The Maze (Hill) Runners!

17 awesome runners ran 3km to help out to tidy up at Maze Hill station!

Another lovely evening in Greenwich! We were joined by two new runners, Ekta and Sara, welcome!! Hope you enjoyed your first GoodGym run!

We started off with a few form drills, not sure I actually told you the name of them but they are called A-skip and B-skip, and you can see how to do them again here! These are great drills to do to work on your running form as they open up the hips, emphasize correct foot placement on the ground and promote a quick leg turnover which will all be beneficial to your running as well as being a good warm up too. A bit faffy but the more you do it the more you'll get the hang of it!

After warming up with those lovely drills, we headed out of the uni, through the park and dropped down into Maze Hill station. We came across what I thought was the correct garden but we were actually the wrong side of the station completely! We made our way over the footbridge to the other side and met Patrick, Rich, Helena and Fiona from the East Greenwich Residents Association. The land is owned by the station but it sadly has no one maintaining it apart from Helena and a few volunteers every now and again so there was lots for us to do!

Rich took 6 of the group to the Westcombe Woodlands to untangle some bindweed which had snaked its way around some of the young trees. This left the rest of us to do the watering, weeding, litter picking and mulching! Everyone assigned themselves a job and got stuck in! We had half an hour to get as much done as we could!

We had a good system going with the weeders, waterers and the mulchers and after just 20 minutes the place had been totally transformed (I always forget to do a before photo - sorry gang). We had filled loads of brown bags with weeds and unwanted grass, a few binbags of litter had been collected, all the little trees had been mulched and everything was glistening with water! Another few minutes passed and the Woodland folk arrived back having tackled the bindweed... SUCCESS! For the last couple of minutes it was all hands on deck tidying up and picking up as much litter as we could reach. Crazy how much there was in such a small area.

Fancy a cuppa?

Just as we were about to head off, our wonderful hosts had brought out some mugs and a pot of tea, top hospitality there! A few people had a brew, we took a quick photo and then headed back to the uni for some leg work! We did 3 pretty basic (yet effective) exercises to work different parts of the legs to get them STRONG! We did some side leg lifts to work the glute medius (side bum), some hip bridges to increase mobility in the hips and strengthen the glutes and hamstrings and then finally finished with a wall sit to engage the quads! Hopefully you felt the burn with that one! All really easy and simple things you can do ANYWHERE! Ideally you'd repeat them all so you do all of them at least 3 times but we ran out of time sadly! But try and include some of these either during your run or just while you're watching TV!

We had a little stretch and called it a night!!! I think hotdogs were on the cards for dinner, am I right?

Thanks so much for all your hard work!! We got so much done in such a short space of time, so you should be so pleased. They don't get many volunteers anymore so we really helped a lot and it was much appreciated! See you next time!