All that litters is not gold

Donning gloves and taking to the streets and park, ten tremendous runners covered 3km of running and filled eighteen bags with litter.

Lovely title punning this week from Louise, thank you!

This week's run started with a little celebration of Stephen's half-marathon success last Sunday at the Big Half - well done Stephen, what a lovely t-shirt and medal! We also heard about our super coach runners Tim and Louise, who are reducing isolation every week, by visiting an older person for a chat. We mentioned Ian too, who had run off to Bexleyheath to help out at an emergency mission, all this good work going on outside our weekly group run! We heard as well from Hannah and Stuart, who have both been embarking on a bit of GoodGym tourism, with Hannah visiting Hackney and Islington (shoveling manure on both occasions!) and Stuart joining Camden's mega-task last week at the Southbank Centre, shifting concrete - good work both of you!

No newcomers this week, but what a treat to have Dom with us! Dom usually runs with our neighbours down in Croydon and is also part of the GoodGym coach team, pairing older people with our runners. He said GoodGym Bromley had been on his bucket list, so he was happy to tick it off. Nice.

This week we were embarking on a bit of litter-picking, as part of the Keep Britain Tidy, Great British Spring Clean. We all put on some gardening gloves, grabbed a blue bag and set off into Crystal Palace Park (after a little warm-up fun). Our friend Penny from the park had pinpointed a problem area for us to tackle first of all, so we skipped by the dinosaurs (I think they were sleeping) and curved around towards the farm. With a handful of head-torches and the floodlights from the stadium, we managed to just about make out the litter amongst the bushes! Very quickly, everyone scattered, pouncing on whatever they could find and, my, did we find some odd things?! Strolling and chatting, we stumbled upon what seemed to be a popular drinking spot, which soon filled up a few bags and worked our way back towards the farm, scooping up any discarded wrappers as we went.

Decanting our finds into a couple of bags, we tied them up and left them neatly by the dustbin, then headed up towards Crystal Palace station, another area of rich litter pickings post-rush-hour. Now picking up the pace, we dipped and ducked, watched by the static traffic on Anerley Hill, before turning in to Thicket Road. On a residential street like this, you can easily pick up the bottles and bits of paper and pop them into a nearby recycling bin, maybe we should all just give this a go on our own roads, little but often? By the time we returned to the park, we had filled eighteen (yes, eighteen!) bags with litter! Here are some of the finer treasures in our haul:

• a cheese knife, complete with chunk of cheese (nice work Hannah!)

• an unopened bag of mini-eggs (tasty find Dom!)

• a (sadly) broken litter-picker (how apt Stuart!)

• numerous vodka bottles (good spotting Joe!)

• a bag of (dog) poo (I really hope you've managed to scrub away all traces of this Helen!)

• but winning on all counts, with tennis balls, a ping-pong ball, a cone base and a tyre is Bradley!

All that and still enough time left to do some smashing hill repeats (the BEST session to slip into your week, to build strength, encourage good form and work on endurance). As we stretched, we talked about Louise's epic challenge, coming up this Thursday, when she will run up 42 floors (932 steps) in the Vertical Rush - good luck Louise, we look forward to hearing all about it! Stuart also has his own challenge over the weekend, tackling his longest run ever, in training for his half-marathon in May. Next Tuesday we will be visiting a brand new task at Penge Congregational Church, where we will be painting the entrance area, sign up and join in! See you then :)