26 brilliant runners explore parliament, Green Park, Buckingham Palace and the King and Queen of Spain!

It was a bit of a bonkers evening to be heading for a run around central London. Not only was the LSE campus buzzing with graduations, the King and Queen of Spain were on a state visit and so much of central London was blocked off. This made the usually busy rush hour areas EVEN BUSIER!

We nipped down to the river and headed along to Big Ben, sadly with a bit of scaffolding round him at the moment, but looking grand nonetheless. After a very busy cross over Parliament square, we celebrated as we reached St. James's park and a bit of space. Hooray!

A nice run around the lake led us to Buckingham Palace and a nice team photo. With that it was over the road into Green Park and a nice lap around. On coming back through Horseguard's Parade, it was clear that much of town was blocked off so run leader / not the best tour guide Katie led the group up and round, with a return stretch scooping below Covent Garden and the busy London streets.

Thanks to everyone who came along and you sure got quite a lot of London experiences in one run there!

10 ran to Writtle to work on the Mencap allotments

On a scorching hot run 10 Goodgym runners braved the heat for a good cause. A long run of just over 5k each way ment we were a little short on time for the task but we summoned all our usual enthusiasm to get loads done in difficult circumstances.

After being greeted by the Mencap team and given much needed water we divided the tasks and got stuck in removing grass, strimming and mowing. The leveling of the earth for the new shed was somewhat hampered by the lack of rain and the sun-baked was super hard, but we dug in and made an impression. Whilst not entirely completing the job we did some great work clearing weeds and grass to make the area more accessible and made a good start in breaking up the ground for more work to be done.

The plot is reasonable large and much of it is overgrown, but we made sure that the fruit plants were more accessible and focused on the area where the new shed will go, and it's surroundings. The Guys from Mencap work hard on this area and it is good that they are able to see things growing and hopefully will get to enjoy the fruits of their (and our) labor, quite literally.

The run back seemed to be a little cooler and everyone made it back to base in one piece for more liquid refreshment. really pleased with the effort put in by the team in both the run and the task. I promise next weeks run will be shorter! I suspect it will also be a little cooler too!

8 Goodgymmers ran to deliver flyers for the ideas festival.

the ideas festival is in full swing and they asked if we could deliver fliers for them to promote the free events they are putting on.

after a short warm up practicing our drills in the park we set off with a street race, seeing who could deliver their side of the street fastest. this was slightly off set by the massive imbalance in number of houses on each side of the street. so we continues on the next section where the roles were reversed, and the number of houses!

with one win each we continued flyering as fast as we could and visited some iconic places in Chemsford and as we passed many pubs talk once again returned to the social. news of this will be added today! A date will finally be decied. check out the facebook page later this afternoon.

the return leg provided an opportunity to stretch the legs and we re grouped for a quick photo op by the cathedral.

Well done to Gerry for his marathon PB last weekend at the Chelmsford Marathon and to all those other goodgymmers who were out running or helping at the weekend.

We finished what we started last night in Wandsworth, as we collected the bags of laundry we had dropped off at the launderette on our Monday group run.

Waiting outside the launderette for everyone to assemble, we met the lovely Emily, fresh from a lunchtime run. Way to go! Kylee had also smashed another personal best that afternoon, while Dave had run from home, Jack had cycled, and Matthew had already put in two hours on the ice rink. Dream team!

After we had picked up the clean bags of washing we headed for the Love to Learn charity to drop them off. Handover complete , it was off to the park for a mile time trial. Time trials are really useful for setting a bar to beat, improving your pace and providing excellent cardio training. Everybody pushed it last night, and the times were impressive. We'll be coming back to that to see if the training has been paying off in a month or so. Great running, everyone.