Swanning Around In The Park

After lashings of rain and a bit of lightning too, we weren’t too sure how tonight’s task was going to pan out…. Were we going to get drenched?? We were outdoors doing a litter pick and had visions of looking like drowned rats by the time we’d finished!

Luckily… the gods had other ideas and the rain cleared up in time for our evening of Goodgym fun! We met at our lovely Queen’s park for a warm-up with Emily who is in the final stages of her run leader qualification and was doing this as part of her assessment. She did an excellent job with the warm-up, getting us all to do a fartlek run. It went brilliantly and Emily explained it perfectly. Well done Emily!

As we were in the park, it would have been rude not to do a cheeky (slightly shortened) parkrun! We did 2 laps as opposed to the usual parkrun 3. 2 was plenty after a full day at work! Those pesky hills never seem to get any easier!

After our run, we set to work with our pickers and our bags collecting litter. We worked our way around the edge of the park, paying particular attention to the bits that often get missed. The park really is pretty good for not having tonnes of litter. There are groups that meet regularly to help keep it tidy. Despite that, we still managed to collect 4 decent bags worth! Goodgym is never without some fun and laughter and we had a fun playing 'Where's Wally' but intstead, it was 'Where's Maurice!). See if you can spot him in the pictures. Maurice also found one of the painted rocks, which he re-hid (I'm not sure it will ever be found again!!!!). And our resident rebel Karen was hoping for a sneaky ride on the Swan pedalos.... luckily for us, they were locked up in the middle of the lake!! Maybe next time Karen - or perhaps we could make that our next social! Lol!

We had a bit of an adventure tonight – in the form of being locked in the park! Don’t worry, we did get out! And it was our choice. As a Run Director for Crewe Parkrun, Karen is a keyholder for the park, so we had a quick chat with security who agreed that he was happy for us to stay in the park after he’d locked up. With the park shutting earlier now because the nights are drawing in (boo), we wouldn’t have had much time for collecting litter. It was quite a nice feeling to know that we were the only ones in the park – with the exception of ducks, swans, geese and squirrels of course!

A small shower decided to try and catch us out but we dived under the playground seating area for a bit of shelter! It soon passed over and we were able to head out of the park without being drenched!

It was a very chilled task tonight, which was nice. Lots of chatter, lots of laughs and lots of litter. All in all, another successful evening.

Well done everyone! Another awesome job!

See you at the next one! You’re awesome!

Lots of love Nicola xx