Trail Running in Greece

C and I traveled to the small island of Syros, capital city of the Cyclades, Greece, to celebrate the wedding of two good friends of ours (I do recommend making friend who plan to get married in Greece, it was one of the best short vacation I ever had).

In short, this is how we spent 10 days: visit in the “morning”, awesome meal selected by the newly husband, chill out on the beach with our group of friend. So. Hard.

Syros looks like that:

The occasion was too good to pass, and I had some training to catch up with.

My first run was an exploratory one. Just to get a sens of where we were staying and to locate the locale beach. I ended up finding a coarse road that climb on top of the local mount.

My second run was faster/flater, a round trip to Hermopoulis (the main city) along the sea shore. I’m a lazy guy and have a hard time to wake up early in the morning, specially during my time off. So I ran around 11 am with the sun already high and a temperature around in the low 30°C.

For my last run on the island, I wanted to go through the historic city of Anos Syros and climb to the radio station, which should be the highest point of the island, via a former shepherd trail.

After a good number of stairs and some detour in the maze that is the old city, I reach the trail head and started the final climb. As I said, it was a former trail. I expected it to be usable as I found it on the locale hiking group web page, but it was more ruins and my run got upgraded with some parkour.

I eventually reached the top, drank the view by buckets. I could see the sea on the other side of the island.
On the way back, I took the easy road and stopped (again) at a bakery to get some local patisserie.

We spent the last two days at Athens, visiting everything we could. On our last morning I went for an early run and was surprised to find a lot of trail around the Acropolis and the mounts on its west side. And it was early enough that I was all by myself, enjoying this beautiful environment.

Welcome back to Toronto

Originally published at gravier.io on June 26, 2015.