Sand Ahoy!

This was officially our coldest group run yet, with temperatures hovering just above freezing, but that didn't stop an incredible 24 runners from turning up! What has been lovely to see is that each week we're still seeing plenty of new runners, so keep telling your friends, colleagues and everyone you know about how awesome GoodGym is and get them involved!

This week's new intake were Lorraine, Faye, Suzanne, Hannah, Minnie and Karly. Give them all a cheer, they deserve it for coming out to their first group run when it was so chilly!

We also welcomed back Liz and taskforce Rach after their respective injuries.

After a quick warm up, we made our way down the hill towards the farm, with Aron in the lead, and Katie backmarking for us for the first time. She definitely deserves a cheer!

After some looping back to keep the group together, and some bonus squats while we waited for the lights to change, we arrived at the farm where Luke ran us through the tasks we needed to do.

Two of the lines of compost that we turned last time out needed to be combined into one, a brand new line of compost needed turning, and some sand bags which were being used to weigh down the covers needed swapping out for gravel bags.

The teams quickly formed, trying to spread out the head torches as best as possible, but the first ones to start making progress were the bag hunters. Adam, Katie, Tom, George and Rach grabbed their wheelbarrows and started the hunt. After the first few bags were found and swapped over, it soon became clear that searching for black bags in the dark, that were placed either on soil or black ground sheets, was quite a tricky task! The search took them everywhere including the vegetable patch:

"I have never been so amongst and within some brussels sprouts" Katie

The rest of the sandbag searchers continued their hunt, but with bags seemingly harder and harder to find, a cry of 'Sand Ahoy!' went up when one was spotted. That is a group getting into the real GoodGym spirit.

The other crew were by now up the hill turning over the soil. We learned that the piles of rotting vegetation could reach temperatures of up to 70 degrees celcius, and have even been used to grow pineapples! GoodGym is not just fun it's educational!

After last week's talk of favourite tools, this week we got to add pitchforks to our arsenal. One newby seems to have perfectly understood GoodGym from the start:

"I went for a pink pitchfork, it clashes with my trainers, but it'll all be brown in the end anyway so it doesn't matter!" Minnie, first timer

The soil turning was heavy work and everyone was working very hard, with steam coming off not just the compost but the runners as well. luckily the compost included the remains of apple pressing so the smell was a little more pleasant than last time were here. One runner still wasn't quite sure about the whole situation:

"It's like skiing in poo!" Abi

A particular shout-out needs to go to Alex who seemed to be doing the work of around 5 people at once! Every time I turned around he'd cleared a whole area by himself which was absolutely amazing!

Having been set the task of making the lines of compost as tall and narrow as possible, we had created some seriously impressive structures , although sometimes we'd been a little too ambitious and the piles collapsed. All in all it looked incredible, and amazing to see what can be done in such a short space of time.

As we brought everything to a close, Luke reiterated how much this work helps the project, because it's a task they basically wouldn't manage to do without us. So you can all bask in that warm glow of a job well done. He's also thinking of other projects we can get involved with, potentially including a crack team of scythers (probably not a word) who can be trained up and go on scything missions around Leeds which sounds ace! Watch this space!

With all the tools tidied away we headed back along the footpath, with a line of head torches bobbing along and a full moon to guide us.

The run home included one big hill (which I could pretty much copy and paste into every run report) so runners were able to take this at their own pace, with some taking it easy, and others racing ahead at the front. We all arrived back for a quick debrief and stretch, before everyone went their separate ways.

Don't forget that next week we have our social, hope to see you all there!