Quick Whittington (and Whizz Back)

It was a cold dark night, the wind was howling, the rain was falling, the puddles were splashing, the GoodGymmers were arriving, I just realised I will never be any good at writing novels...

20 of us rocked up to Highbury pool on this wet January night and after a quick briefing headed off for a gentle jog towards Whittington Park Community Association for some weeding, organised by Ann

En route we got involved heavily (some more than others - much more) in a discussion about whether fried or boiled eggs are best.

Early on we heard that fried eggs are best because you can have them with chips and beans. I personally think the argument was won there, but there was an objection that boiled eggs are more portable (I will just point out that fried eggs are also portable if you just lower your standards a little).

We also learned that:

• In America there are three types of fried eggs: over easy, over medium and over hard (surely the "over" is redundant)
• It is Veganuary, which means that some people aren't eating eggs at the moment
• And some people don't like eggs, so suggested the best thing to do with an egg is chuck it in the bin
• Somebody broke the rules / revealed the false dichotomy, and mentioned poached eggs. It all kicked off then with talk of scrambled eggs, omelettes and devilled eggs.
• Cadbury's have changed the chocolate for their eggs. A few of us will be investigating this claim and its effects

Once at WPCA we were greeted by the friendly Paul, who showed us the three areas in need of attention, so we split up into three teams and tried to work out what was a weed and what wasn't. Just as we started to panic, Jack mentioned that he was a landscape architect, so we put him in charge.

Perhaps it was the talk of eggs on the way up, or perhaps the fact that the rain had stopped, but somehow the weeding was done in record time. So we grabbed some bin bags and had a chocolate biscuit while clearing up. Great job!

Paul explained a bit about the centre and handed out a few leaflets and we all posed for a photo before heading off round the corner to warm ourselves up with some drills.

On the way back we worked on being light on our feet while doing a few reps. We pretended the ground was lava, we pretended we were burglars/cats/ninjas, we tried to run without making a noise, and we continued the egg theme by pretending we were running on egg shells. We even got involved in some technical terms such as "vertical oscillation" and "ground contact time".

Some top suggestions from the group for being light on your feet:

• Relax your arms
• Nice tall posture
• Less vertical oscillation (bouncing up and down)
• Get up on the balls of your feet

We got our breath back with a little jog and then finished off by storming up the hill to the crescent and having a nice old stretch.

And that's the end of that. Great job all.

Simon