Vblurb

Every Friday evening in Paris, a lot of people gather at Montparnasse to go for a 3h ride around the city. It's a different route every week and yesterday, when I went there with David, it was 28Km long. That's pretty damn long... Ok so we stopped 2/3rds of the way in but it was still a lot of exercise!
I hadn't gone in years and it was groovy to go again, especially since we had a few "schuss" when you go real fast because there's a slope down. These were due to tunnels/underpasses where there's a nice slope down, a very flat smooth surface to speed in and then the slope back up (usually a killer, especially the 4th one...). It's great to be amongst so many skaters going really fast, so much so that you don't realise your own speed cause your reference is the skaters around you, not the surrounding buildings or the floor which whisks by too quickly. And you get the sound. The sound of hundreds of roller blades rolling along. It's awesome :)
A little adventure happened to us along the way. Before leaving, we cleaned my skate's wheels, taking them off, cleaning the "rotating agents" and then putting them back on. Now, about 15 minutes in the rando, we hit a cobblestones street and my front wheel starting getting really loose. So I had to stop and hail one of the organisers for help for a key. Turns out one of the bits had fallen off so he told me to sit down, took that wheel off, took the second wheel and put it at the front. At which time, of course, the rest of the people were far ahead of us. So the organiser said "ok we're going to have to go fast"... We started off and went pretty fast pretty steadily for a good 7 minutes I'd say, to catch up with the rest of the gang. By which time David's heart was being a bit funny and he wasn't feeling too well. He decided to go on anyways and bravely (it would have been foolish if he'd collapsed but he didn't...) went on. When we finally decided he really needed a break and we should stop, we were in a place I absolutely don't know, in the north West (very West) of Paris and I had no clue of how to guide us home. And I'd forgotten the map. So we carried on for a bit till we reached Gare St Lazare, which is where the official rest-stop was meant to be anyways.
By then I was pretty damn tired as well - cause they're all good skaters, so it goes pretty fast, and we'd had quite a few hills to ascend! - so we decided to grab the metro to get home, even if we had to wait 30 minutes (it's still the middle of a big transportation strike here, so the metro is free but there are hardly any running). And luck of all lucks, we got a metro just when we got there! Running down the stairs to catch it was a killer after a good 1hr30 spent in roller blades (so weird on the foot) but we were very happy to catch it!
Aaand.... we're not even that sore today :D (ok after lots of stretching and hot showering but still!)