Some people fund-raise for their kids’ schools with bake sales. Others might go door-to-door to ask for donations. Greg Senyo is not one of those people.
Seventeen months removed from a heart attack that required three stents, the 47-year-old set out to hike 301 miles in 10 days from his home in Temperance to the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania.
People who had previously done similar trips believed he would have to slow down or quit altogether. Senyo explained that he woke up in pain every day of the journey. As the unexpectedly strong heat rose from the asphalt roads he traversed, he contemplated giving up. And yet, come day 10, he was dipping his torn-up feet in a river and sipping a Miller High Life at the cabin that marked his finish line.
“When you’re under duress, you try to talk yourself out of doing it,” he said. “That’s what it did to me. My mind made things harder on me at times, like ‘Oh another hill, oh another hill, you know, oh another hill. Why am I doing this?’ And then you remember why you’re doing it. For me, it was really important to put the work in and make a sacrifice that doesn’t directly benefit me.’”
The background
As he updated his progress on social media, viewers donated more than $6,000 to his sons’ Bedford High School lacrosse team. The Kicking Mules are technically a club team and thus only partially funded by the school.
Julia Porter, the president of the school’s booster club, explained that the school has been nothing but supportive of the team, but the financial strain on public schools in the state limits their ability to spend more on athletics. Thus, the boosters fund-raise to ease the financial burden on parents. This includes contributing funds for equipment, jerseys, meals at away games, team dinners, and paying coaches’ salaries.
While the boosters usually rely on more traditional tactics, such as sponsorships or donations from local businesses, that is not in Senyo’s DNA.
“The person that he is, he’s one that doesn’t just go out and ask for donations,” Porter said. “That’s just his personal belief: you put hard work in to show hard work pays off. Instead of going out and submitting donation requests or sponsorship requests to come up, he walked about 300 miles and put the work in.”
The team seems to share Senyo’s same grit and determination. Despite competing against schools with bigger budgets, nicer equipment, and longer track records of success, the Bedford boys lacrosse team won a conference title this past year.
Not only did they win, but they did so in the biggest situations. Of their 12 victories, four were decided by just one goal, including two in overtime. Josh Vislay, an assistant coach and former player with the program, believes that the underdog mentality is a fundamental part of the team’s identity.
“We have that chip on our shoulder,” Vislay said. “We say, ‘Everything is earned and nothing is given.’ Many teams look past us because we don't have the bright new shiny helmets or the abundance of resources many other programs have access to. It's that grungy garage gym style of blue-collar, hard-nosed mentality that this team and the community were built on. It makes the success on the field much sweeter knowing how hard you had to work for it.”
The team was not always this way. When Vislay played there from 2014-18, the Kicking Mules were something of a laughingstock. Other schools would automatically chalk up the game as a win on their schedules. Some of his own classmates did not even know that the school had a lacrosse team.
In 2025, they will return nearly the entire roster from a team that made it to the second round of the regional playoffs, and their internal expectations will continue to rise. Their goal is a regional championship, and then a state title.
The journey
Before he left, Senyo mapped out a path with public campgrounds to sleep at and packed roughly 43 pounds of supplies. He reached out to friends along the route to enlist their support. And then, steeled by his will to set an example for his sons — Bryce, a rising junior, and Callan, who is entering the seventh grade — and the players in the Bedford program, he set out on the road.
Much of the trip was not the idyllic camping scene some might imagine. With no company for much of the journey and needing to preserve phone battery for navigation and check-ins, Senyo moved alone with his thoughts. He walked mostly on highways and train tracks, making sure to avoid the cars whipping by.
The most difficult part of the trip came in the first few days, Senyo said. As his mind and body adjusted to the grind, the conditions were at their most treacherous. For dozens of miles in Sandusky, he walked along seemingly never-ending scorching asphalt without any shade in sight. At the same time, he realized that he had underestimated the heat and needed to reconfigure his gear.
“I think he had to dig down deeper,” said Jeff Liskay, a longtime friend who came by to take some gear from his friend’s pack so he could carry more water.
“Everybody knew it was going to be hard, because I know a lot of people who do this, and they were like, ‘He’s going to hit a stumbling block and have to regroup.’” Liskay said. “He just dug in. I think he just changed his thought process of how long he was going to hike, what he was going to hike, how to take breaks, I think it was a learning curve for him.”
Those early adjustments were critical. Senyo realized that he could slow his pace, take breaks as he needed, and simply lengthen his day. With each pause, he reminded himself that it was not a race.
More than any strategic shift, he credits others for keeping him going: not just his support groups who brought him supplies, offered him cold showers, and places to sleep and eat, but random strangers who saw him struggling along the side of the road and brought him some much-needed cold water.
Once he made it out of the sun and past the first set of mental roadblocks, the physical wear and tear began to set in. His body rose from each night’s sleep aching a little bit more. Every step put more weight on his already throbbing feet. But come sunrise each day, he broke camp to keep moving forward.
By the time he hit the Pennsylvania state line, he knew he could make it to the end, even though the most treacherous mountainous terrain lay ahead. While his body continued to grapple with the strain he placed on it, he had won the battle in his mind.
In his Instagram updates — which can be found @pack.mule300 — Senyo does not hide the pain. The point of the hike, in fact, was to show the adversity he faced and to continue through it. For Senyo, fundraising was only a secondary objective to showing the youth in his community what they could achieve.
“The reason we typically do social media is to show people the best aspects of our life,” Senyo. “For once, I needed to show this is just what determination and hard work and suffering look like.”
His updates omitted any mention of his heart attack or his three stents, as he wanted to avoid sympathy or anything that would divert attention toward himself and away from his core message and the kids. Although he recognized that such a story could have raised more money, he would not sacrifice those values.
In his final videos after he made it through, the relief and joy of not having to put on a pack are clear. But even in those exhausted and exhilarating moments, he deflects the attention away from himself, instead spending the time thanking everyone who helped along the way, reminding the children watching what the journey was all about and urging viewers to contribute to the GoFundMe.
The future
Senyo is not walking the same path again next year, but he hopes to continue the spirit of Pack Mule 300 by getting the Bedford high schoolers involved. While he will not subject them to the harshness of the trail, the goal is to run a 24-hour event where students do 50 miles in 24 hours, with community members pledge to donate for their success.
“It’s going to show them what 300 miles was, and if they’re capable of doing something harder than what they think they can,” Senyo said. “It’s about finding that next level, finding that next layer of what you are capable of.”
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