Mark is the athlete in the family.
Let me tell you what an athlete is:
An athlete is someone who never lets a day go by or a challenging location stop them from pursuing their physical passion. And for Mark that is currently the discipline of trail running.
I can also tell you that an athlete also appears to be someone who is always sore, endlessly tired, and often asleep by 8:30pm because said passion is usually so strenuous that they wear themselves out before most of the non-athletes even get out of bed.
During our visit to Meteora, Mark found some awesome trails to run. But these trails were more like the kind of activity more suited to a monk pursuing the harsh religious disciple of self-flagelance—scourging oneself in an act of repentance.
But Mark thought this sounded like fun. So while Chloe and I were still fast asleep, Mark was jogging up the vertical trails to the Monasteries that are literally just a mile or two shy of celestial planets, so it’s a climb.
After the lazy among us woke up, Mark would show us some awesome trail photos and tell us a few stories from the day’s run. It also meant that after a hot shower he then had to climb up once again to the very same monasteries he’d already jogged up to just hours before.
But we didn’t feel sorry for him or his aching burning calves as he climbed all the way back up. He’s an “athlete” who decided to pursue his passion at the crack of dawn whilst Chloe and I were pursuing our passion…sleep.
It was all worth it for him. Those maniacal trails made it into Mark’s top-ten, all-time favorite trail runs. That said, Mark might be burning more calories pursuing his passion, but from the sounds of his moans and groans as he lugged his sore calves back up the trails, we are fairly certain that when it comes to Meteora, once is better than twice.
