Just Another Plog In The Wheel

Three gallant GoodGymers ran out into the bleak biting Barnsley breeze to clear up some troublesome trash in and around Locke Park.

The Friends of Locke Park are still in hibernation mode, so we were wombling about on our own tonight, channeling the litterpicking personalities of Great Uncle Bulgaria, Madame Cholet and Wellington.

I had picked up a couple of brand new litter-pickers earlier in the day, so everyone was super keen to try those fresh out of the box.

We were a little 'light' on the ground tonight, with only one head-torch in the group. Rachel fashioned an interesting make-do head-torch (buff-beacon?) stand-in; she had a bike light which she ingeniously attached to herself by way of buff. The light was tucked under said buff and maneuvered such so that the light was facing forwards/downwards; this way she could have both hands free for bag and picker holding duties.

James had the only old-fashioned head-torch tonight which was used to spot litter and illuminate it for him and Daniel to then pick up. Daniel had to be quick on the pick before the head mounted searchlight moved on to pastures new at the whim of it's wearer.

Daniel displayed some deeds of derring-do, scaling a steep bank to retrieve a pancaked can that had become stuck by the side of a tree root when tossed. This can wasn't a flash in the pan mind; we found many more flattened ferrous items on the tarmacked surfaces in the area.

After spending some quality time together in the dark bushes we moved onto Racecommon Lane and Fairview Terrace by the allotments. Here we picked our penultimate pieces of rubbish from the frozen ground, before heading back into the park to do the first of 3 extra fitness activities planned for the evening, Spiderman planks. These were new to some folk so a quick demo was required on the artificial grass first- you start in a standard elbows-on-the-ground plank, then bring one of your knees up to meet your elbow on the same side with your lower leg and foot pointing out to the side a la Spiderman when he's climbing a building! We did 10 of these before moving onto our second set of exercises on the yellow bars. On these we did 5 pull-ups on a low bar with straight legs outstretched on the ground in front and hands facing away, then 5 with hands facing towards, 5 tricep dips on the high parallel bars (those who could get up there), 5 climbs up, over and back on the tall climbing frame and some sporadic somersaults thrown in too. We also did a hanging competition to see how long we could dead-hang, quite a while it turns out considering the bars were ice cold.

All bar none had a wonderful workout on the icy frames

Next we took our full purple bags back to the main road and started our search for a roadside bin to leave the bags at. We spied some encased bins next to one of the park entrance gates but deduced that these were likely private bins so we couldn't deposit our bags here. We'd have to start running back down the hill and keep a look out for a roadside bin on our way. We didn't end up finding a suitable one until reaching Longcar Ln, by which time our arms had had another good workout carrying the full bags! Lots of bonus fitness tonight! Weight offloaded, we continued our run back down to Glasshouse, with one final fitness challenge on the cards... our faithful old favourite Strava super-steep segment of Fitzwilliam St (though we weren't doing suicide sprints this time). Each of us gave it our all on one last great gallop up! Good job one and all!

After this, all that was left to do was stretch off by the picnic tables in the plaza and do wrapping up announcements- welcome news of more Barnsley sign-ups on the website whom I've been in contact with, woop! Also of our progress in the January Challenge; keep the kilometers and deeds coming folks!