Pines and needles after all that running!

18 runners run over 6km to collect abandoned trees and litter in Greenwich (and Lewisham!)

Last night was the first group run of the year, and it started off so well with a cancelled task! Hey ho, these things happen, the show must go on! Good deeds must be done regardless!!!

No new runners last night but there was still cause for celebration because it was Alex's 100th good deed!!! Well done Alex, it's actually also your 3 year anniversary of running with GoodGym, doing good since January 2016 which just goes to show that consistency is key! It's been great seeing how your running has progressed over the years and looking forward to your 3 marathons in April!! CRAZY!!

It was a rather cold evening so after revealing our best Christmas presents, we went off to warm ourselves up for a longer run than usual! Bags and gloves were distributed for some litter picking en route, there were a few hotspots on the main road towards Deptford which are now looking oh so clean!

We arrived at the Christmas tree recycling point in Deptford Park and split into groups to see if we could actually collect any trees since we hadn't seen a single one on the way there!!! Time was tight so we had 15 minutes to gather what we could find! After just 5 minutes, one group came back with a haul of 5 trees! AWESOME!

A few minutes later, group 1 came back looking extremely smug with a total of 1 tree! But they did get awarded top marks for arriving back on time ;) And then finally, the third group brought back a mini tree in a pot (still counts, unless it was taken from someones front garden...?? in which case apologies to that person, you can find your tree at the Deptford Park recycling centre!)

It was time to head back to Greenwich, we ran back the way we came and then had a stretch before getting nice and warm again inside!!

All your good deeds have been added to the January Challenge. We are well on our way to smash our distance target but are a bit behind on the good deeds. As long as your home area is set to Greenwich, you can go and do good deeds and group runs in other boroughs and it will still count towards our target, plus missions and coach runs of course count too!

Hopefully see you at Hilly Fields Parkrun on Saturday morning. If you're in our Facebook group the event details are here, a group of us may be running from Greenwich (to get some more miles in!) so the more the merrier!

Great job everyone! Well done for clearing the streets of trees and more importantly so much litter! Hope to see you on Saturday, if not next Wednesday!