Goodness me, it's Gym up North(bank)

10 Runners ran 7.5k to help clear leaves for St Saviour's Church in Pimlico.

GoodGym on a Thursday?" I hear you cry. "I thought the monthly drinks were last week!"

Indeed they were; this was something different though - a special one-off run in collaboration with The Northbank, an organisation promoting the Business Improvement District of Trafalgar Square, Strand and Aldwych. They're the ones responsible, among other things, for the lovely Christmas lights that have just gone up for the very first time all the way along Strand. More information here.

A group of 11 runners assembled at Somerset House, including several new faces and even one GoodGym runner from Bristol who was here for the day. After a brief intro from Ivo and Charlotte from The Northbank, we headed outside into the unseasonably mild air for a quick warm-up from Axel, and then over Waterloo Bridge to, err, the South Bank (sorry!) for a nice 4km route along the river. But that was good in that it meant we could admire the North Bank in all its glory from across the Thames!

Crossing back over at Vauxhall Bridge (runners, watch out for the pedestrian traffic lights on the north side - they take an absolute age if you obey the Red Man, as we ALWAYS do at GoodGym...), we headed up to Pimlico, and our task at St Saviour's church. Given the time of year, there was a huge amount of leaves on the pathways and flower beds around the church, and it was our job to collect and bag them all up to leave the area nice and tidy and safe.

We split into three teams of three, each aiming to bag up the greatest weight of leaves in the limited time we had available. We managed to get rid of the vast majority of the leaves, with two of the teams each filling four bags, and my team just two - though in fairness we did pack the leaves in a lot more tightly so they probably weighed as much anyway - it's hard to tell with leaves. (Coincidentally, which weighs more: a kilo of leaves or a kilo of soil? Answers on a postcard please.)

For the run back, we stuck to the North Bank, but added in a couple of sprint intervals. The first was roughly half a kilometre down to Lambeth Bridge at 80% intensity, with the focus on keeping ourselves tall, with arms at right angles and pumping them backwards and forwards rather than across the body at all. Then after jogging again past Westminster, we had another sprint burst of about a kilometre back to Waterloo Bridge, possibly at slightly less intensity as we were a bit tired by then! Back at Somerset House we did a few stretches outside, then went our separate ways; north, south, east and very-far west (i.e. back to Bristol!)