Food for sort

There was a certain tension in the air tonight as a high knee-off between lefts and rights looked like it could descend into a rather unsavoury fitness duel. Hopefully the rights will keep their rather boastful comments to themselves next week or it really looks like the lefts could (heel) kick off.

Still, things calmed down eventually and as the dust settled an astounding 33 runners came into view. That's 33 amazing people who are happy to give up their Tuesday evening and run through the cold and dark to help sort the stock at their local food bank. Gert proud of all of you!

Our run tonight took us past the broken Cheesegrater bridge, (closed for six months after a lorry drove onto it!) and out to Big Yellow storage where the East Bristol food bank stores its stock and where we were met by Andy.

After enjoying the challenge of testing the quoted capacity of a 26 person lift, we arrived at floor 3 to find that Andy had been busy. A neat line of crates lay waiting for us all labelled up with the particular food type they should contain - there was even a "Christmas things" crate - how exciting is that! In fact, with our huge turnout tonight we dispatched a small team to lay out a second line of crates, thus doubling our sorting rate.

The sort process is simple, crates containing a random array of items are removed from the store cupboard one at a time, weighed and then their contents are sorted into categories using other empty crates so they can be dispatched to the various food banks around the city for distribution. Ciara manned the scales and did an amazing job of efficiently recording the weights so they could be quickly carried around for sorting.

A steady stream of Goodgym red passed into and out of the store cupboard and I was pleased to observe some excellent crate lifting form after our practice at the warm-up.

By the end of our timeslot we had succeeded in sorting ALL the crates - brilliant work everyone! We said goodbye to Andy (who looked really pleased with our progress) and ran back to base, with my group taking in a few sets of steps along the way.

Thank you to Mel for leading the second group today and Richard and Dave for backmarking. Thanks also to Richard for the pun!

And lastly special mention to Matt for ensuring that every one of his crates was captured on film.