A HOLESOME TASK FOR ALL

27 runners ran 7k to help plant trees along Queensbridge road and 4 went to help clear an older person's garden.

Last night’s task was all about digging holes, literally rather than just metaphorically for once. Our run for the evening was to help the Secret Seed Society dig some holes and prepare the soil for a secret tree planting session that they’re organising in Hackney this weekend.

So knowing that we were about to get our green fingers into gear when we gathered for our briefing from Cory, we were full of the joys of Spring – probably helped by the lovely sunny day and the fact that the evenings are finally starting to get a little warmer and lighter!

Along with our three lovely new runners for the evening (we’re growing!), we ran at a gentle pace for about 2km to our top secret location in Dalston. There we received our instructions from the tree-planting experts at SSS about how to dig and prepare our 1m x 1m holes so that they’d be in tip top condition for the saplings come the weekend. To be honest, the key thing they told us was to try to remember not to tread on the crocuses at the same time as we were digging our tree holes – something we remembered most of the time…

We then split into groups of three – square spade diggers, pointy spade diggers, and heavy pole droppers (their technical terms) – and got stuck in. Given you don’t normally get the chance to just randomly dig holes when you live in London, it all felt very “Famous Five” and by the end of our task we were all standing back admiring each other’s holes. (Perhaps some of us had taken IWD a little too much to heart.)

On the 2km run back, we were joined by our splinter group who had run slightly to help clear a garden a little further down the road. They got to us just in time to enjoy the speed play laps that Cory had us running round the block. As with most things ‘Good Gym’ – it’s the type of training you’d find it hard to push yourself to do when you’re running on your own and not in a group. Ever the optimist, Cory tried to convince us to enjoy the lovely tingly, ‘painful’ sensation in our legs afterwards and somehow managed to persuade us to ‘warm down’ by doing step sessions on the curb!

We then ran back to base – with one final challenge of ‘Chase The Rabbit’ group running in London Fields. After all that running and digging, we felt we deserved a little treat, so a group of us went for pizzas and drinks (and avocado and bacon ice-cream!) to cool down, where we got the chance to celebrate Will’s and Patrick’s successful completion of 100 tasks since they joined Goodgym! A fantastic achievement – and one that came with bright spangly new Goodgym tops adorned with little ‘100’ wings: nice work guys!