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I was in Paris last week for about 10 days to give training at an aerospace customer. Weather was about the same than here: cold in freezing point temperature and cloudy, so not the best time to be there.

I was staying in a hotel in the Porte de Clichy area. On my first night there, I took a longish walk in the neighborhood. My first feeling was ’sensory overload’: so many people, cars everywhere, very dense presence of stores of all kind, crowded sidewalks, etc.  After half an hour or so, I stumbled upon one of Paris landmarks: the Moulin Rouge cabaret. I am sure you have heard about the movie of the same name.

From my hotel room on the 6th floor, I could see the Effeil Tower in the distance. If you remember, a year ago I posted pictures of the monument…

 After a 2 weeks break from training, it was time to get back into running, but it was not an easy thing to do on weekdays: all parks were opened only from 9am to 5h45pm during winter hours. So I resorted to run in the dense urban area, which meant a lot of stop and go, crowded sidewalks, and REAL busy intersections to cross.

On Saturday, I could run in the small park behind the hotel, doing a countless number of loops to get my 30 minutes in. After that, I walked toward downtown. I ended up walking for over 4.5 hours. I got into very big crowds near the big shopping areas like Galeries Lafayette. Near there, I took a few pictures of the ‘Academie Nationale de musique’.

My walk then brought me at ‘Place Vendôme’, all decorated for the holidays.

Keeping walking, I then arrived at the beginning of ‘Champs-Élisées‘, one of the most famous street in the world also part of the final stretch of the ‘Tour de France’. For the winter, they have a big wheel at one end. I was cold so I warmed up with a glass of warm wine.

I walked it till the ‘Arc de Triomphe‘, another big landmark in paris. I went on the top of it in 1997, but this time I just looked at it from below

After that, I walked back to the  ‘Champs-Élisées‘. As daylight was falling, the neighborhodd came to life.

On the Sunday, I went to the Louvre Museum (I will post pictures in a separate post) for a quick visit. It ended up in a big weekend of walking and running, which may have contributed to my demise on Monday evening’s run. On a small 45′ run (9km), my hip flexors started to hurt. I stopped running before it got too bad and decided to eat at the hotel to avoid further walking. Even then, a sudden movement during diner caused my left hip flexor to snap. After that, I was not even able to walk anymore that evening, and I limped hard for several days afterwards.

It’s now been a week, and I am still not 100% and not ready to run. So much for taking time off training to give the body a break… Sounds like I may have been better not stopping hehe!

Food was awesome there and with the lack of exercise of the past weeks, I now have an extra 8 lbs and the holidays have not started yet… I’ll have to start taking control of that.

More pictures and larger versions below.

Paris Walk 2010

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 5th, 2010 at 8:40 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.