On this weekend I planned to go to the U.K. and run a loop course made up of the West Highland Way, Mary Queen of Scots Way, and Rob Roy Way. My starting point was to be the town of Aberfoyle where in the morning I would take the northern route on Mary Queen of Scots then head down the West Highland Way to reach the town of Rowardennan. On the next morning, I planned to return via the Rob Roy Way, grab a shower back in Aberfoyle then head to the airport. However, while weather is always unpredictable (and not always nice) in this area, an Atlantic hurricane, Lorenzo, was headed directly for Scotland. While I like a difficult run, it didn’t seem smart to venture out into a hurricane, even if its force was diminishing. I opened up Google Flights and started to look for other destinations that I could get to via a direct flight on a weekend from Stockholm. The best flight I found, and to a country I also hadn’t done a significant run in, was to Paris, France. I booked the flight and emailed the hotels hoping that they’d let me cancel. Thankfully they did, so the re-routing didn’t cost me too much money, so it was time to plan the run.

I started my normal progression of looking for nature parks, evaluating Strava heat maps and searching for ultra-runs to find a good route in or around Paris. The route that came to the top was the tracks for the Ecotrail Paris run. I’m familiar with this event organizer since I ran another one of their runs in Brussels, Belgium, which was an excellent course. I decided on using the first 50k of their 80k route as it is almost entirely trail. I looked at the map a few times because it seemed hard to believe a route through such an urban area could be made up of so much trail, but it is true.

I arrived in Paris late on Friday night and found my pre-booked car for the ride to the Auberge du Manet hotel in the southwest of Paris. As we were leaving the airport, the driver mentioned that one terminal was closed, which I could tell from the long lines of cars on the entry ramps. Just as he finished talking, there was the sound of a massive explosion. You can imagine my surprise, but he quickly said it was likely just the bomb squad blowing up a piece of luggage left behind. I searched on twitter as I thought someone must report it, but couldn’t find anything. Turns out, this is a very common occurrence at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, occurring over 2000 times in 2015 according to this article. The rest of the weekend was uneventful, thankfully.

I woke up early on Saturday to have breakfast and coffee. There was a light cold rain, so I wasn’t in a real hurry to get going. The track started out on roads for the first couple miles (3k), but then turned into a trail. From here, it was nearly all forest trail for the entire day. The trails were a mix of single track, forest roads and dirt paths through parks and forests. The leaves were still green as I was just ahead of autumn, and I saw a lot of runners out in the first half of the day.

The amazing thing about the entire day was how remote the trail felt despite going right through a very urban area. During the run, the only time the trail popped out onto roads was at about the 20km mark. I was thankful it did because it gave me the opportunity to get some water, twix and gummi bears at the Intermarché Super et Drive in Buc, France. I normally have these things at the start of my run, but I forgot at the airport, and assumed I’d see a shop earlier in my run. It’s a bad thing to assume there will be somewhere close by to get water, there almost never is when you need it.

The high-point of the day, near the 50k mark, is the Paris Observatory (Observatoire de Paris). The grounds are made up of manicured bushes and dramatic outdoor spaces bounded by stone walls. You can even see the Eiffel Tower in the distance from one of the large gardens. You can explore much of the grounds, except you cannot get into all areas, which meant I could not follow the Ecotrail course exactly. Since I always have my downloaded maps on Gaia GPS, that wasn’t such a big deal. I ended my day at the Ibis Paris Meudon Velizy hotel.

Paris turned out to be a great ultrarunning destination weekend. If not for an Uber drive who inexplicably took a wrong exit onto A86, the world’s longest underground urban tunnel. Here is a great video of the tunnel which is very calming, but at the time I was not calm since the wrong turn meant I would not make the Versailles tour I had signed up for. On the upside thought, I can say I’ve been in the world’s longest underground urban tunnel. However, if you start with this run for your weekend getaway, and plan a little more time, you are very close to all the central sights in Paris and can mix running and exploration in the same weekend. I hope you have as much fun as I did ultrarunning the urban trails of Paris!