parkrun (the junior version or otherwise) is most certainly not a race, but occasionally you do have to doff your cap to one of our Sunday morning runners who clearly had more than one weetabix for breakfast this morning. Our first finisher, on a first time visit from his usual course at Leyton, crossed the line in an awe inspiring 6:56, more than a minute clear of his closest "pursuer" - chapeau m'sieur, as they say in bike racing. The maths is easy to work out his per km splits!!

Thanks as ever to our very helpful GoodGym volunteers who arrived at the big tree this morning and made sure everything ran smoothly - Hilary, John and Harvey were deployed as Course Marshals at key spots around the course, whilst Sooz and Nick kept it all largely under control at the start/finish line by barcode scanning, marshalling, encouraging and run directing, and all of our 40 finishers, including 1 absolute first timer, and 2 who received their half-marathon wristbands for each having completed 11 runs, crossed the line smiling (if a little red faced and out of breath), although a few needed to be guided towards the finish funnel...

More of the same under the big tree next week (super speedy times not guaranteed...) - join us if you can!

Friend of GoodGym and LDN Tube Runner, Claire, is taking on the infamous Comrades Marathon in South Africa. As well as taking on this huge challenge, Claire's taking a bag of pre-loved running shoes with life left in them to donate to local runners from disadvantaged communities. Some of these folk can do 400km/month run-commuting because they can't afford public transport.

And this is where GoodGym comes in! Four of our runners who might possibly have more running shoes than are strictly required hunted through their shoe boxes!

Harvey collected the shoes, making use of old packaging, and met up with Claire for the official handover. Coffee may have been involved.

Claire will now transport our old shoes to the southern hemisphere, where they'll be cleaned up, and make sure they find new owners who'll get many more miles out of them!