You paint seen nothing yet!

21 awesome runners ran 3km to do some painting and weeding at the More2 Childcare centre in Greenwich!

What a delightful evening that turned out to be eh?? Even the sun came out for us :)

We had a slightly smaller group last night which was actually rather lovely and meant I was a lot less headless-chickeny than usual! A lot of our "old timers" were, for some mystery reason, otherwise engaged last night (what they could possibly be doing on a Wednesday evening, I do not know!) but it meant we had a nice group predominantly made up of people who have recently started running with us, which is great! It's like the next generation of GoodGym Greenwich. Or GoodGym Greenwich 2.0!

We were also joined by 3 new runners! Bliss, Elizabeth and Apurva... welcome ladies!!! Hope you all had a good first run with us!

When I grow up...!

So since we were going to a childcare centre for the task, I felt it was appropriate to go round and find out what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. It didn't take long to go round the circle before we realised there was a bit of a theme. About half of the group wanted to be a vet! And how many of them are now vets? Hmm... not many...! But Andy worked with dogs and Amy is going down the medical route so not too far off! Not sure how close Simon is to becoming Batman, but if he manages to run those 78 miles at the weekend, I'd say he was better than Batman! Not all superheroes wear capes eh Si!

We put our stuff in the room and went for a quick warm up outside. We kept with the childish theme and played a game of stuck in the mud. The boys were very much outnumbered last night so we made them all IT and they had to run around chasing the girls. If a girl got tagged (or touched appropriately.. ha!), they had to stand like a starfish until someone crawled through their legs to set them free! There were some pretty impressive dives by some of the ladies I must say. After a few minutes, we were pretty warm so headed to the task!

It was nice to be able to all stick together as one big group for a change! And because the place was literally up the round, we were there in no time at all! We were greeted by the lovely Kelly who had set everything up for us. She took a few members of the group round to show them the gardening and then the rest of the gang were psyching themselves up for an epic paint job. There were 3 rooms that needed a bit of a makeover. Kelly walked us round, showed us what needed doing and then everyone grabbed a roller or a paint brush and got stuck in!

"Is that the right colour?!"

No Vickie, no it's not! 2 rooms were to be painted cream and one was to be painted white....! But to be fair to Vickie, the paint all looked the same colour in the trays ;) Luckily Stacey did a decent job of painting over it..!

I went out to see what was going on with the gardeners and they had already filled about 3 bin bags worth of weeds! AMAZING! Nathan was getting so involved that I thought he was going to do his back in! That particular weed was pretty stubborn by the looks of it!

After half an hour of solid painting and gardening, we had to leave unfortunately but it was just unbelievable to see the amount that had got done! It has taken 1 guy 3 days to paint 1 ceiling, yet you guys managed to paint 3 entire rooms in half an hour... just INCREDIBLE!!! Their plan for the rooms is to turn it into a working space to help people get back into work so you've all just really helped to speed up that process so really well done :)

TO THE TT!!

We headed back to the uni for the fitness session, which of course was our monthly 1km time trial! Conveniently at this point Emma, Helen and Pulin had to shoot off but the rest of the gang just could not wait!

Because there were a few people that hadn't run the route before, I offered a practice slow jog around it first but that did NOT go down well so we just got on with it! As I mentioned yesterday (and every time we do this as it goes), it is just a means to measure YOUR OWN improvements. You don't have to worry about anyone else and it is not a race or a competition... although, saying that, there was quite a fierce showdown between Nick and Vickie at the end!

Here is the official Strava leaderboard for the segment. Some really great efforts by you all yesterday, well done!! Hopefully you are seeing yourself get a bit faster! And it is just lovely to have everyone cheering and clapping everyone on! You guys are THE BEST! :)

We had a nice little stretch on the grass, chatted about Vickie and Simon's ridiculous runs coming up at the weekend and then went in for some treats (thanks Pulin!). It was also Irina's last ever GoodGym run so we wish you all the best, it has been an absolute pleasure having you run with us these past few weeks!

Also one last thing, for those of you who are new, please join our GoodGym Greenwich Facebook group and you can make sure you get involved with all our amazing events we've got coming up!

Thanks so much for coming yesterday everyone! You made a HUGE difference and got so much done in such a short space of time. It really is amazing so you should be really proud! Hopefully see you all next week for some clothes sorting at the charity shop!