A weekend in Paris
A grand 42.2K tour of the City of Light
Of all t he races in t he world, Paris provides perhaps t he best running tour of its cit y. The st art ing area t akes over t he entire Champs-Élysées, one of the most famous streets in the world. Looking back in the corrals are more than 40,000 runners, as well as the looming Arc de Triomphe, which will later serve as a visual queue that t he f inish line is near.
The race starts on cobblestone streets, which can be challenging to run in the opening kilometre. But the boulevard is wide and can accommodate the stream of runners as you pass the Grand Palais and through the Place de la Concorde. Every step of this race could also function as a historical tour of Europe. Here is where King Louis xvi and Marie Antoinette were publicly guillotined during the French Revolution. At the centre of the square is the Luxor Obelisk, a 3,000-year-old giant stone pillar given to France by Egypt that once stood at the entrance of the Luxor Temple. Immediately after exiting the square the Tuileries Garden is to your right, which then spills into the home of the Mona Lisa, the Louvre Museum.
At 5k, you pass through another square, Place de la Bastille, and see an extraordinary monument, the July Column, built of 21 bronze drums. If you look carefully, you can see the names of those who died in the July 1830 revolution carved into the bronze in gold. After exiting the square, which gets throngs of cheering spectators, you’ll run past the Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opera.
The next stretch of the race heads east and away from the Seine River. Paris is f lanked on both sides by two large parkland areas, often referred to as the “Lungs of Paris.” The easternmost lung is the Bois de Vincennes, Paris’s largest park, created by Napoleon. Before it was a park, the area was a hunting retreat for 12th and 13th century French kings. This cooler, quieter area will give you a bit of reprieve from the city running (although Paris is remarkably calm and relaxed on race morning). As you run through the park you’ll spot a zoo, a horse track and the Chateau de Vincennes, which-many of the kings of France once used as their home.
The race spends about 10k in the Bois de Vincennes before heading west, back into the city proper once again, through the sleepy 12th arrondissement. Just after the halfway mark, you’ll hit one of the most thrilling parts of the race, running right along the northern edge of the Seine River. Here you can take in the view of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
Curving along the north shore of the Seine towards the Left Bank, the Eiffel Tower will suddenly come into view, and you’ ll run right by it and the grounds of the 1889 World ’s Fair (for which it was constructed). The Eiffel Tower marks the 30k point of the race, as you head west away from the Seine. The bulk of the remaining 12k is in the westernmost “lung” of the city, the Bois de Boulogne. This park was built by Napoleon iii (t he more memorable one’s nephew), and is just a bit smaller than the Bois de Vincennes. The park is beautiful, and like most of the Paris Marathon route, fairly f lat , but of course it ’s a challenging st retch at t his st age in the race, with few spectators. In the last kilometre, you emerge from the Bois de Boulogne, onto Avenue Foch, with the Arc de Triomphe looming in the distance. As you run towards it , you cross the f inish line, and gather with over 40,000 other runners from nearly every nation in the world, beneath one of the great monuments of triumph over adversity in Europe.