No prograsstinating on Tuesdays!

With Beth on holiday in Slovenia, she trusted me with the Hammersmith and Fulham crew for the evening.

After a little welcome, and chats about upcoming half marathons like the Ealing and Oxford halves (come and cheer on fellow GoodGym runners at either of them if you can!) and the GoodGym Social next week, we made our way outside for a warm up and introductions. I wanted to find out the best things about Hammersmith and Fulham, so we got everyones ideas. Fitting for a running group, the most popular thing turned out to be the running route along the river, so I'll be sure to come back and try that out some more!

After the warm up we headed out to Maystar Estates, a local housing area where they have some communal green areas that need looking after and lots of smaller individual gardens. Despite back-marking being one of his favourite things (sorry!), Jason did a splendid job leading from the front, and got us there safe and sound. We met Pauline there, who got us all armed with gardening tools and bin bags and set us to work. We also caught up with some of our friends from the Chelsea FC Foundation, who we helped out last week, at the task.

The Task: To turn a grassy area into a patch of turned over soil, ready for planting some bulbs, to give the communal space a bit of colour. Plus we also had a couple of individual gardens to tend to, cutting back their hedges and doing some weeding on of their grass.

Everyone got stuck in quickly, and so before we knew it the task was completed and we found ourselves eating biscuits in their community hall - what a treat! After a group picture, and goodbyes to Pauline and the Maystar reps, we jogged off to the famous riverside to do some sprint training. Using a small length of the path, with some handily placed street lights, we focussed on different factors of our sprint to try and improve our running techniques.

• Socket to pocket (focussing on driving that elbow backwards!)
• Lifting your torso upright, imagining a helium balloon pulling you up
• Increasing your cadence to maximise speed

After a tiring little session, it was time to call the run to an end for the night, so we made our way back to the Fitness and Squash club for some stretches and chats about next week's run, which you can sign up to here.

Don't fear, you'll be back to normal next week when Beth returns. Hopefully see you all soon. Thanks for having me H&F!