Thrive had the time of my life

With head-torches firmly in place, twenty-three of our finest athletes took on 7km of running and about 1km (OK, slight exaggeration) of path over at Wildcat WIlderness!

Where do I start?! This weekend was one of those that pretty much blew me away. Yesterday we had so many of our runners taking on challenges, that I could barely keep up; it really was Medal Monday today. Our bling-baring heroes were:

• Nykolette , Clare and Lucy, who ran the Royal Parks Half-Marathon (Lucy's first ever half)

• Stephen, running his first marathon down in Bournemouth (exactly one year after running his first ever race at the Petts Wood 10k!)

• Caireen, Kim, Helen, Chris, Jacqueline, Conroy, Hannah, Chris and Sean (and Sean's sister) at the Petts Wood 10k

High-fives also to Monica and James, who were at Petts Wood to support their friends (and maybe to snaffle some of the amazing post-race samosas, ahem).

Wow!

Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day and all of our group runs this week are in partnership with Thrive LDN, who are encouraging us all to work towards improved mental health in our city. We all know the benefits of running together, chatting as we go and how good it can make us feel to be out in the fresh air, helping make our community a better place for everyone. On tonight's run, we decided to think about friends we might not have seen for a while, maybe reconnecting with someone and sharing the things we do to make ourselves feel good. At our task, we were joined by Alex from Thrive LDN, who chatted with a few of our volunteers as they worked.

Joining us also, was Jackie, who has been commissioned to work on a photo story for Huck Magazine, so was taking lots of photos to capture us in action (sorry it was so incredibly dark Jackie!). We really look forward to seeing the results of her evening with us.

Our run to the Wildcat Wilderness is always a good one, being around 7km in total, it means we have more time to catch up on all the latest news! It was great to see Mridula back and to hear about how she has been tackling an injury by cycling lots and really getting the two-wheeled bug :) It was lovely hearing the exciting news that Emma is now the proud guardian of an allotment (maybe we can all go round sometime, to help?) and I also enjoyed chatting to new-comer Enoch about his involvement with youth groups and how he works with them on an allotment himself. We might look like any old running group as we pass by, but there's so much more going on as we run...

We were met, as always, by Maria, who had a great task lined up for us. To go deep into the wilderness at this time of year would be plain daft, we wouldn't be able to see a thing! Tonight then, we would work on clearing the path through the allotments, a metre or so wide, this stretch was partially covered in brambles, nettles and ivy. With the space being used regularly by little ones and also older people with mobility challenges, we needed to make the path a bit more easily accessible for everyone. With our head-torches on and our tools (or gloves) in hand, the team set to work, bashing, slashing, chopping, tugging and gathering. Thirty minutes of hard work later and the path edges were clearly visible (with the help of a carefully positioned light!) and our work was done.

This is the kind of job that just wouldn't get done normally, said Maria

A trail of lights twinkled their way out of the allotments and back onto the street, before we grouped together to run back to our start point. Not feeling fully worked out, we got down for today's #planktober (30 seconds of front plank and side planks every day in October) and some good stretching. We had a chat about how long is OK to hold a plank and I said the World Record is something like 24 hours, it's not, it's 8 hours and 1 minute. Fair enough, that's a looooong time!!). We'll stick to our thirty-second efforts shall we?

Next week we have two tasks! Meet at Glass Mill at 6.45pm, as always and we will decide on who goes where as people arrive - do say if you have a particular preference though! See you then.