May Day--the observation

Date	Place of exercise	Duration (minutes)	Classic Sprint	Pull-ups	Dam Sprint	Start time
2 May	Park	49	54.30	5		09:58

          A beautiful day. A holiday recognizing 1 May. The park was full of people even at the late time when I began the run—10 am.  During the final sprint, I forced myself to sprint. My legs were hurting, but they weren’t giving me the grief that I became used to during the last several months of tightness and unwillingness to even move. Dodging around the puddles and broken concrete, while I didn’t achieve another record, my time was surely respectable.

          My legs are really feeling fine. I came home the other day and I just had this feeling that they were loose. I lay on my back and raised my feet straight up. In the recent past, just this move would have brought out the screaming dogs of pain. This time, however, I was easily able to grab a big toe, thereby stretching the long muscles on the back of the leg, the hamstrings.

          My left shoulder is still healing from an injury which occurred on 18 February on the ski slopes in Montenegro. I’ve written about this injury before; the most memorable anecdote was when an Albanian ‘physical therapist’ told me that even though 15 seconds before the fall on the mountain, by shoulder was fine, and 15 seconds after the fall, my shoulder was injured, the fall was NOT the event that caused my pain. I put physical therapist in quotes because Albanian and American PT is done differently. In Albania, they try to massage the pain away. They rub, rub, rub, and ask over and over, “does this hurt.” It’s actually a lot like that old cell phone commercial, “Can you hear me now?” They continue this until they get an affirmative answer and then they poke that position many times.  This strategy has some positive effects, but I prefer the American Way—possibly because it is the old story, “You like what you are used to.” 

          I went to see the Albanian doctor—actually three Albanian doctors—because the American doctor was having some issues so she wasn’t working. Eventually, she came back and my insistence calling the clinic where she works paid off because they sent me a message telling me to make an appointment. I was so persistent, in fact, that the doctor lengthened her working day so that she could see me. 

          In the end, she worked on me in a very similar way to the injury in the right shoulder during the last half of last year. The injuries are very similar. The bad thing is that this time, the injury is worse, so it will take longer to heal.  Oh, well, I have time. 

          The length of my run today was quite a bit longer than usual.  I didn’t spend that whole time running. Much of the time was spent walking next to an acquaintance who works at the UN, so today, she wasn’t working.   

          It seems that every other country in the world sees May Day as a really big holiday. They celebrate workers and the institution of working on this day. The country where it might be the biggest is Russia. They take a huge number of days off. Another big holiday, probably even bigger, is May 9—Victory Day commemorating Russian victory in WWII.  Many people take these days, and all the ones in between off work—more than a week. Some people actually celebrate a holiday called May Day in the US, but it’s not big, I don’t understand what it is for, and there is no official respite. I seem to remember something about kids walking with ribbons around a pole. I also remember when I was a kid, my mother trying to get us to make something like May Baskets, and we were supposed to go to neighbors and chase them around the yard or something. It never really caught on, because we were the only ones doing it, and like I said, I didn’t understand what I was doing.