A very warm welcome to our first-timers this evening, Michael, Sophie and Nick. It was lovely to have you all with us, and we hope to see you again soon! A warm welcome too to Julian who joined us this evening from Greenwich.

We had a slightly different task lined up for us this evening, with a spot of plogging around Lewisham to tidy up our local streets and green spaces. It soon became apparent that the slow pace of plogging was no match for a cold dark evening in February, so everyone formed pairs for some impromptu...

• Sprinting and press ups
• Sprinting and squats
• Sprinting and lunges
• And just plain sprinting!

"Something fruity in the park..." I'll say anything to make speedwork sound fun!

Despite Lewisham looking relatively tidy this evening, we still managed to collect up an impressive 5 bin bags of litter in a little over an hour, great work everyone! Today's top find had to be the crisp £10 note found by Michael! And a big thanks to Chloe for sweeping up as backmarker this evening.

Check out the link for next week's group run and task here; it will be a much warmer affair helping out at GRACE in Lee. See you there!

Wowzers, what an evening! Huge kudos to every one of you who battled gale force winds to make it out for our group run this evening! A special welcome to Olivia who joined us for the first time after an excellent recommendation from her sister who runs with GoodGym in Brighton. And welcome back to Sophie who had such a lovely time last week that another group run was totally worth braving the weather for!

After a relatively chaotic bit of route planning we split into teams, with the rather biased choice between Team Run-Far with me, Team Most-Trees with Kim and Team Fingers-Crossed with John (ably assisted by Magda who is much more familiar with the local territory).

We headed outside for a not-so-warm then with the rain lashing down, we set off towards Hilly Fields to comb the local streets for rogue trees and drag them to the drop-off points at the corners of the park.

• Team Run-Far traded kilometers for trees, finding only 4 trees (one of which had been abandoned literally over the road from the drop-off point - we lucked out with that one!)
• Team Most-Trees lived up to Kim's confidence, dragging in a winning total of 9 trees
• Team Fingers-Crossed didn't get lost (hurrah!) and managed a solid 5 trees

Not quite as magnificent as last year's total of 53 trees (even accounting for this year's smaller group size - I've done the maths) but doubly as impressive given the weather!

Take a look at the starter session coming up after Hilly Fields parkrun this weekend, and next week's lovely group run at Crofton Books followed by our 4th birthday social at Mamma Dough.

Happy running everyone, have a good rest of the week!