The Race of Spades

A big Brighton Goodgym welcome to Clare & Daniel joining us for the first time tonight, its great to have you along and we hope we’ll see you again. It was also good to see Madeleine back after a few months off. Welcome back!

And a huge Brighton Goodgym Congratulations to Sherman who has reached the amazing milestone of 50 good deeds. That’s a fantastic achievement and he now joins a select club of only a few Brighton Goodgymmers to have reached the magic 50! We look forward to seeing you in your black t-shirt next week! And I wonder who will be next?!

Just a a short run to our task tonight where we met David from the St James’s Community Action Team. They have received some funding from Pride in the Community to refresh some large raised beds at the bottom of Upper Rock Gardens, but before they replant them, they needed some soil improver added to get the new plants off to the best start. So armed with shovels, spades and forks our task was to shift and shovel a half tonne of muck into the raised beds. As it was a small working area we split into 2 groups with one group working whilst the other ran around the block before swapping over. After about 20 minutes we’d got the job done, leaving the beds ready for planting, I look forward to seeing how they look in a few days once they've been planted up.

With plenty of time for a fitness session we headed to Dorset Gardens for a session all about agility and plyometrics. First we took on the Illinois agility test, designed to bring out those nimble, sprightly and fast feet as you negotiated some tight turns and weaved your way through a course of cones.

Next we had a series of plyometric relay races jumping and hopping over cones, which produced some nail biting photo finishes between the 2 evenly matched teams. Plyometrics are great exercises for runners, anything with small, light hops and jumps is fantastic for strengthening muscles and tendons and helping you develop a spring in your step to get those feet moving quickly when you run.

Hopefully see some of you at our monthly parkrun meet up this Saturday where we will need maximum spring in our step to get us up that lovely big hill. Breakfast at The Bevy after!