Litter picking for dummies

Oh what a wonderful evening it was, when 4 fabulous GoodGymmers set off in search of litter and beat the street boxes!

It was such a stark contrast from last week, with the sun shining down on us all. Full of beans, the task for us tonight was a general litter-pick/plog of the town centre, whilst running a pre-asigned route to beep as many of the Barnsley's Beat the Street boxes.

Beat the Street is a community wide competitive game in Barnsley, that has been established to get the community out and about and keeping fit. The game is running for 6 weeks, and during this time, teams compete against each other to run, walk or cycle to as many of the boxes (attached to lampposts) and beep their cards. At the end there are prizes! It's a great initiative to get people more active, and GoodGym Barnsley couldn't miss the opportunity to be involved!

Tonight's route was to be approx. 5km long, with 8-9 boxes to find. Armed with gloves, bags and our cards, the four of us set off in search of box one. On the way and between the boxes, we picked up any litter we could find - this as usual included plastic, plastic, plastic and lots of cans and bottles! Some unusual finds this evening however, included babies dummies! We're not sure if it's something to do with the time of year, perhaps babies shed their dummies in summer, but we found at least 3 of them on our 5km route! How very odd!

Once we arrived at Locke Park, having climbed the hill and beeped three boxes, we were overloaded with lots of rubbish! We shed our load and went in search of the park's box, which was easier said than done, as there aren't many lampposts in the park and it's not exactly something you normally look for! We did eventually find it though and claimed our double points for enjoying one of the towns green spaces!

We took a break from beeping in the form of tonight's fitness session, which I had planned around the Moby song Flower. The lyrics included the words "Green Sally up and green Sally down. Lift and squat, gotta tear the ground" over and over again for 3.25mins, which is perfect for a variety of down and hold exercises! We split the song into three parts, with 1 minute of squat holds, 1 minute of press up holds (harder than it looks!) and one minute of bench dip holds! The group definitely felt the burn!!

Back to base we headed, nicely down hill and bagging a further three boxes on the way. We finished up with some nice stretches and said our goodbyes and see you laters!

Another great evening, good running effort from everyone and a further 320 points for team GG Barnsley! Hurrah!

Join us next week where we'll be helping Age UK with a painting task and bagging more beat the street points for our team! Sign up here.