Au Revoir Paris!

Oh mon dieu it is good to be back home! I just spent two weeks taking training in Paris, and yes, it was beautiful and fun but it was also time away from my family that I missed so dearly. Leading up to the trip I was very worried about my swollen knee and how it would react to being at 30+ thousand feet. Needless to say, it throbbed and hurt a lot but I managed to refrain from calling a mid-air emergency both ways. I hobbled off the plane after 11 hours and walked for another 2 trying desperately to find my hotel (it seemed so straight forward on Google back at home!). Once at my hotel I got settled and tried to recover from my first bout of jet lag. All I'll say about that is that jet lag sucks and it took 3 days for me to feel normal again. Somehow I managed to get to work the next day though and stay semi-conscious, with the aide of 3 double espressos. My leg eventually felt better, but then the constant (and I mean constant) walking of over 6km a day (sometimes 16!) left me hobbling back to the hotel day after day looking for an ice pack. I tried my brace, but it chaffed my leg and was insanely hot in the 35 degree weather that is June in Paris. I think if my mother hadn't joined me for the second week I probably would have spent the weekend in my air conditioned room instead of walking for 10 hours each day, but hey, I saw the sights right? Jury's still out on how I feel about that. So no, I didn't join the throngs of runners endlessly running in the beautiful streets of Paris at all hours of the day, but I felt my endless walking was making up for the shorter runs I'd normally be doing. After a day I figured out why Parisians are not overweight (or even seem concerned about their weight). It isn't their diet, although more fatty and heavily laden with carbs, is mostly free of fast food and pre-packaged everything. Their secret is the insane amount of walking they do every day. These people have functional fitness down to an art. Seriously. I saw two people in two weeks who would be considered overweight, and not once did I see an obese person in a wheelchair or huffing and puffing up stairs. The runners I saw ran with such a relaxed pace it could almost be called "jogging" (gasp!). They often stopped for walk breaks and I didn't see one doing anything close to speed work or checking their watch for their splits. And I saw hundreds of runners. I just wished that I could have been one of them, even for a short run.