and quit for the day around 6 or 7 p.m. “My goal was to get to the next shelter, to get some protection from the bears as well as any bad weather.” But the small, three-sided wooden shelters—there were about 250 of them placed along the trail—held only six hikers, and if he found a shelter full, he’d have to set up his pup tent for the night, which offered little protection against high winds, storms and bears. Rodents and other small animals, some of which carried disease, could be a nuisance as well. There were also plenty of copperheads and timber rattlers along the trail.
Overall, Mike was well provisioned. He had two walking sticks, and his backpack initially contained an extra pair of shoes, a lightweight tent, a sleeping bag, blow-up mattress and liner, Jetboil stove, extra battery packs for his cell phone, a Sawyer water filter and three bottles, a puffy jacket and hoodie, three pairs of hiking socks, two shirts and a long-sleeved wool shirt, two pairs of hiking shorts, one pair of long pants, two pairs of undershorts and a bear bell. Later on he was able to lighten the load by about 10 lbs, sending off several items to his parents in Georgia.
The trail took its toll. “In the military they tell you to take care of your feet,” he says. “My feet just got ruined. I wasn’t wearing your typical Titan boots. I was wearing trail runners, and that put a lot of pressure on the balls of my feet. Early on I had blisters all over them. I had tape on them everywhere. They were always dirty, but I didn’t want to wash them because I didn’t want to get the tape all wet. The hiking really did a number on them. I’m still walking gingerly.”
Weather was often a problem. At times he froze, at times he was sweltering, and at times he was soaked. There were rainstorms that made hiking almost impossible, and he had to dry out before continuing. One downpour created a flash flood that he had to navigate around. In Virginia, of all places, he got caught in a nasty blizzard which kept him in his shelter for an afternoon.
Bears were a constant source of concern. Some areas posted notices that they were closed because of aggressive bear behavior. “You didn’t see them, but you knew they were there. We’d see bear poop all over the place,” he recalls. On two occasions, he had close encounters with a bear but didn’t see it. In the first instance, the bear came to a shelter he was sharing with some other hikers and took one of their bear bags while they slept. In the other instance, he was hiking alone and heard a growl emanating from the woods. Something moved in the underbrush. “They tell you to stay put and make yourself look big,” he says, “but I ran away as fast as I could.”
The terrain itself was at times formidable. There were steep climbs and precipitous descents that had to be taken. Even on flat ground there could be rock fields to cope with. In one flat area the ground was completely taken up with gnarled tree roots that made walking a precarious task.
When he finally reached Mount Katahdin in Maine, Mike knew he had accomplished something. “It was a real challenge. Day after day I was racing to reach a particular point, and then it was on to the next one, for 95 days in a row. I’m proud of myself for meeting the challenge and being able to raise money to help a worthy cause.”
And he should be. The pledge campaign raised some $50,000 for the Lemon Bay Wrestling Club, and more trickles in after the fact.
What’s next for Coach Mike Schyck? Who knows? But whatever it is, you get the feeling that it will be a big challenge … and that he will be up to it.
Dean Laux is exploring interesting folks living in our community. If you know of anyone with an interesting background please send an email to: [email protected]. Include the person’s name, contact info and give a brief description of the person’s background.