Nine runners ran 5km to help St Matthew's Big Local tidy up the green spaces on the St Matthews Estate

We visited a new beneficiary tonight in St Matthew's Big Local, a charity based on the St Matthew's Estate in Leicester. Many thanks to Jimmy for putting us in contact with them.

After a slightly diverted run to the task due to a road closure, the group met Mel at the site who had kindly taken the litter pickers over for us. The group set to work on the multi-use games area (MUGA) and the surrounding area and within fifteen minutes had scooped up every last scrap of litter to be found. Our appetites for litter collection not yet satisfied we headed around the corner (with some slight litter picking related hold ups en route) to the Kamloops Crescent Open Space and used the remaining time we had to clear the second green space on the estate.

It is always nice to know we are making a difference for the charities and communities in which we volunteer and tonight it was especially pleasing to receive a tweet while we were still at work from St Matthew's Big Local thanking us for our efforts. It's great to know we made an immediate impact on our first visit to help them out and we are looking forward to returning to help with some spring planting outside St Matthew's House in March.

Task complete, we returned to the MUGA for our fitness session. They have a wonderful new facility there and have kindly allowed us to use it when we are in the area for tasks. After a couple of laps to get ourselves warmed up again we did some paired relays then some individual sprints and recoveries with Carlos (making a welcome return to the group) being the brave one sprinting the long straight and recovering on the short one while the rest of us opted to sprint the short straights and take an extended recovery. Great work from everybody!

Alas it was time to head back to base and we took a route through the cultural quarter of the city with Jeanette discovering parts of the city new to her, quite the sight-seeing tour!

Don't forget there are opportunities to join in with community missions on the next two Saturdays in addition to our regular Tuesday group runs if you want to add to your good-deeding tally!

HD