Tout Terrain Club Chasing Trails and Techno Above the Côte d'Azur

One Person, One Loop, One Decision to Share It

The simplest origin stories are often the most honest. Sometime in the early summer of 2024, Alex stood at the trailhead above Nice, looked out at the limestone ridges and maritime scrub rolling back from the Côte d'Azur, and decided that running all of this alone did not make sense. So he stopped doing it. Tout Terrain Club was the result. Not a grand plan, not a brand strategy, not a mission statement drafted in a co-working space. Just a person who loved trail running and wanted company on the hills. That kind of uncomplicated honesty tends to attract people, and in Nice, a city pressed between the Alps and the Mediterranean where trail access is woven into the urban fabric like almost nowhere else in Europe, it did exactly that. The crew's founding run was a 12-kilometre loop with 500 metres of positive elevation, held every Monday evening. A moderate distance, a real climb, and a start point at Port Lympia, the old port neighbourhood on Nice's eastern edge where fishing boats and apartment blocks share the waterfront in comfortable proximity. That loop became the spine of what Tout Terrain Club would grow into. It gave the crew a rhythm, a shared reference point, and the kind of weekly ritual that transforms a group of strangers into something resembling a community. Before long, a Thursday session was added, launching from La Gare du Sud, the former train station in the north of the city that has reinvented itself as a cultural and social hub. Two routes, two departure points, two different slices of the same extraordinary city.

The Trails That Shape the City's Edge

Nice is not a city that keeps its wildness at a polite distance. The trails begin almost immediately once you leave the coast, threading up through olive groves and Aleppo pines into the Parc Naturel Régional des Préalpes d'Azur. The Baou de Saint-Jeannet, the hills above Èze, the ridge paths that look back over the Baie des Anges and out toward Corsica on a clear morning: these are the landscapes that Tout Terrain Club moves through each week. For a running crew, this geography is an extraordinary gift. Each new route can feel genuinely different, not a variation on a theme but a distinct experience shaped by altitude, light, and terrain. The crew has leaned into that variety, deliberately designing its Thursday sessions to explore different parts of the city and its surrounding hills. The intention is always to find somewhere new, which in a place like Nice is not a difficult ambition to sustain. Running trail in an urban context also means navigating the transition from city to mountain, from tarmac to technical ground, often within a single kilometre. That transition is part of what defines the Tout Terrain Club experience. You gather at a port or a converted station, exchange a few words, and then within minutes you are gaining elevation, catching your breath, looking back at a city that suddenly seems very small below you. That abrupt shift from the urban to the elemental is something road running in a city can rarely offer, and it is one of the reasons trail running around Nice carries a particular satisfaction that is hard to articulate but immediately felt.

A Community Built Around Shared Effort

From the beginning, Alex built Tout Terrain Club as an open crew. No membership fees, no application process, no prerequisite pace or experience level. The crew welcomes everyone from people lacing up for their first trail run to seasoned ultra-trailers who have spent weekends at UTMB or the Laveredo Ultra Trail. That range of ability and experience could easily create friction in a group setting, but Tout Terrain Club has structured its sessions to make it work. The Monday Happy Trail session at Port Lympia runs at an easier pace, providing an accessible entry point for newer runners or those who simply want a lower-intensity evening in good company. The other sessions push harder. The crew understands that different people need different things on different days, and it has built that flexibility into its weekly rhythm. Beyond the scheduled runs, a WhatsApp community keeps the crew connected throughout the week. Members share plans for longer weekend efforts, swap information about upcoming races, offer advice on gear and nutrition, and organise informal group outings that fall outside the regular calendar. That layer of connection matters. It transforms the crew from a twice-weekly gathering into a living network, one that operates on a human scale and stays responsive to what its members actually want. In a sport that can sometimes feel solitary even when practised in groups, that sense of ongoing dialogue is part of what makes Tout Terrain Club feel genuinely communal.

Captains Damien and Julien, and the Work of Growing Something Real

Alongside founder Alex, the crew is led by captains Damien and Julien, two active members who help shape the sessions, welcome newcomers, and maintain the energy that keeps a young crew moving forward. Building a trail running community from scratch in under a year requires consistent presence and a willingness to show up even when the numbers are small, the weather is uncertain, or the pace of growth feels slow. That kind of quiet, sustained effort tends to go unacknowledged in the narratives that get told about running crews, which tend to focus on the big moments rather than the ordinary Mondays when three people turn up and run anyway. Tout Terrain Club is still in those early years, which means the work of Damien and Julien in keeping the momentum alive is as important as any single event or route the crew has created. The crew also organises a monthly meeting event, a more structured gathering that brings the community together outside the context of a run. These occasions give members a chance to connect with faces they recognise from the trails but have never properly spoken to, to share stories from recent races, to plan future adventures together. In a crew that spans the full spectrum from beginner to ultra-trailer, these social moments build the kind of mutual understanding that makes mixed-ability running feel natural rather than forced.

Trail to Techno and the Shape of What Comes Next

Perhaps the most distinctive thread in the Tout Terrain Club story is still being written. The crew has recently begun developing what it calls a trail to techno event, a concept that brings together trail running and electronic music in a way that pushes past the conventional boundaries of both. The idea sits at an interesting cultural intersection: the physical intensity and immersive solitude of trail running on one side, the collective energy and sonic abandon of techno on the other. Both involve a kind of surrender to rhythm. Both reward endurance. Both are, at their best, experiences that dissolve the usual noise of daily life and replace it with something more direct and more alive. The trail to techno concept has not yet reached its final form, but the crew has identified it as central to its future identity. It represents an effort to push harder while also connecting more deeply, to find a new way of using running as a vehicle for shared experience. That ambition says something meaningful about what Tout Terrain Club is reaching toward. The crew is not content to simply repeat its founding loop indefinitely. It wants to grow in a direction that is specific to Nice, specific to the people who make up the community, and specific to the particular combination of landscape, culture, and energy that the city makes possible. That kind of intentional evolution is rare in a crew less than a year old, and it suggests that the most interesting chapters of the Tout Terrain Club story are still ahead.

The Open Invitation on the Hills Above Nice

Tout Terrain Club gathers every Monday at 7pm at Port Lympia and every Thursday at the same hour at La Gare du Sud. The runs cover medium distances at a moderate pace, with the Monday Happy Trail session offering an easier alternative for those who want it. No experience is required. No fee is charged. You show up, you run, you find out what it feels like to move through the hills above Nice with people who are genuinely glad you came. The WhatsApp community is open for anyone who wants to stay connected between sessions, and the monthly events give the crew a social dimension that extends well beyond the trails themselves. For a crew that began with a single person deciding they did not want to run alone, Tout Terrain Club has built something with real texture and real momentum in a remarkably short time. The trails above Nice have been here for centuries. The crew that runs them together is just getting started.