Pond(ering) while we run

Tonight we ran around over 6km to tidy a pond, sweep up leaves and litter pick in Grangewood Park

Definitely getting warmer now which was lovely for the first half mile until we began to heat up and resemble our t-shirts! Tonight we ran to Grangewood Park in the Thornton Heath/Selhurst area to help out the Friends of Grangewood Park. They do fantastic work in the park making it an oasis in the middle of a built up residential area. Unless you know it was there it’d be easy to miss. Tonight our task was to sweep up the leaves around the pond and a beautiful mosaic and litter pick in the surrounding area. It was a fairly long run to the park with a rather huge hill at the end to tire our legs out so we only had 30 minutes or so for the task itself – however we managed to fill two huge builders bags with leaves and dead wood and a large sack with rubbish so a pretty good effort in such a short time.

On the way back we had a lovely downhill to the park exit and then the option of some hill sprints for our fitness – some runners opted in and some didn’t and I’m not going to name and shame because that hill looked pretty steep to me! Well done to those who hauled themselves up that long hill twice.

It was lovely to meet Clayton and Karen and to say hello again to Rachel B - hope to see you all back soon in your red GoodGym t-shirts. Good luck to Stephen and Rachel H with their 10k runs in London and Nottingham this weekend. Thanks also to Rachel B for coming up with the run report title and saving me lots on angst this evening!

On Bank Holiday Monday (29th of May) we have an exciting Starter session starting at 1pm at Heathfield House and Gardens where we will be working to help the bees who are struggling globally at the moment.

The following evening it’ll be our normal Tuesday evening run where we will be heading back to Addiscombe Road to help ECCO with some more ivy/bush clearing. This where we found our mascot Jim. Straight after it’ll be our end of the month social at BoxPark – hope to see lots of you there.

Finally…. Rachel will be doing her 50th Parkrun at Lloyd Park on Saturday the 3rd of June so we are hoping some of you can come along and then celebrate with brunch in the Parklife café followed by a crafty session making a flag for the GoodGym Olmpics and a GoodGym themed installation for Saffron Central’s Pride flag.