10 Pauls at the Pickle Factory? Paul the other one!

A completely surreal but absolutely brilliant last run as trainer tonight began with the arrival en-masse of 13 Bristol University medical students who had all decided to join us for the night as part of their vounteering assignment. Thanks for joining us folks!

This made the warm up circle pretty large but feeling I had things nicely under control we moved onto the usual head count. However, when rather familiar looking faces began appearing and giving their names as Paul that I realised things were not quite as under control as I had thought. Each time I thought we were back on track another Paul would pop up and I pretty soon realised that possibly this wasn't the evening to plan on separating people into odd and even numbers :) Thanks for making me laugh though Pauls!

With 48 runnners needing to travel the 3k to the Pickle factory a group split was essential - so thanks to Dave for being ever-dependable and having claimed not to know the way in fact succeeding in finding all the short cuts that I had missed!

I'd prepared Stuart for a big turnout - but not this big, so it was fantastic to arrive and find he had come up with an array of jobs to keep everyone occupied - Stuart you're a star! One group cut and sawed a pile of branches down to size so they could be transported by car. Another dug out the earth at the entrance to one of the containers so it would be level enough for paving stones and rain water wouldn't drain inside.

The biggest groups were reserved for painting though. A group of 20 which included the students painted the hallway inside the Pickle factory. Conditions were cramped but I'm not sure that accounted for all the paint that seemed to find its way mysteriously onto the legs and arms of the painters. The last group worked on creating a green path that would match the green walls above it.

Excellent progress was made by all the teams and by the time it was time to go we'd certainly got the bulk of the jobs done. We posed for a group photo and I can't be sure, but its just possible that one or two Pauls appeared again behind me.

We returned for some stretching and then congratulated Deb on reaching her amazing 200 good deed milestone. Everyone loves Deb so it was no surprise that this was greeted with an enormous round of applause. Watch this space for associated fashion updates in GG red in the next week or two.

So all there was left to do was to give my sincere thanks to all the fantastic Task Force members and Run Leaders who've supported me over the last seven months - honestly I couldn't have done it without you - and to wish Shona all the very best for what I know will be a very successful tenure as captain of the good ship GG Bristol!

(Ps Thanks to Richard for my Pink Panther cake and for the mysterious photos left in my bag, a montage of which can be found attached to this run report. Richard and Clo you are completely mad - but in the best way possible x)