Why Paris?

So you want to live in Park Slope Department
(Overheard while on a Prospect Park six-miler)

“I don’t even know if he is a guy.”


Why Paris?

It isn’t for the runners, all seemingly well to do and oh so many Americans contentedly running along the hushed-stone main paths of Parc Monceau.

Or the cobbled walkway along the Seine, which is both uneven and yields too many dead-ends into tunnels chock-a-block with cars, always bumper to bumper (at least in the one in which I ran for about a kilometer – not so smartly along a narrow ledge for emergencies, which cars zoomed past with zero regard to my foolish presence).

Or the rare bike lanes.

Or in certain arrondissement sidewalks where you’re just as likely to see a scooter as a person, driven by not just messengers and delivery folks as one finds in New York City but by all manner of men and women professionals in helmets, fast-moving burners who like New Yorkers seemed so much in a hurry but unlike New Yorkers unconditioned to seeing runners as they zip around the myriad blind corners of the old city.

Or for the prospects of running along the Canal Saint Martin, an inner city waterway that one would think would draw evening joggers, even more so to the north, the Canal de l’Ourcq, with its hushed-stone surfaces that make for pick-up bocce games. Not so much. At the northern end of Canal Saint Martin in June 2012 the Sally Ann deliver services to the down and out, all men, hungry-looking with pinched Orwellian faces, thirty clochards per evening runner.

Or for the tourists that clog up the Seine sidewalks at twilight, folks grabbing a postcard souvenir or a Tour Eiffel magnet for a 2 euro piece, and then back on the bus.

If I didn’t run in Paris I’d discover none of this. I’d be in Prospect Park. Or at the entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery, listening to the squawk of the Quaker parrots. Paris is a place where running feels as unique as it did when I first started thirty-plus years ago. That is, except in Parc Monceau. Where if you care to run in USA-like 2012, be my guest.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Why Paris?