Given that I train around 8 to 12 hours per week on the Bike and most of it is zone 2 aerobic riding does it make sense to not include any zone 2 runs in my training week and just do three quality runs mainly threshold and steady state/tempo runs and include some VO2 max sessions?
Every single year, like clockwork, the Mosta festa rolls in and the health centre car park vanishes behind fencing — fireworks setup, funfair, band club kit. And for a couple of weeks, if you actually need the health centre — if you’re sick, if your kid is sick, if you’re old and can barely walk — tough. Park somewhere else. Walk.
Sit with how backwards that is for a second.
And yes, before the pile-on: the festa is great, people love it, months of work go into it. Nobody is cancelling the festa. But I am done with the two lazy arguments people trot out the moment anyone dares question this.
“It’s religious.” Come off it. The saint is the excuse, not the reason. What actually drives the festa is fireworks, band clubs, rivalry, spending, pika — and that’s completely fine, enjoy all of it — but don’t dress a party up in sacred robes so it gets to steamroll everything else. It’s a party. A brilliant, loud, beloved party. It doesn’t get a holy exemption from common sense.
“It’s tradition.” So what? That’s not an argument, it’s an excuse in a nicer coat. Half the things we’ve binned over the years were “tradition” too. “We’ve always done it this way” is just what people say when they’ve got nothing better.
So take both props away, and here’s what’s actually left: a lot of people enjoy the festa a lot, for two weeks a year. Real. Worth something. Now put that on the scale against a man having a heart attack, a mother sprinting in with a limp child, an 80-year-old who physically cannot make it from wherever the nearest free space has been shoved off to.
And here’s the part that should make everyone squirm: the people who use a health centre are the exact people who can least afford to park far and walk. That’s the whole point of the building. So “just park somewhere else” doesn’t land on everyone equally — it lands hardest on the sick, the old, and the frightened. We’ve somehow built a system that inconveniences precisely the people it exists to help, and then we wave it through because — festa.
And you know exactly who’s counting on us waving it through? The politicians. Come festa season they’re all there, front row, shaking hands, eating imqaret, getting photographed being oh-so-close to the people. Not one of them will lift a finger to fix this, because they’ve done the maths: a handshake and a selfie at the festa wins more votes than doing the sensible, boring, correct thing. That’s the whole game. They govern for the next election, not for the country. Common sense loses to the ballot box every single time — and they’re betting a warm photo op will make everyone forget they let the health centre car park get fenced off in the first place.
The party can move. The heart attack can’t. You can stick a funfair anywhere on the island. You cannot reschedule someone’s chest pain for after the fireworks.
And don’t even get me started on the sheer genius of storing and setting off fireworks next to a building full of sick people.
So go on — tell me there’s some arrangement keeping real access open that I’ve missed. Or is this just the usual: it’s the festa, shut up, don’t complain, and hope to God nobody needs an ambulance before the last petard goes off?