20 runners came along to our first group run in York to tackle graffiti with rigorous wiping!

It might have been more but the Premier Inn has five entrances so some others might still be hanging out there. Luckily the Right Honourable, the Lord Mayor, Councillor Dave Taylor and the Lady Mayoress persisted 'til they found us. The Lord Mayor gave us a lovely speech and was delighted we are now up and running; he was particularly excited that we will be doing some tasks at some of his named charities in the coming weeks.

We headed off up Micklegate, at least we did after getting stuck at the longest traffic lights known to man. After 2km we had a dark rendezvous on a bridge with Ken Groom from Sustrans who told us a bit about the trail.

We split into little groups armed with graffiti cleaning wipes and set about scrubbing the lamp posts. The rule was: if you weren't scrubbing and you weren't providing light, you had to do star jumps. Some people were rule breakers but some were very dedicated to the star jumps.

We quickly learnt the following:

• Blue paint is very difficult to scrub off

• Scrubbing graffiti using a wipe is an excellent arm workout

• The graffiti-cleaning wipes are the sweetest smelling cleaning devices ever

Whilst some of the graffiti was un-cleanable, we left the whole area smelling very fresh and we celebrated with some squats and a little leg burnout under the bridge before running some fartlek intervals back along the cycle path. Then we did some mini circuits with jumping squats, lunging and crab kicks before jogging back to the Premier Inn where bottles of water had been provided for us to rehydrate (thanks Premier Inn!)

After a cool down stretch and lots of chat, we decided that we'd better all come back next week because this was really, really good!