Breaking the rice

With a smaller group than the last time we visited The Ealing Food Bank ( which was a record breaking run back in January! ) last night we had 11 awesome runners come out to lend a hand sorting, shifting and cleaning down at this vital community resource. We also had one new runner Rachel join us so a big welcome to her!

Is it spring yet...

With the chilly weather still lurking around (come on spring, get your act together!) we started with a quick warm up with a few exercises (which made you all look ridiculous!) but I promise they are all legitimate running drills! And then we were off into the night to do some good.

We arrived to meet Hilary who had a list of jobs for us to complete which included a lot of shifting and resorting as well as weighing donations and a clean up too. We quickly sorted ourselves into small teams across each task get everything covered in the time we had. Everyone got straight down to it and stuck in with their assigned missions and it was clear this would be a smooth operation...

Creating a rice breaker...

And then a crash! I knew it had to be Michael... A little mishap with shifting the rice donations resulted in a bit of a breakage but luckily it was just the storage containers and it didn't leave us with a big clean up operation!

Once everyone was settled into their jobs myself and Larissa popped around the corner to help with a secondary task for the evening at the local night shelter to see if they needed a hand with anything for the evening. We've been visiting at this pop up winter night shelter for the last few weeks alongside our other tasks to lend a hand where they need it and next week is their last night for the year so we'll be back one more time!

Light work was made of all the jobs on the list and once we returned from the shelter to regroup we were ready to head for home. The first of us to arrive back made use of the time with some core exercises and squats before welcoming in the last runners for some stretches.

Lastly just a quick thank you to Michael for back marking the run and being second in command on the task. Michael is a vital asset to our GoodGym group and is on the taskforce for Ealing, something lots of you are keen to be involved with which is great to see! If you're wondering how you can be involved just ask me at the next group run!

Happy Running!