Tarpaulin' at our hamstrings

Another Monday night, another evening of doing some real good in the local community and getting fitter in the process. Last night we ran a huge 10k to the amazing, glittery Work and Play Scrapstore, and we had some lovely new runners along for the ride! Throw a big cheer Kate and James's way to welcome them to the group!

After saying our hellos, we said well done to Amy who absolutely smashed park run with a huge PB on Saturday. If you want to do an Amy and get those times right down then why not check out your local parkrun? They are free 5ks all over the country every single Saturday morning at 9am - our closest here in Wandsworth are at Tooting and Fulham Palace, so get yourself down and start getting nailing those PBs!

During our warm up this week we sung a very tuneful happy birthday to the lovely Ella and then put a question to the group. What is the most interesting thing you've ever eaten? Answers ranged from jellyfish and locusts to the little plastic fork you get in fish and chips (Nick!). But the winner for most unusual/disgusting thing eaten goes to Jenny, who we had to bid a sad farewell to as she jets off on her exciting travels last night, for her answer. A tiny snake in a shotglass. The horror.

It was a longer run down to the scrapstore, so we set off at a steady pace, stopping at traffic lights to do some conditioning exercises and keep the group together. After 5k we arrived to find Rachel waiting for us ready to hand out jobs.

The scrapstore is an amazing charity which promotes re-use of materials that would otherwise go to waste for environmental, community and artistic benefit. It relies on volunteers to donate clean and re-useable surplus materials destined for incineration and landfill to schools, charities, community groups, arts organisations, students and families. And on the 5th December they will be turning the fine age of 30 years old - as Rachel said, we're invited to join them then to help celebrate and maybe do a job or two.

We soon set about cutting and folding tarpaulin, sorting plastic bottle lids, shifting bulky bits from the storeroom and boxing up tiles, and after half an hour of work, we had finished the jobs that, as Rachel said, the volunteers found hard to do. Great job, team.

The choices for the run back were perhaps a little over complicated, but we managed to make our way back to Earlsfield station, where we could either take public transport or run the remaining route back to the BAC - tackling that long hill at the same time. Well done to everybody, whatever you option you took, for it was a fair old run this week.

We got back to our starting location to wave good bye to Jenny - don't forget us and send us lots of pics from those Cape Town parkruns! - and to finish off the night with some stretches. Next week we're back to the Omnibus theatre to do some window washing for this great arts charity.