“All I want for Christmas is youuuuuu and your butts”

This evening we got our 'butts in the right place" to save the environment.

A smallish group of 8 runners this evening, due to christmas festivities and a downpour, ran to clean up the streets of Leamington.

Meeting at the Fat Pug, we gathered in the warm, but wet garden to hear how about "No ifs, No Butts" and how we could 'save the environment one butt at a time'. Simon Perkins joined us to talk about the benefit of portable ashtrays, he is leading on a project to get more smokers to use them instead of littering the streets, our task was to find the smokers of Leamington and offer them a free portable ashtray in return for completing an online questionnaire, an extra bonus would be for each questionaire filled in, £3 is donated to Leamington Night Shelter for Homeless.

So with our bags full of ashtrays and all our christmas lights turned on, including some antlers and a festive hat we did a little warm up and headed off to find the pubs.

Due to the rain and it getting slippery underfoot we headed to the park do do a Parlauf session before it became to wet to race. Splitting into pairs, everyone had a go at sprinting as fast as they could around the park till they met their partner who was walking, they then tagged and swapped, a great effort session that was lots of fun in the rain. Great recovery and some very fast running from a few.

Once we were all sprinted out we started out own pub crawl. We had a slight lack of smokers on our route, it appears only the hardy smokers were out. So with our we "Don't like fag butts and we cannot lie" routine we managed to chat to 7 smokers on our route of 10 pubs/eateries, getting them all to sign up raising £21 for LNS.

Simon, who had a captive audience in The Fat Pug beer garden also signed people up.

On our return leg we had a little breakout group who enjoyed a little loop back on the last hill, a good test of the legs before Christmas.

Once returned to The Fat Pug we did a little stretch and a few of us stayed for a Christmas drink.

Happy Christmas, see you all in the New Year.