Composter Syndrome

There are no better words to use to describe last night's effort by GoodGym Wandsworth than Truly. Epic.

The task was to move masses of donated bags of compost up to Doddington Community Roof Garden. 'Masses' doesn't really do the job justice. We're talking over 1000 bags. Not only that, but it was up two flights of stairs!

We kicked off the night by guessing how many we would manage, which ranged from 110 to 575. Read on to find out just how many of the 50 litre bags we shifted between just 11 of us....

After just over a mile we arrived at the garden to find a pile of pallets packed with bags. OK, we thought to ourselves, that seems fairly manageable. That was before we realised there was another massive lot of them just round the corner! Not ones to be put off, we set about forming a human chain and got to it. There were many different techniques, from the 'hold it like a baby' to the 'hoik it over the shoulder' approach, but we were soon making good progress. There were some much needed breaks and shifting round of positions, and passers by must have wondered what on earth was going on a shouts of 'the chain!, the chain!' echoed around the estate.

Luckily we managed to borrow a couple of trolleys from kind Mr Tesco, which sped up the process, and we kept careful count as we went. After 40 minutes of the upper body work out of all time, we called it a night and I can reveal that Steph guessed the closest final number at an astonishing...

• 215 bags of compost!

Well done gang, that is a huge amount of work, and massively helped out the volunteers at the garden. If you would like to come back and put in another shift, there will be a community mission happening on Saturday morning, where we will be back again to help transport some more.

If you fancy the first in a series of monthly north of the river GG on tour parkruns, then check out this one at Gunnersbury park, while there is also a great lunchtime mission every Friday to help serve food at a homeless centre. There's so much to look forward to! Happy running, all.