I hate cigarette butts and I cannot lie

I hate cigarette butts and I cannot lie, y'all litterpicker's really fly. When Tav runs home with earwigs on his phone you see SWANS!

Hmm, my lyrical genius isn't what it used to be? We welcomed Angela back for her first run since having a baby, and it was a return to our litter picking for Rivercare. With the World Cup and Wimbledon over, and the weather slightly cooler we had a return to our more usual numbers, as 12 runners showed up for the task.

We had many congratulations to give including, Ella being first lady at her parkrun on Saturday, Dan climbling Mt Kilimanjaro, Emily doing a Half Marathon on Mt Snowdon, Bob running his longest ever run of 12.5 miles and Vanessa completing the midnight marathon for Breast Cancer Care at the weekend. What an inspiring bunch of do-gooders!

After the usual catch up and briefing, we made our way outside to do our warm up on the grass (or that brown patch where there used to be grass), and Emily taught us all how to floss, which was a fantastic warm up for our shoulders ahead of the litter picking!

We ran into the park to collect the equipment and then started our task, and I have to say that whilst it was a little bit disappointing for the runners that there wasn't all that much interesting to find litter wise, isn't it wonderful that at a time when litter is often at its peak, in the summer when people are spending more time outside, we really didn't have a lot to find. It was predominantly cigarette butts.

After the task we said good bye to Emily, Fay and Helen, and the rest of us made our way to the range for a fitness circuit - 3 stations (400m run, squats and press ups). Bob demonstrated excellent form on the press ups, Katherine did the deepest squats and Ian ran some speedy 400m, made even more impressive by the fact that both times he was running along the finishing strait, there was a freight train on the train line making lots of noise behind him.

Circuits done, and back home to leisure world for a stretch, and Bob lead the cool down, although I'm not sure he took it quite as seriously as he could have!

Thanks for a lovely first run back! And look forward to seeing you all again in a few weeks.