While growing up a scrawny kid in the Midwest, he was inspired to become a distance runner in 1984 by Joan Benoit Samuelson's victory in the first ever Olympic women's marathon. He got to run a year of junior varsity cross-country, but personal family problems resulted in having to live with foster families between Indiana and Wisconsin for his high school years. With all of the emotional turmoil in his life at that time, he lost his self-confidence and his will to run.

Mark, during his sophomore year at Purdue University in Indiana, was, at 5-feet-11, a "small" 125 pounds at best. That year he was inspired by a triathlon he saw on ABC. Running, swimming, and biking. He could do that. Well, two-thirds of them anyway - at the time, Mark didn't swim.

A friend, started teaching him how to swim, and swim fast. He also started taking an Outward Bound Mountaineering class to gain weight and get into shape. And in the summer between his junior and seniors years as a Boilermaker, Mark ran his first Triathlon in his home state of Wisconsin.

Nine years, 33 more pounds and a qualification for the National Championships later, Mark is living in San Francisco and making an impact outside of his own pair of Nikes. While continuing to aim for the Olympic team in 2004, he is building an organization that is unique.

That unique aspect is something that Mark hopes to play up more. He is well aware of the stereotype in the straight community that gays can't be athletes as well. Mark also sees that stereotype propagated in the gay community, where athletics are often discouraged.

He later found that self-confidence again, and has become a high performance athlete after years of hard work. With Team Flame he hopes to "demonstrate to the gay community that's it's possible to be gay and be an elite athlete. We're here to facilitate that and to mentor up and coming athletes."

Team Flame has an active membership of five professional and elite amateur athletes, including Mark. All of them are openly gay and all individual sport athletes - three triathletes, a distance runner, and a sprinter. Mark hopes to attract athletes in team sports as well, but no active athletes have come out in the U.S. as of yet.

A big piece of what Team Flame does for its members is help identify sponsorship money. For many individual sport athletes, sponsorship money translates into the ability to travel to, and enter in, races and competitions. When Team Flame was originally founded, this was a huge concern for Mark, being a gay athlete.

To Mark's pleasant surprise, it didn't take him long to find Team Flame's first sponsor, Sports Basement, a sporting goods store in San Francisco. Since then, he has secured sponsorships from companies such as Clif Bar and Speedo. With more talk about gay professional athletes recently, Mark is starting to see another need for Team Flame - advancing the notion among closeted athletes that it's OK to come out. Also, Team Flame is reaching out to colleges and universities, and the NCAA. This, Mark hopes, will help develop a more gay-friendly environment in sports before athletes enter the world of professional sports.

When he isn't teaching aquatics at a local sports club, he's swimming 10 miles, running 35 miles, and biking 150 miles every week. And that's not including the yoga. He is now focused on training and racing to make a run at the U.S. Olympic Team in 2004. For Team Flame, he'll be looking for more sponsors and team members, and hoping that Martina gives a call soon.