More recovery

Pentecost is a public holiday in France. Well sort of - it's a very French thing. Whenver you can take something simple and make it extremely complicated then you can be sure that it's done in France.

Pentecost was made a public holiday in France in 1886. Everybody enjoyed a day off work, except under special conditions for jobs which require permanent presence (police, firemen, air-traffic controllers etc.) Then in 2004, after the summer of 2003 which extreme heat caused thousands of old people to die in the country, the french government decided to cancel the bank holiday and make everybody work this day. Companies were required to pay a special tax as a contribution for the elderly financed from the extra productivty gained from having an extra days labour from their employees (I won't go into how this doesn't work anyway following the amendments to the labour laws following the introduction of the 35 hour working week, as that's a different story ...). What a great idea - everybody agreed half-heartedly. This is when the confusion began. Some schools continued to not work on Pentecost meaning that many parents took the day off to look after their kids. Nobody knew whether it was a holiday or not anymore and so it has continued.

I was working today. But apparently, I was one of the rare people in France to be doing so. Driving into work was a real pleasure - 30 minutes instead of my usual 1h20 drive. We arranged to go for a run at 7:00pm at the club to recover from the Paris St Germain race for most. Laurence, Nico, François, Sandra, Pascal, Philippe, Catherine, Stéphanie, Christelle, Nabil and Nicoletta also turned up for our easy run.

I led the group through the woods towards Le Mesnil from the clubhouse and then wound our way back through the forest back to the clubhouse. It was 10km in total and an hour's leisurely run at a very easy pace for all. A lot of banter and joking went on and if only every day could be a bank holiday like this, life would be so much more pleasurable.

10km all up in 1 hour. I'll let you do the maths for the average pace!