Higher ground

BRADENTON — The view is spectacular from the top of Mount Buzzard Bait. The valley unfolds below your feet. The thick green forest. The small college town.

Reach out and you can touch the sky.

Standing on the summit makes you feel alive ... exhilarated ... What’s the right word?

“Tired,” Matthew Sanchez said.

“And hungry,” Nick Algozzine said.

Sanchez and Algozzine, both juniors at Manatee High, ran to the top of Mount Buzzard Bait during the final day of the Smoky Mountain Running Camp in Asheville, N.C., back in July. It’s 4.5 miles, most of it straight up.

“This, Algozzine said, “was a mountain.”

It took the pair of Hurricanes cross country runners nearly a half hour to negotiate the steep, switch-back trails, and both are better for it this fall.

Algozzine is running two minutes faster than he did at this point last season, dropping his time to 17 minutes, 13 seconds. Sanchez has lowered his personal-best time from 17:45, which he ran last November, to 17:39, which he ran earlier this month.

The camp is run by Roy Benson, the former University of Florida coach who now coaches high school cross country and track in Atlanta. Benson has been sending runners up and down the mountains that surround the University of North Carolina-Asheville for 36 years.

“It’s like weight training,” Benson said. “The idea is that you’re going up against gravity, and that’s all weight training is: going against gravity. Think legs, not lungs.”

Sanchez and Algozzine thought about their legs for the one week they spent training with some of the top high school runners from the south and learning from some of the top running coaches from around the country.

They logged 37 miles that week (400 each for the summer), but Benson’s camp offers more for the runner than running.

There is the Advance Placement Cross Country Class that Sanchez attended — pen and notebook in hand — that teaches such tricks as the physics of drafting behind a runner and the proper way to stretch before and after a race.

“It’s the kind of camp that even if all you do is listen, you come back a better runner,” Manatee cross country coach Mike Smith said.

Tom Orehowsky, Manatee’s former boys cross country and track coach and current assistant to Smith, has worked as a counselor at Benson’s camps since 1990.

“It’s a camp where you learn to run better, run smarter, and to have a good time while doing it,” Orehowsky said.

Former Hurricanes Liz (Lopacki) Casteel, Amy Zientara and Matt Sisk began their years with a week at Benson’s camp before placing at the states in cross country and track (Casteel and Zientara) and track (all three).

Campers ran twice a day, working on speed and pacing in the morning with easy long-distance runs through the wooded trails in the afternoon.

That’s the working.

Algozzine and Sanchez can attest to the fun. There was a dance one night and great food.

“And all you can eat,” Algozzine said.

Campers slept four to a dorm room. No TV, though.

“We watched the microwave,” Sanchez said.

He wasn’t kidding.

Nothing like a little mac and cheese to cure some mid-evening boredom. And it was mid-evening since curfew was at 10:00 p.m. and wake-up was 7 a.m.

The run up Mount Buzzard Bait came on the final morning of camp. Wake-up was at 4:40 a.m. The first runners headed for the trail at 7 a.m. The weather, a comfortable mid-70s with no humidity that greeted the runners all week, was on the chilly side that morning.

Sanchez wore a cap and gloves.

“It was a freezing,” he said.

That’s no weather for a couple of Florida boys. But the uphills were just what a couple of flat-landers needed.

“It was fun,” Sanchez said. “The opportunity to train in that environment, you don’t get that here in Florida.”

You don’t get the view, either.

Sanchez and Algozzine arrived, like the rest of runners, at the top of Mount Buzzard Bait tired and hungry.

What awaited was a feast.

“Bannanas and beagels,” Sanchez said.

“And orange juice,” Algozzine said.