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March 13, 2026
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Photo: Antoine Guichard
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Paris doesn't ease you in. Gare du Nord at 3pm is already a full-contact sport, North African spices drifting out of food stalls, the metro exhaling warm air onto the street, pigeons with the confidence of locals who've seen it all.
I'd come to run the Hoka Semi de Paris, the world's biggest half marathon, 48,000 runners somehow corralled into a single city on a single Sunday morning. Which felt, standing in that particular chaos, like the most optimistic thing I'd done in months.
The night before, a small group of us had been invited to a pre-race dinner. Not the carb-loading-in-a-school-gymnasium kind. This was a restaurant that normally wouldn't be caught dead serving pasta, concrete floors, metal furniture, lighting that cost more than my first bike.
Around the standing metal tables, two very different relationships with running had somehow agreed to share a bread basket.
On one side, the kind of runners who look malnourished by design, lean to the point where you worry for them, then they open their mouth and quote lactate thresholds at you.
On the other, the new running crowd. All black kit, carefully dishevelled hair, the ones who found running sometime between a pandemic and a personality and never looked back.
The plan for the 21.1 kilometers was 78 minutes, agreed upon weeks ago in the rational hours when such things feel entirely manageable. In the pre start chaos I only found one other runner from our group. We settled in, smooth and controlled, the city opening up around us.
By kilometre five we had lost each other. The pace was exactly where it should be but something shifted.
The labrador in me took over: this is my favorite thing to do. No pace. No objective. Just running hard through the foggy streets of Paris, crossing the Seine, free of any asks.
Running has always been the discipline that humbles me most. Swimming has technique to hide behind. Cycling has equipment. Running gives you nothing (although: how good are super shoes?!).
I'd spent the winter ski touring, building what felt like a respectable fitness. My first run back disagreed. There's a specific sharp protest the legs make when you ask them to run at anything above slow motion, the same feeling as walking into a gym after a year away. The body's way of saying: we remember this and we are not ready to forgive you yet.
It doesn't matter who you are. The running gods are completely indifferent to your CV. Every step a new compression, a new system check you cannot cheat. On the bike you can sometimes negotiate: sit up, soft pedal, hide. Running notices everything. Every small weakness, every shortcut, every week the shoes stayed by the door.
By the time I crossed the finish line, the fog had lifted and Paris was finally warming up, the crowds loud and generous — the way only French crowds can be once they've had their morning coffee. That fulfilling feeling of having done something hard for 71 minutes. Not complicated, not technical, just hard.
I've always had a complicated relationship with running. It's the discipline that broke me the most, humbled me the most, and somehow keeps bringing me back.
I only realise how much I love it when I can't do it.
But on a Sunday morning in Paris, running free through foggy streets with the labrador fully in charge, it made perfect sense.
It always does, eventually.
Signing off for the weekend,
Jan.
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