I’m a bit late with my Paris weekend report, but we didn’t get back til Monday night (thankfully taking the Eurotunnel rather than the very-disrupted Eurostar!), and then I had to fly out to Dublin and back yesterday so things have been crazy! Seriously – three European capitals in three days? I feel like I’m on a Contiki tour!
We had a pretty busy schedule while we were in town, but a trip to Paris just isn’t complete without a visit to the Montmarte fabric shops (For more details on those please see my earlier French road trip & Paris fabric shopping posts!)
I’m so pleased we were able to squeeze in a meetup with Veronica again and have lunch, and since she knew I wasn’t able to go to her local fabric market with her this time around, she gifted me a HUGE bag of fabrics, in exactly the colours and prints I love!
Seriously, wait til you see the goodies she brought for me (photos coming later)!
As a teaser, check out the overflowing Tissues Dreyfus bag of fabric!
About half are from Veronica, then another 3 lengths bought by James, then 4 lengths bought by me!
But the main reason excuse for our trip was that I signed up to run the Paris Semi-marathon, which was my first-ever half marathon! I’ve been running for about 7-8 years now, but I’ve only ever run 10ks (with the odd 5k and 8k thrown in there).
All in all, I had a FANTASTIC race. I nearly missed the start due to the 45+min toilet queue (11 toilets for 25,000 runners??!?!?) but I held it in (both the wee and my initial speed) and kept a rock-solid pace throughout the entire race, which I’m super, super proud of. Around 14km I caught up to, then passed the 1:50 pace team, which felt awesome as that was my gold/wishing/hopeful/target finish time. I really pushed myself once we hit Notre Dame and I finished with an official time of 1:47:12!!
If you don’t believe me, all the official times were printed in L’Equipe the next day:
“SF” is short for “Senior Femme”, because, at 32, I’m considered a Senior! ha! (Anyone over 40 is a “Veteran”)
I just looked at my official 5-10-15km splits and I’m shocked to see I actually beat my 10km PB (Personal Best) during this race, too, omg! And by a full minute!
I was very lucky that James brought his DSLR and snapped me at about 11km and 16km – seeing him really perked me up and you can see me with my game face on until the moment I see him and then I get the big grin you see in these photos (and the rest of the Paris race photos here at the bottom of the page).
I brought my newly-sewn leggings along with me but didn’t wear them in the end as I wanted to minimise all possible worries and I hadn’t run in them enough to be sure the seams wouldn’t chafe. So in the end, I raced in my comfortable New Balance tights, Anthony Nolan vest for good luck, bright green Brooks jacket, and my super trusty Camelbak (I’m used to running with it and it meant I could sail past all the water stops and concentrate on not tripping on bottlecaps and orange peels!).
All this travelling means I’m totally craving a weekend at home, though, so I think I’ll get reacquainted with my sewing machine this weekend…
PS: Special, big shout outs to Karen, who joined me on the Nike Leap Day run last week, Cidell, who’s started running again in a big way and is my newest DailyMile buddy, and finally to Emiko, a FehrTrade reader who witnessed my very emotional medal ceremony at RDC this week.