The Paris 50K: Running therapy?

I didn't post last week and I don't like falling behind my weekly pace... But I'll argue that I had three excuses: spending quality time with the family while grieving Agnes' mother, attending to my parents in Paris for a weekend and fighting a bad cold or the flu.

Right after my personal Ohlone, I flew to DC then Geneva and, between this time spent on planes and meeting people who recently went through a cold, I finally caught a bug, darn! Not to mention the fatigue from all these personal events and the stress at work.

Bottom line, it was hard to run but I felt it was necessary to hit the pavement and the trails to heal. However, in retrospective, it's hard to know for sure if that was the best thing to fight the cold as I'm still coughing and sneezing two weeks later... I wish I could say running helped me getting back to shape faster, but I'm not sure. Well, for one thing, I didn't really go for short runs either...

While in Sezanne in Champagne, I went for a 10-mile run through the vineyards and woods. The vines are all green now, many winemakers were out to take care of their vineyards.

In Paris, I worked on Friday and took an hour break to circumnavigate the Parc Montsouris 10 times, a nice 0.95-mile rolling lap right in the city.

On Saturday, I went long on a course which I feel could become an official event. From Stade Charlety, I ran toward the Coulée Verte (see my 2007 detailed description) which I hopped on at Porte de Chatillon, at the entrance of Malakoff. I already wrote several times on this blog about this amazing path linking Paris Montparnasse to the train station of Massy-Palaiseau, along one of the TGV lines.

Last year, I went on and discovered a continuation called ID35, another bike path and trail which prolongs La Coulée Verte down to Saclay-Bourg.

On my way back to Paris, I crossed hundreds of pilgrims between Clamart and Chatillon, on their way to Chartres. This is a yearly pilgrimage, 62-mile/100km long, which exists since the Middle Age but has been revived 100 years ago, just before WWI. Nowadays, it gathers about 15,000 pilgrims and I felt like a salmon swimming against the current as I was running against the flow!

While these runs didn't really take care of my bad cold, they helped releasing some stress so I'm glad I went out! And I hope you did too!