Painting the stirway to heaven

As the wind whipped up, 14 fantastic faces smiled their way through Penge, to cover around 3km and paint the walls at Melvin Hall.

This week we welcomed a brand new GoodGym runner, Anna, who is friends with Bea (we like it when people bring their friends along!). We also said hello to Lauren, who has been along to a starter session in Lewisham, but was joining us here for the first time, welcome! Lauren is one of our 200+ runners who are taking part in the Big Half in March and we are now happy to offer places to our runners in boroughs outside the race route. There was lots of talk about this last night, with Stuart being on the verge of signing up and Stephen already diving in head first! If you do fancy trying this new race (with top cheering from me!), then sign up here and get training!

This week we were returning to Melvin Hall to continue our, as David said, Forth Bridge-like painting challenge. This means a short run down the road, so a quick warm-up and off we went. En route we were briefly joined by a small boy (appropriately dressed in red!), who skipped along with us for a moment, until his mum hollered for him to come back! Thank you to David for being our back-marker this week, keeping us together as a group. We were met by Councillor Kathy, who showed us where to find the equipment and everyone got stuck straight in. After a rather challenging start last week, with the emulsion bubbling on the surface of what looked like gloss, our intrepid team rolled on another coat, with the finish looking much better. The various pockets of activity were:

• the corridor and stairs (and then into another corridor, not wanting to stop!)
• finishing that pesky peach area, getting into the nooks and crannies in the top corners
• creating a sauna effect by cramming five people into one small office space off the hall

As I circulated, taking photos, wiping up any drips and generally getting paint all over myself, I heard snippets of conversation, with Bitcoin, liquidity, half-marathons and volunteering being covered. One treasure, offered up by Tim as he and Ian cursed that peach paint, was that the French equivalent of 'A bad workman blames his tools' is 'A good workman has good tools', something for us to keep in mind when we visit tasks! Someone who clearly follows this already is Ian, who brought along his paint stirrer from home! After weeks of looking for something long and stirry, giving the paint tubs a jiggle and resorting to using unmixed paint (oh, the horror!), we could now perform our task with the utmost professionalism, thank you Ian.

Rollers, brushes and trays washed up, we had a moment to work out who was singing the version of 'Tragedy' blaring out of my mini speaker and, yes, it was Steps. Classy.

Running back towards our start point, we continued up to Crystal Palace Park (yes, I heard those groans), where we enjoyed some hill repeats. We are surrounded by (splendid) hills here, so it's best to just go with it and embrace them. This particular hill acts as the start for Crystal Palace parkrun, so good to practice if you're a regular! Keeping our torsos tall, driving our arms and lifting our knees, the hill was embraced fully, with three strong repeats, jogging down to recover. Watching from behind, I could see great arm-drive and great determination. Good work.

As we stretched, we talked about this Sunday's 5 or 10k race in Crystal Palace Park; there are still places at the moment, so go for it and good luck to Stuart, who is taking on the 10k! Ian told us about another racing goal that is far enough away to build towards with confidence, the Beckenham Half-Marathon is in September and very local, so let's make it one of our GoodGym races shall we? Next week we will meet again at 6.45, to do some more good, sign up now and put it in your diary!