Bromance Athletic Club Running on Friendship and Trail in Paris

From Late Nights to Early Mornings in Paris

There is a specific kind of friendship that survives the transition from a nightclub exit to a 6am alarm. Bromance Athletic Club was built entirely on that transition. Founders Maxime and Julien had been friends for a decade before they laced up together. They were, by their own honest admission, the party harder kids. Weekends belonged to going out, staying out, and not thinking too much about where the night was heading. Then, somewhere around their mid-twenties, the logic shifted. The mornings were too rough, the nights no longer worth the cost. So they did what friends with something to prove to themselves sometimes do: they started running. It was not a dramatic resolution or a health scare. It was quieter than that. A shared sense that they wanted to save their health and, in their own words, their soul. Running gave them a reason to keep spending time together that did not require a bar tab or a recovery day. It gave them something to work toward. And in 2015, that something got a name: the Paris Marathon. Training for 42 kilometres through the streets of the city they grew up in, the two were inseparable. Their girlfriends noticed. The nickname that followed was inevitable. They called them the Bromance. The two friends laughed, accepted it, and filed it away. A couple of years later, when they were ready to take things further, it became the name of their crew.

An Instagram Account and a Reason to Grow

In January 2017, Maxime and Julien created their Instagram account under the name Bromance Athletic Club. The decision came from three clear instincts, each one practical. They wanted a space to document and share their stories and challenges as runners. They had also noticed that running culture, as it was blooming on social media, was fundamentally social: everyone seemed to be running in pairs or trios, which meant every crew was already, in some sense, a bromance. And there was a third angle: both of them worked in digital professionally, so connecting their daily craft to something recreational and personal felt natural and honest. The account was not built to chase followers. It was built to record something real. Within a few months, the circle widened. Friends joined. Colleagues joined. Friends of friends showed up on Sunday mornings and did not leave. A core team of eight people formed organically, drawn together not by a campaign or a hashtag but by the simple pull of a group that was clearly enjoying itself. With more runners came more ambition. The distances got longer. The terrain got rougher. The crew moved from road marathons to long runs and then, with a shift that changed everything, to trail running.

Trail Running Changed Everything for the Crew

Trail was the real game-changer. That is how they describe it, and the weight of the phrase is accurate. When the Bromance Athletic Club members stepped off the pavement and onto dirt, everyone fell in love with it. The sensation of running through forests and along ridgelines, navigating by feel rather than by kilometre marker, suited the crew's character. These were not people drawn to running for its efficiency. They were drawn to it for what it opened up, and trail offered something the road never quite could: wildness, unpredictability, and the kind of physical honesty that reveals exactly who you are by kilometre thirty. The shift to trail also brought new structure and new connections. The crew earned the attention of Asics, who came to support them in tangible and meaningful ways. Through that partnership, Maxime, Julien and their teammates got access to professional coaches, received technical running gear built for the discipline, and received invitations to major races. The crew now carries the informal but proudly worn title of Asics team trail amateurs, a designation that captures something true about who they are: serious enough to train properly, grounded enough to never forget that the whole thing started as two friends trying not to waste their weekends.

Three Routes Through the Heart of Paris

The Bromance Athletic Club runs three times a week, and each session anchors itself to a different stretch of the city's geography. On Wednesday mornings at 6:45, the crew meets along the Canal de l'Ourcq, one of Paris's quieter waterways, where the light comes in low and the towpaths offer a long, uninterrupted line through the northeastern edge of the city. The canal has a working quality to it, a sense of the city before it fully wakes up, and running along it at that hour feels like belonging to a Paris that most people never see. Fridays begin at 7am at Buttes Chaumont, the park that Parisians who know the city well love more than any postcard landmark. With its steep paths, its artificial cliffs, its lake and its suspension bridges, Buttes Chaumont is essentially a trail run smuggled inside a city park. For a crew that has fallen hard for trail, it is the obvious choice, and the park's dramatic topography means that no two laps feel quite the same. Then on Sunday mornings at 9am, the crew meets in Montmartre. The cobblestones, the climb to Sacré-Coeur, the narrow streets that spill out onto views of the whole city spread below: it is the kind of run that reminds you why you chose Paris in the first place.

Around Twenty People and One Core Idea

Today, the Bromance Athletic Club counts around twenty members. It has grown slowly and by proximity, the way crews that last tend to grow. No open recruitment drives, no entry tests. Someone runs with the group once, then again, then they are simply part of it. The team is close in the way that reflects its origins: this was always a crew built on the logic of friendship first, and that logic has not changed as the numbers have grown. What holds the Bromance Athletic Club together is something more durable than a shared training plan. It is the understanding that running was chosen deliberately, as a replacement for something that was not serving them anymore, as a way of investing in each other and in themselves. Maxime and Julien made that choice in their own lives, and the people who have joined them since share some version of the same story. They run together through the parks and canals and hilltop streets of Paris, and they do it with the ease of people who genuinely want to be there, on a Sunday morning, at 9am, climbing toward Montmartre together.