GOODGYMBERRRRRRR!! Tree fellers have a Riley good night

It was another lovely evening and we had more lovely new people. Which is quite amazing and lovely. We congratulated Frances on reaching her 100th run with a party popper. Well done Frances!

After a nice warm up we split into two groups. One group went with Katie directly to Agnes Riley Gardens about 3.5km away up some long straight roads. It was quite warm, phew, but we got there and they were quite surprised by how many we were. Little did they know (until Katie immediately told them) that there was another group of almost the exact same size, led by John, that was on the way, they had just taken a longer route.

There was a range of saws and loppers and people got to work quite literally chopping down some large trees as well as pruning some fairly ferocious shrubbery. Some others took to neatening up the bed edges and even more did some lovely watering. A gang with wheelbarrows and trugs collected woodchip from over there and brought it over here. It was wonderfully organised (yet of course safe) chaos. We smashed the glass ceiling by insisting that they didn't need 'four strong men' to cut down trees and in fact showed them that a wonderfully diverse group of capable people could in fact achieve the same thing.

John took half the group and did some truly tough exercises with them involving some horror of a burpee involving a sit up. And he's relaxed having just come back from his honeymoon imagine if he was having a bad day lads?

With 5 minutes to go we were dragging the aforementioned ferocious shrubbery to a different resting place and the big tree branches had been chopped into smaller ones. The cut grass was taken over to the compost heap and you really would never have known we had been there except for the improved look of the place and the mixture of shock and awe on the faces of the lovely people who run the gardens.

'They came, they saw, they massacred', they said. Which was in fact a good thing.

And with that we ran home again, did some stretches and went our separate ways. EXCELLENT WORK!