Take the Long Way (to the care) Home

Welcome It was ace to welcome 4 new runners tonight - Ginnie, Jordan, Lauren and Michelle. It was great to have you guys, you did awesome on your first run! We hope you had a great night and will get your T-shirt on order and come back for another task sometime soon!

Kudos Some great running this week from some of our regulars. Suzanne, Rachel and Karl all taking part in the Conwy Half Marathon - well done guys! A great achievement.

Thank You A big thank you to Phil for all his efforts in getting Radio Stoke to come down and run with us last week and for all the subsequent air time that GoodGym has received on Radio Stoke since. Nice work Phil! Also, a big thank you to Pam and Barry for being our diligent back-markers once again this week (I am in total awe of your endless energy!!).

The Task We started the evening off with our usual warm up (a slightly shorter version than normal, as tonight we had our longest run to date, so needed to make sure we left enough time for everything!), which got the heart pumping. We set off on our run to the Mayfield Care Home where we were going to spend the evening chatting (and playing cards etc if they wanted) with residents. When we arrived, we were greeted at the door by a an extremely startled Jed! He wasn't expecting to see a 'bus load' (his words, not mine, haha!) of people turning up at the door at 7.15pm on a Wednesday night. Once the correct member of staff was located and Jed had recovered from the shock, we made our way into the main lounge where we were greeted by some very surprised residents (13 sweaty runners in bright red t-shirts is probably not a sight they're used to at 7.15pm in the evening!). Everyone had a lovely time getting to know the residents who live there, finding a common ground and learning a little bit about them. It was great to listen to their tales and find out more about their interests and some of the things they'd done in their earlier lives. As always, I think we got more out of it than the residents, although I do think we put a smile on their face which was lovely. It would be awesome to visit there again at some point in the future. Thank you for having us Mayfield Care Home! On our run home, we took a route via our little training spot (aka the Rocky Steps!) and did a short fitness session in honour of the residents we'd just visited - we did some sitting based exercises - cycling, leg raises etc. On the way back, it was great to chat to some of the members about how much they felt their running had improved since starting GoodGym.

Thanks for another great task everyone. I absolutely love being with you all on a Wednesday night. Love getting to know you all, love the laughs and love the feel good factor that I get every single week! Next Week, we're sorting food at the Crewe Foodbank (St. Paul's Pantry). I really hope you can join us for this one - I think it's going to be a cracking task!

Have a super week everyone and keeeeeeeeeep running!

Big hugs and see you soon, Nicola xxx