Wiping the slate clean for 2017... and the carpet, and the windows.

A whopping 19 runners, ran 4km to clean up at the Deborah Ubee Trust!

Last night was the first GoodGym Greenwich run of 2017 and my oh my, what a turnout! It was great to see so many of you out! It also happened to be the first birthday for us too yay!!

It was lovely to welcome some new runners to the group too! Rina, Helen, Carly, Doyin, Jenny & Frances... hope you all had a nice time! It was great to meet you!

Best presents

We kicked off with a briefing and a much needed headcount while we went round the circle and said what our favourite Christmas present was... there were some great ones... including flights to Iceland to see the Northern Lights (lucky Helen!) and some nice socks and pants from mum (lucky Ben!). We went to put our bags in the bagdrop where Alex met us with two new recruits (Jenny & Frances) and then off we went to do the warm up!

One final headcount, just for my sanity, and then we were off down into Greenwich, through the town centre and past the station. The Deborah Ubee Trust was about 10 minutes away, so a nice run to ease us all back in after an overindulgent festive period!

We arrived and were greeted by Sally who was quite taken aback with the number of runners flooding through the door! We split the group in two, while one group cleaned, the other would face a "fun" fitness session avec moi and then we swapped over so everyone could do a bit of everything.

The makeshift fitness session comprised of some partner exercises, with lots of core activation! Apologies if anyone is aching today, I certainly am and I didn't even do the full thing! The first exercise was a plank on the hands facing each other and doing little high fives to one another, we did 3 sets of 30 seconds. Next we took it in turns to do leg pushes which really gets the abs burning, 2 sets of 30 seconds each and finally we finished off with a 60 second wall sit because the legs were feeling left out that they weren't getting worked! But that soon set them on fire! We swapped over and by the time we'd finished the session with the second group, all the cleaning was done... perfect!

To the tunnel!

We said our goodbyes and headed for the Greenwich foot tunnel where we would do the actual fitness session that I had planned, some speedwork! We crossed the river to Island Gardens where there were some nice evenly spaced out lamp posts which were perfect for landmark sprints! We set off in groups so as not to trip over each other. The task was to run at varying efforts of 60%, 80% and 100% using the lamp posts as markers for when to change speed. This is fartlek training which is basically a form of interval training. You can do this if you are running by yourself to make things a bit more interesting. You can use anything as a marker... a bin, a tree, a bench, a person, a dog... whatever is around you! It is great way to get your body used to running at faster speeds which will ultimately increase your overall speed.

After everyone was suitably dead, we headed back to the start where we had a little stretch and that was that!

Amazing job everyone! It was so great so see so many of you out (plus lots of new faces!) and was lovely to catch up with you all after the break. Hopefully see you next week!