Bye bye Birdie, we’re starting on a clean slate

It was going to be a short run to a new location, but you know what a short run means… Mark gets a glint in his eye and dusts down some ‘fun’ training drills. After an ‘ease them in gently’ warm up, he quite literally had us galloping around Richmond Green on all fours like gorillas playing a kind of tag (most entertaining for the crowds no doubt), followed by 30 second circuits of jumps and squats and push ups and planks. We were definitely warm after that.

Then we were off to Lynde House Care Home in Richmond, a perfectly situated nursing care facility for older people on the banks of the Thames. We’d heard we would be building a bird house for their gardens, which suggested a graduation from our normal tools of litter pickers and trowels to full blown hammers and nails. Before you know it, we’ll be running wearing tool belts with a custom loop for our Strava tracking smartphones! Needless to say, we were excited.

We arrived to a very warm welcome - tea, juice AND biscuits in the residents’ lounge – top notch, we’ll be back again if they’ll have us! Alison, the manager, introduced us to some of the residents who were keen gardeners and then showed us round the lovely mature gardens that surround the home. No bird house tonight as it turned out, as she didn’t have all the materials, but she still found use for our willing hands. There were four garden borders that needed a little bit of dressing up and Alison had secured twenty-seven bags of slate to do the job. That was twenty-seven bags of heavy lifting and a lot of spreading with our pink latex gloved hands. But with 15 pairs of hands, it was light work and we got the task completed with time to spare for a glass of juice beneath the chandeliers in the lounge. All very civilised and altogether a brilliant night – good workout, good cheer, good task, good gym!

All that remains is to welcome our first-timers – Izzy, Samia, ‘Big Mac’ Mahmoud, and welcome back to Al, David and Salwa who have come back for a 2nd run– great running with all of you. And thanks to Giulia for the inspired pun. If there was a role on the Task Force for a Pun Master (and I think there should be), then you’d definitely qualify. Good luck to Jane, for Sunday, she will be cycling 100 miles for the charity SPEAR – you’ll smash it.