Jogging in the gardens of Paris

It was with some trepidation that I pulled the drawstring of my workout pants and laced up my running shoes. I had never before jogged in a foreign country, let alone Paris! Yet here I was, about to walk down the narrow, quiet street behind my hotel in terribly unfashionable thick-soled sneakers and a mishmash of polyester and fleece to protect against the chilly weather. Pas tres chic! Not to mention the fact that I _ who like to know exactly how far I've run _ was heading to a botanical garden in the fifth arrondissement where the length of the paths was not clearly marked by a sign. Quelle horreur!

It was around 9 a.m. Saturday _ a late start by New York standards _ but most of the ancient Left Bank neighborhood was barely stirring. The cafe across the street from the Jardin des Plantes on Rue Cuvier had its sign board on the sidewalk but no one sipping espresso inside.

As I gazed somewhat cluelessly at a map just inside the park, a few kindred souls brushed past me and took off up shaded paths just beyond the gate. I meandered through a wooded labyrinth, skirted a little zoo, then turned onto a wider path that led into a very long, quite spectacular formal garden. Many joggers seemed to be gravitating there.

In New York, I run in Central Park, which was famously designed to look wild, even though every rock and rivulet was put there by design. Here, the artifice was evident. Two rows of plane trees bordered a large rectangle, inside of which were precisely laid-out flower beds, now dormant for the winter. The tops of the trees were lopped off, creating a boxy curtain above the well-groomed pathways.

I joined runners already doing loops up one shaded alley and down the other. From the top of the rectangle, in front of a stunning Beaux-Arts building that houses the Museum of Evolution, the tree trunks receded in the distance, offering a long, serene perspective of a distant park entrance, and beyond that, the streets of Paris. I felt as though I were running through an airy tunnel, with the sun glinting through the canopy of colored leaves.

Around and around I went, at one point catching a glimpse of a dinosaur skeleton through the glass windows of another museum that was part of the larger, natural history complex. The dirt-and-gravel lanes were surprisingly forgiving, an easier surface to run on than the asphalt paths of Central Park.

Some of the joggers were strikingly different than those I was used to seeing in New York. They seemed perhaps new to this odd, obsessive, American pastime, as though they'd decided the night before _ perhaps over a pack of cigarettes, a plate of foie gras and a bottle of vin rouge _ to "faire du jogging." Some wore the tattered, old, baggy clothes people in the United States used to wear before jogging got big, before microfiber polyester, nylon and spandex transformed athletic gear.

Perhaps the elite Parisian runners were elsewhere, working out along the more challenging Viaduc des Arts or in the Bois de Vincennes. But I felt at home here in the Jardin des Plantes, especially after two weeks of nearly daily consumption of pate, cheese and baguettes smeared with butter. I didn't even care how far I ran, or that the distance of one of the alleys was a mere 500 meters - a third of a mile.

As I slowed to a walk after about a half-hour of loops, all I could think about was how very badly I wanted to come back here to run down those beautiful rows of plane trees. The elegance of the gardens, the carefully placed sculpture, the collection of great buildings and greenhouses preserving France's prized collections of crystals, fossils, rare plants and minerals _ I felt like an aristocrat in spandex and running shoes.