Wild Goode Chase!

Our first Saturday meeting at our new start point - Mud Dock café. We were given a warm welcome, enjoyed a coffee or two and were allocated a couple of lockers for bags so all in all a very nice start - thanks Mud Dock!

We also had FOUR new runners today which was fantastic - welcome Jane, Heather, Alefiyah and Lauren! Hope you had fun and will come back and visit again soon!

Our warm up on Queen Square was accompanied by the news that Bristol is currently so well off for volunteers that our planned task at the Christmas homeless shelter now required only 6 people to sort donations. We agreed to divide this up and have one group tackle the first half hour and the other the second.

So we set off on a 2k run to the shelter, only to find that we had been beaten to it by the unexpected arrival of yet another band of donation sorters; a young offenders group. Ed our host had quickly put together an alternative mail-out task so with the help of Jack and Maria (and their Google map apps) we were able to dispatch a couple of small groups to deliver those. Thanks to my Run leaders for co-ordinating a few lunges while I was gathering up the envelopes!

The rest of us took a little fitter-litter tour around St Paul's. Starting at Portland Square with some meet-and-retreat, and a dash of running train we proceeded via Brunswick cemetery gardens with some press-ups and then on to Brunswick Square, collecting up litter as we went. It may not have been planned, but the local squares certainly benefited from our diversion as everyone managed to collect a lot of rubbish (including a pair of rather damp shoes).

Meanwhile the postal parties had managed to do their deliveries although there was apparently a little confusion over the location of the Wild Goose café, leading to Maria's lovely pun.

Thanks for being adaptable everyone - we still did plenty of good today and most of us managed a good 5k of running too!