That'll be the Clay

On GG York's 2nd birthday, a big crew rocked up to run, get fit, dig clay and celebrate!

We were joined by two brand new runners, so let's give some big ol' Yorkie cheers to Amy and Savannah. Also worth a cheer, team Beningbrough who collectively clocked something like 240km yesterday for the January Challenge, nice one.

Extraordinary Ed ran his 22nd good deed in 21 days and also got to wear the Cape of Good Deeds as he did his 50th on Friday, whilst Jolly Jenna was running her 50th tonight, and got to wear the cape on the way back. Make sure you give them both some cheers too, 50 good deeds is a brilliant achievement.

After a bunched up warm up (even a car park isn't enough space for us), we headed off for Heworth Holme - where our task was to dig up lots of lovely clay, bag it in heavy duty blue rubble bags and carry it a couple of hundred metres to the end of the path. The clay is to be used to create a new wetlands area at St Nick's Nature Reserve.

The hardest part of the task was figuring out what was soil and what was clay. The clay was much firmer than the soil and could be dug out in blocks. Some people were poking it to see if it felt clay-like whilst others just dug massive holes and took whatever was deepest.

It didn't take very long for us to fill every single bag (around 40), so with a bit of time to spare, we kept digging more holes to make 'wildlife scrapes', which are temporary ponds for wetland wildlife.

After the task we ran over to our favourite birthday workout spot, Morrisons Tower. We had a speedy mini circuit session including all of these treats:

• walking lunges
• sprint circuit
• sit squats
• press ups
• tricep dips
• single leg sits
• mountain climbers

Love the lunges, it's a bit like stretching! (new member Savannah, already my favourite)

We ran back, enjoying the climb of Micklegate Cobbles and then celebrated our birthday with a beautiful bit of cake made by Vicky.

If you want to join us tomorrow to empty out all those bags of clay and get mucky compressing them into the base of a pond - you can sign up here.