Barnsley

Group run

Scrape, Grapple & Roll

6 GoodGymers made their way 5.8km to help their local community in Barnsley.

  • Susan Gillie
  • York runner
  • Sharon S
  • Mark Robinson
  • Amanda West
  • Lisa Billingham
 
Tuesday, 15th of August 2017
 
Led by York runner
She/her

6 runners ran 6km and widened the footpath at the Lew Whitehead Community Centre.

What a change from last week! It was a beautifully warm and sunny evening for a run in Barnsley this evening. We welcomed along brand new runner Amanda, to the gang - don't forget to give her a big cheer!

After a warm up, it was pretty much uphill all the way towards Wosborough - well, it felt like it anyway. The best thing to distract us from all the uphill was the gorgeous view across the valley, and you don't get that without a little bit of climbing.

We arrived at the Lew Whitehead Centre and were greeted by the lovely chaps from Twiggs who were providing us with some tools and guidance for our task. The footpath around the field had become completely engulfed by grass, so much that you can barely see that a tarmac path exists! Another volunteer group had made a start in clearing the grass and getting the path back to its original width at the very top section, and now it was our turn.

It was hard graft scraping the turf away, rolling and lifting it up and chucking it all under the hedges. Amanda broke a nail but was very brave and carried on regardless. She was soon distracted by digging up some dog poo along with her turf and forgot about the nail. Meanwhile Lisa was getting some nice straight edges in and Sharon was just grabbing and yanking the turf up with her bare hands (well, gloved, but you know).

Speedy Suze from Sheffield had arrived after we'd left, but legged it to join us too - so she grabbed the last spade and jumped straight into the task.

Apparently what I've got is a shovel, not a spade.. which is why I'm finding this very difficult.. (Suze)

After half an hour of hard graft, we'd taken the footpath back to full width for about a 20m stretch. It was a hard effort but the dog walkers were already enjoying the newly widened path before we'd even left the field!

We celebrated our achievement with a mega set of the world's best exercises, lunges.

  • Forward lunges
  • Backward lunges
  • Side lunges
  • Lunges with kicks
  • Balance lunges
  • Sneaky jumping squats (not lunges)

With wobbly legs, we headed back over the hill, enjoying the last of the evening sunshine. Sharon and Suze boshed a couple of extra hill reps on the way back because they're hardcore like that and Mark chucked in a bonus set of bench press-ups too.

We'll definitely be heading back to help again with the footpath in the future, there's a lot of work to do there to keep an eye out on the future runs to see what's happening.

Report written by York runner

She/her


Discuss this report

Ruth Taylor
Ruth Taylor
Wednesday August 16th, 2017 12:11

Beautiful looking evening indeed!

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