I feel like a new man, a Cardinal Newman!

I don’t know about you but I found that hill tough tonight so apologies for not easing you back in gently and making you tackle one of Brighton’s biggest hills on the first run back of the year! IT strangely felt up hill in both directions too!

But before the run we had lots of Christmas and New year park run progress to catch up on. Congratulations to Roy for finally smashing his target of getting under 21 minutes at both Hove Prom and Hove Park and to Rosie who also took a big chunk off of her PB at the Prom. And well done to Katherine who finally discovered the joy of park run and completed her first ever, quickly followed by her second ever! And talking of parkrun its our meet up at East Brighton this Saturday so hope to see a few of you there.

So with much chat about how we’d all enjoyed the festive season we headed up the massive hill to Cardinal Newman school, picking up Benita, Emma & Tabitha on the way. Premises Manager Pedro set us to work on cleaning the hard to reach parts of a large staircase, concentrating on the dusty railings, high level cobwebs and dust and scuff marks on the walls. With 15 of you working hard we got the job done in about 20 minutes leaving time for a quick fitness session of plank variations in the school corridor. The variations were all designed to target your glutes as well as your core, so great exercises to do to strengthen and condition yourselves for running!

And with all the excitement of the first one back I forgot to mention the January challenge to see which Goodgym area can do the most good deeds and run the most kilometres. Distance ran will be only include those runs logged onto Strava so if you’re not using it then now would be a good time to start! For those that don’t know about Strava its an app that records all your runs and a great way of documenting your activity and process and you can follow your friends to see what activities they are doing as well.

See you next week for a lovely flat run to George Street to help in a charity shop. It’s another longer run at 6km but I’m hoping to have an alternative run and task delivering newlestters for Extinction Rebellion if you don’t want to run so far, so watch this space! And its our weekly social next week too.