Parliament Hill and Digging

Last night's run from the excellent Armoury had two options:
1. to run 12km to help level a community garden in Holborn.
2. to run up Parliament hill 4 times and to work on technique.

Both tough challenges for the second week of GoodGym in Camden. Amazingly - we smashed both of them.

Ivo led a group of 6 to Holborn, heading South and along the canal where we'd been asked to be the eyes and ears of it's protectors at Camley Street Natural Park keeping an eye out for things thrown in the canal and Japanese knot weed.

Arriving hot and sweaty at the Greener Camden site we were greeted by Adele from Groundwork and a resident in a wheelchair who instructed us on our ground leveling duties. In 28 minutes we dug up and raked flat an 8 metre patch of land before shoving the tools back in the salt cupboard and hot-footing it back to the Armoury. All in all it was a 10k run with an average pace of 8.13 / km - would have been faster had we not hit every single red man in Camden.

We arrived back, hot and sweaty and even managed a quick sprint back up pond street to the Armoury.

Mark led a group of 9 out into the Heath to spend some time on running technique before working on strength endurance.

We started with a warm up jog, up the gentle climb into the heath and did a few ground-touching/jumping moves to get our bodies mobile. We talked briefly about arm postion and keep our posture tall and stable, then began some drills back and forth concentrating on arms and posture as we worked through a number of different strides and movements.

We then set off to the base of Parliament Hill. A few burpees warmed up the legs ready for the explosive full power sprints to the top of the hill. Between each of the 4 repetitions, we kept jogging through the recovery back to our start marker. Once fully out of breath, we gently jogged back to the armoury, briefly gathered around a relaxing bubble machine then found a room of mats to stretch off.

All of the runners kept very impressive upright posture right to the end of the session and it was great to see arms starting to look more efficient too. Great work out everyone, see you next week.