On a blustery morning at Lydiard Park, the usual scene looked slightly different, as a wave of red shirted superheroes from GoodGym Swindon swooped in to take control of parkrun.

The eager bunch of scanners, pacers, marshals, funnel managers and timekeepers gathered at the registration point ready to get into action and spread the word about the Good in GoodGym and ensure the event run like a well oiled machine.

The pacers, Paul ‘the Scientist’ at 20 minutes, Andrew at 22 minutes, Stuart ‘50 Deeds’ Kingsley at 25 minutes, ‘Sandy’ Sam at 27 minutes, Tracey at 30 minutes, Graham at 32 minutes, Jo at 35 minutes and Sharon and Kyra Bonner with young Ely in the buggy pacing at 40 minutes donned their yellow pacing bibs, collected their pacing cards positioned themselves ready to drag, ooh sorry encourage, potential victims, sorry runners, around the course to a PB!

Emma ‘the Trainer’ called everyone over to the ‘grassy area’ for the compulsory landscape, portrait and square photo call! The grassy area, everyone thought! Which grassy area? We are in the middle of a park, it’s all grassy!!! Emma, not blessed with height, could not be seen!

James ‘David Bailey’ Booth, the parkrun resident photographer managed to squeeze everyone in and take the photos.

Hopefully they were up to the strict standards set by Jo, our instatwitbook expert?!

This was a great opportunity to welcome Cath to the group. We look forward to seeing Cath on a Group Run in the near future.

Lily joined ‘Safety First’ Simon on the timers with David ‘the Pacer Chaser’ made sure everything was kept in order by being the number checker. We sent him up and down the funnel that many times he must have almost run a 5K run by the time tail walker Teresa finished. Thankfully Teresa managed to complete the whole course without getting lost, or going the wrong way! Having Mike, Emily and Tracy marshalling on the course would have helped keep her on the right track!!

Kirsty kept a tight hold of her cattle prod; an important piece of equipment in the funnel manager arsenal to keep the runners in the funnel so...

...we don’t have any ‘funnel duckers’ messing up the results! A phrase not to be said too quickly!!!

Once the runners finished their run, top scanners Jase the Ace (not sure if Tracey is the only one allowed to call him that!), Hannah, Helen, Rachel and Gina (in charge of the unscannables) ably recorded every run making the results processing a lot easier. Having so many GG’ers volunteering was fantastic and great to see so many red t-shirts on parade!

So when is the next Community Mission? We are heading to We're Open THIS THURSDAY; check it out HERE!