The stereotype that French people are “rude” has always bothered me. I’ve found that the gesture of attepting to speak French, even a rough “Bonjour”, is met with respect. Mutual respect. If you worked at a hotel in Manhattan as an Anglophone and a guest checked in and insisted on only speaking Estonian, wouldn’t you be a bit frustrated? Anglophones expect the rest of the world to bend for them. Why should a Francophone be any different when we are in their home? It’s usually only former non-Imperialist countries that are humble enough to understand that the whole world doesn’t revolve around them and their language.

Anyhow. Guillaume proves my point. Only a few years ago, a total stranger to me. Some years ago, I wandered into Distance in Le Marais in Paris. I was told by my friend Joe that there was this cool new running store that we needed to check out. At the time, “cool” and “running” were not usually words that one would put together in sentence. Sure, the brands “Satisfy” and “District Vision” existed but was still quite niche, and unknown to most. Most of us (runners) were wearing whatever was put out by Nike, Adidas, ASICS, etc. Not that this was bad, by any means, there was just nothing out there in a more directional aesthetic, and if there were, it would only be stocked in fashion concept stores, instead of sporting goods shops.

And then there was light. For me, Distance did it. Walking into the small shop on Rue des Filles du Calvaire, I was immediately confronted with a curated selection of what running could be and has become. And then there was Guillaume. Tall. Thin. Fluffy dark hair. Large eyes. And very little English (at the time). My French is slightly better than OK-at-best, so we were able to get along pretty well right off the bat. And just like that I felt like I’d gained a new friend.

Anyhow. That’s a long time ago now. The running “scene” is different. Running is cool. Smaller brands are at the forefront, and Distance is responsible for a lot of that. Just to note, Distance is not a one-man-show. There are other players who play pivotal roles in the success story, and I do not mean to diminish their roles by any means. In fact, likely they will appear in a Context story at some point as well. But now it’s Guillaume.

Some years ago, Guillaume asked me if he should open a new store in Copenhagen or…I think Amsterdam was the other option. I told him about the massive running communities I had witnessed in my time there and tried to convince him to choose my city. It must have worked to some extent, because in mid-October of 2023 I’m waiting at the Arrivals door at Copenhagen Airport in Kastrup for Guillaume to arrive. I bring a Danish flag and he walks through the door to find himself in a glass-walled hall with only dark clouds on the other side of the windows. I ask him to take a photo with all his bags and then we board a train for the Central Station. Guillaume is opening a store in Copenhagen and he’s here to oversee the last few days of construction before doors open.

We arrive at the station, and I walk with him down Gammel Kongevej while photographing. We enter the space and find an all-French crew building up the fixtures they have fabricated for the space. I grab a few photos of everyone and head off to photograph Virgil in the city center, who’s Context you’ve already seen.

Guillaume is a person who, through Distance, builds a community. One person at a time. One group run. One quick run together after he closes the shop.

For this story I went to Guillaume’s apartment to run around Bois de Vincennes with him before all the Copenhagen store stuff I wrote about above. At dawn he lets me in to drop my cameras and clothes. We loop the fields and forest while low fog looms. In the past years I have not spent as much time running with Guillaume as I would have liked. Guillaume has seen me very depressed and stressed at Fashion Weeks over the course of the past years, and it somehow had created some, no pun intended, distance between us. But this run seems to bring it all back.

Through the thin language barrier, we chat as I try to breathe. Guillaume is an excellent runner so his ability to converse is much greater than mine while running. But regardless of the lack of oxygen uptake, we seem to reconnect to some degree. This is what I love about sport: connection through mutual suffering. It’s the strangest phenomenon. Trauma bonding.

As I write this from the couch in Milan, I’m looking forward to arriving in Paris next week and hopefully finding the time to run with friends. In fact, I think I’ll send Guillaume a text now and see if he’d like to run. Or maybe he can just read this in an hour when I post it: Hey man, wanna run together in Paris next week?