Keeping Cup Appearances!

26 GoodGym’mers came out on a Sunday morning to volunteer at the ASICS London 10K

Water way to spend a Sunday morning!

26 GoodGym’ers convened at the bright and early time of 7.30am on the Victoria Embankment ready to operate Water Aid Station 3.2. With everyone dressed in their red GoodGym tees, you could spot the team from a mile away!

Stack to basics

Fully briefed on the task at hand, fill and stack twelve tables with thousands (absolutely thousands!) of recyclable paper cups (as the race is now free of plastic bottles) - the team set to work.

JUG-gernauts

As often is the case when GoodGym runners come together, everyone worked together efficiently like a well-oiled machine, with everyone taking it turns to complete the 3 main jobs:

1. Delicately lay out and stack the cups on the tables.
   
2. Fill the cups two-thirds full with water using the supplied jugs.
3. Refill the water jugs from the large blue water containers so that the cups can be filled - a great workout for the quads and hamstrings!

It wasn’t long before the tables soon filled up with beautifully engineered and crafted cup stacks; this very much brought back memories of constructing card towers, however this was on a FAR bigger scale!

Hand and deliver

Place, fill, stack, repeat occurred for a good few hours, but it didn’t seem long until the team were given the signal to spread out along the barrier ready to hand out water to the first runners - as they say, time flies when you’re stacking and filling cups...

Bottoms-cup!

With 9,000 thirsty runners spread out across the 8 waves there was a steady flow of runners passing by the water station for over two hours, with many glad to receive a much needed hydration, or in some cases where it went straight over their heads, cooling fix!

Tourists, children on school trips and other members of the public passed by the water station and stopped to admire (or gaze in disbelief!) and photograph our wonderfully constructed masterpiece, ‘cup stacked tables’!

No giving cup the ghost!

The team also exercised their lungs and gave all the runners a big cheer as they came passed, with Paul in particular non-stop with his verbal encouragement. The loudest cheers definitely went to our fellow GoodGym runners, with “Go GoodGym” shouted all down the line whenever a red GoodGym tee appeared.

The tables turned

As the “course end” car passed-by it was time to initiate the clean up. The tables of leftover cups were quite literally ‘up-ended’, with many echoing Luis’ thoughts of “that was so satisfying”. Now was the big challenge, get all the cups into the large recycling bins! With some speedy stacking, sweeping and scooping it was only a matter of minutes before all the cups were off the road and into the recycling bins ♻️. Great job team!

Many thanks to you all for the fab photos!