Springtime and Running in Paris

On Sunday, after min-numbing flights from the US to Paris and a normal amount of indignities, I arrived at my Paris hotel in the mid-afternoon on what was an amazing warm springtime day. Our meetings were set to start the following day (Monday) so I had a late afternoon and evening to get ready for a week of traveling.

Within minutes after arriving, I had put on my running shorts and singlet, gathered my iPod and set out from the hotel to romp around the Bois de Bologne. The park is the equivalent of Central Park for Paris, a sprawling, vast complex of trails, kids play areas, lakes, leafy trees, and just endless areas of green. Immediately after leaving the hotel, I could feel the pleasant warmth beating down on my skin in the late afternoon. With GPS watch working well, I could easily track my time and distance but was in no hurry to beat any records for speed and would rather enjoy the great day outside.

Though I had run in the great park several times before, I purposely wanted to find new trails and roads that I never seen before both for interest and for beauty. There were parts of the run that nearly brought tears to my eyes both in beauty and enchantment with the Parisian stereotypes so present. There were couples holding hands, lying together on the grassy slopes, eating and drinking together, and just lazing about on a wonderful Sunday for them. Then there were the dogs. Of course the dogs. I started out thinking I could count the number of them, but gave up on that notion. I saw big dogs, small dogs, yapping dogs and lap dogs.

I was struck by the amount of hounds that were off-leash and seemingly well behaved, none of them ran after or tried to attack me, as often happens on my runs in Petaluma. I saw bums drinking on the benches, old men playing bochy ball and the immaculate perfectness of bulbs and flowers in bloom, with colors so bright that they hurt my eyes believing that they were real and not fake. On one of the loops, I saw this 3-4 year old boy laying on his mother’s lap, with a half-eaten bag of potato chips sitting on her chest and this fantastic smile on his face that was mirrored on hers.

In the end, I did about 7.2 miles in a fairly slow pace listening to some great tunes and watching (but not hearing) the world go by on a warm, spring day in Paris. I wish words could describe what it is like when the body seems effortless to move, sunlight is filtering through massive trees, and there is a feeling of life that is being lived going on – and yet I’m just a stranger visiting their land. Though no one knew that as I ran by and smiled on the inside and outside of the sometimes absurd nature of our lives ….