Viens M'Attraper Running Fast and Free Together in Paris

Try to Keep Up

The name says it all. "Viens M'Attraper" translates roughly as "come and catch me," and there is something perfectly honest about that. This is not a crew that softens its edges to seem more approachable. It was built on the idea that you can train with genuine intent, chase real times on road, track, and cross, and still end up somewhere between a sports club and a group of friends who would happily share a holiday together if a marathon happened to fall on the Sunday. That tension between seriousness and warmth is not accidental. It is the entire point. When a handful of close friends gathered in Paris in August 2018 and decided to start running on their own terms, the brief was simple: compete at their best, and do it together. Everything that followed grew from that.

A Club Built Against the Grain

There is a specific frustration that serious recreational runners know well. The traditional athletic club can offer structure, training partners, and access to tracks, but often comes wrapped in hierarchies, bureaucracies, and customs that belong to another era. Viens M'Attraper was a direct answer to that frustration. The founding group wanted the competitive infrastructure of a real club, the track sessions, the race calendars, the shared training load, without the weight of outdated conventions sitting on top of it. What they built instead was something closer to what you might call a sporting household. Everyone knows each other. Everyone is invested. The bonding that other clubs treat as a side effect is here treated as a foundation. Based at KIEZ Kanal in Paris, the crew now numbers around fifty members, each one part of something that was deliberately kept human in scale.

The People Who Make It Run

Any honest account of Viens M'Attraper has to start with Vince, the crew's founder, president, and coach. He is the one responsible for the training plans, which is another way of saying he is the one responsible for the suffering. His athletes will tell you both things in the same breath, and the affection in the complaint is unmistakable. Vince is the engine of the operation, the person whose vision shaped what the crew is and whose daily presence keeps it moving forward. Around him, a group referred to simply as "Le Bureau" handles the rest. Mathilde is one of the fastest runners on the roster, a social specialist and the person who keeps the crew's visual identity sharp through her photography. She also handles Vince on a daily basis, which the crew notes with the kind of deadpan warmth that comes from genuine familiarity between people who spend a lot of time together. Charles brings a different kind of literacy to the group. As a sport and lifestyle journalist, he is deeply embedded in the culture surrounding running, the brands, the races, the conversations happening at the edges of the sport. He is, by his own admission, more in love with the idea of running than with running itself, and that self-awareness is part of what makes him good company. Then there are Raphaëlle and Naomi, who together manage the logistics, the events, the coordination, and the quiet work of making sure that both things and people are, as the crew puts it, running smoothly. In a group this tight, those roles matter more than any title could capture.

Speed Sessions and Shared Suffering

Training at Viens M'Attraper is built around two weekly sessions, both of them oriented around speed. On Tuesdays, the crew gathers for a Speed Run, a track session focused on sprints and fast work. Thursdays bring the City Fartlek, another session of high-intensity intervals that takes the same energy and applies it to the city's terrain. Both sessions run year-round, regardless of season, which tells you something about the crew's temperament. There is no off-season here, no coasting through winter and revving up in spring. The commitment is continuous. The pace is fast. The discipline behind it is real. This consistency is not accidental. It reflects Vince's approach to coaching, which takes the long view on fitness and treats the calendar as something to be used rather than endured. Whether the goal is a track personal best, a road marathon, or a cross-country race, the sessions are designed to build athletes who can compete across disciplines. That versatility is central to the Viens M'Attraper identity. The crew does not specialise in one format and dismiss the others. It trains broadly, races broadly, and finds something to chase in every distance and every surface.

Paris as Training Ground

Paris is a city that rewards the runner who pays attention. It is dense, layered, and relentlessly interesting at street level, the kind of place where a single route can pass through five distinct neighbourhoods with five distinct textures. Viens M'Attraper is embedded in that landscape in the way only a crew of locals can be. The routes, the meeting points, the post-run rhythms, all of it is shaped by an intimate knowledge of how Paris moves and where it opens up. Running here carries a particular charge, especially in a group that cares about pace, because the city does not always make it easy. The traffic, the cobblestones, the parks and their unofficial protocols, navigating all of it together is part of the shared experience that binds a crew over time. The choice of KIEZ Kanal as a home base is itself telling. KIEZ is a concept rooted in neighbourhood culture, the idea of a place that belongs to a specific community and reflects its values back at it. For a crew that was built around friendship and locality rather than institutional membership, it is a fitting anchor.

Competing Together

One of the images the crew returns to when describing itself is the idea of going on holiday with your mates, except the marathon is part of the Sunday program. That image is worth sitting with for a moment, because it captures something that most sports clubs struggle to articulate. The race is not the entire point. But it is very much a point. The social life of the crew and its competitive ambitions do not exist in tension. They reinforce each other. Runners who genuinely like spending time together train harder, push each other more honestly, and show up on race day with something extra that is difficult to manufacture through discipline alone. This is what Viens M'Attraper figured out early and has built its culture around. The camaraderie is not a reward for training. It is part of the training. The meals, the trips, the shared suffering on the track, the pride in watching a teammate run a personal best, these things are not separate from the crew's athletic life. They are woven into it.

An Invitation That Earns Itself

Viens M'Attraper operates as a members-only crew, which means entry is earned rather than assumed. That selectivity is not about exclusivity for its own sake. It is about protecting the quality of the relationships that make the whole thing work. A crew of around fifty people, where everyone knows everyone else and the bonds run genuinely deep, requires a degree of intentionality about who joins and how. The culture that Vince and the rest of Le Bureau have built is specific enough that it needs to be maintained, not just expanded. For the runner who finds their way in, though, what awaits is a version of the sport that is hard to find elsewhere. Serious coaching, real competition, year-round training sessions that demand your best, all of it wrapped in the kind of warmth and humour that only comes from a group of people who have chosen each other deliberately. Follow Viens M'Attraper on Instagram to see what the crew is chasing next.