Lycoming’s Sydney Taylor won’t take running for granted

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“The day I was supposed to move into college and everyone got their freshmen t-shirts, a local non-profit, Kids Can’t Fight Cancer Alone, sent me a shirt,” Sydney Taylor said. “I just thought,‘How ironic is that?’”

In August 2022, a week before leaving Troy, Pa., for Williamsport and Lycoming College, she found out she had Stage 4 Hodgkins Lymphoma.

A PET scan at Hershey Children’s Cancer Hospital revealed that was the cause of a lump that had developed on her right arm in May and then a lump on her neck in August. Suddenly, the David B. Sykes Gate had closed and the next six months contained 24 chemotherapy treatments instead.

“My whole life I had been really healthy, so it was a big surprise,” she said. “The first treatment I got, I lost a lot of weight. My body was not expecting what was going on and reacted poorly. Then, towards the end, I got sick a lot. It would take me one week to recover then when I finally felt better, I had to go back.”

At the end of the treatment on Feb. 9, 2023, subsequent PET scans found that the chemo had done what it was supposed to do. White blood cells were repopulating. It still needs to be monitored even today, but one year after being diagnosed, Taylor walked through the SykesGate a cancer survivor.

By the time Taylor got through the track and field season her senior year, she was pretty sure she was done with competitive running. She had run competitively for six years and after showing some impressive promise during her first two years of high school, the success didn’t continue her last two years.

A knee injury her junior year started to signal the end. From finishing in the top 10 at the District4 Championship as a sophomore to falling to 28th as a senior while her time on the 5K course climbed nearly three minutes, Taylor thought she was past her peak. She didn’t knowit at the time, but the struggles she had breathing weren’t due to asthma, but the tumors growing from the lymphoma.

“I never got back to where I was my sophomore year,” she said. “Now, looking back, it makes a lot of sense. As a junior, I was running six-minute miles and when I was a senior, I struggled to break seven minutes.”

At the time, it was so frustrating that Taylor’s plan was to play basketball, not run cross country in college. After her diagnosis, though, and months spent sick from chemo, she was more thanready to try running again.

“Once I couldn’t run anymore because of the chemo, it turned out I was very upset that I couldn’t,” she said. “Once chemo stopped, I started to run again.”

That led to a chance encounter with Lycoming head cross country coach Katie Sick one day on campus as she got set for a short run and an open-ended invitation to join the team. Taylor didn’t think much of it, but a member of the team, Ella Scott, happened to live across the hall from her and she convinced her to give it a shot.

“It was humbling because I had forgotten how hard it was to run for that long,” she said. “I hadjust been doing 2-mile runs. As I started to get stronger, I was able to do everything everyone else was doing. I started to get my strength up and started to lift, which I hadn’t done all summer, and doing hill workouts, which I avoided at all costs. With the motivation from mycoaches and teammates, I actually started to like running again and it was a great environment to be in.”

By the end of the season, only nine months removed from those chemotherapy sessions, Taylor was one of the team’s seven best runners helping the team to a program-best 23rd-place finishat the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional.

“That was probably my favorite meet of the whole year,” Taylor said. “It was a perfect temperature and Lock Haven’s course is flat. My family was there. Everyone wanted to PR that day and there was no better day to do it. I was always close in time with Bella Fave and Maddy O’Connor. We work together as a group and push each other. Maddy ended up passing me andas she passed me, she said ‘Come on, let’s work together. Let’s go.’ Everyone was just pushing and we were doing it for more than just ourselves and that made a big difference for me.”

Her times are still not where they were three years ago before the lymphoma started to take hold of her body, but they are getting better quickly.

“I definitely am doing more hills than ever before,” she said of her summer workouts. “I want to make sure I come in and not struggle. I want to help the team from the beginning, not just at the last meet.”

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There were a lot of reasons Taylor, who wants to be an elementary school teacher, didn’t think she would be a student-athlete when she finally got to Lycoming College last August. Sure, she was only eight months removed from chemotherapy, but she’d also been out of school for a year. She wasn’t sure what the transition to college classes would be like. As it turned out, she said being an athlete made it easier in some ways.

“Having practices every day, I could schedule my days out a bit clearer – class, practice and homework – I didn’t have time to sit around and do it later,” Taylor said. “That helped a lot.”

Taylor also said that the supportive professors helped a lot, as she finished her first year on campus with a 4.0 GPA.

“One of the reasons I picked Lycoming is I knew the professors were amazing,” she said. “They are so understanding with everything I had going on. One of my favorite professors, (Assistant)Professor (of History Laura) Siddelmeyer, would always ask about the meets. I don’t think a lot of them knew that I had taken a year off and that I’d need that extra help, but they were so understanding and helped me to do my best.”