17 runners run 4km litter picking along Riverside walk for Rivercare

Another Wednesday, and another group of excited red t-shirt wearing runners gathered at Leisure World. We welcomed new runners Chris, and Courtney (Tommy’s sister, or was it brother! ;-) ). And congratulated David, Naomi and Catherine on their pbs at parkrun on Saturday. As well as Ian for the Dedham 10k, and Arthur who had just returned from a 420 mile cycling trip.

After a confusing warm up, we made our way through the park to Middle Mill Weir to meet David from Rivercare who had brought the equipment for us. We are becoming an official Rivercare group, and our zone is from Middle Mill to Eastgates, therefore, in a few weeks we will be able to store the equipment in the park, and access it to do river cleans whenever we like.

Litter grabbers and bin bags collected, we made our way back to riverside walk via Kings Meadow, and the litter picking began.

This was somewhat harder than anticipated as there was just the right amount of light to make the headtorches ineffective, but not enough light to actually see. Distinguishing between a cigarette butt and a leaf was particularly hard, and there was a piece of string that could easily have been a worm.

The ducks found this hilarious and were quacking away as we left. Angela regaled the group with her shadow puppet skills, as the shadow of the grabber became a crocodile… Yes, we always knew she was a bit odd.

Anyway, we returned the wares to David, who promised us that next time we’d have hoops, and we had a rather challenging attempt to take a group photo in the dark.

Next it was time for the fitness session, which took place in Kings Meadow. This is sometimes used for parkrun, and was rather famously the route that we made up a couple of years ago when the world record for a 5km dressed as a pantomime camel was set at Colchester Castle parkrun. We couldn’t use the usual route for a reason that escapes me, so now, from time to time we use this kings meadows route.

This was pseudo parkrun training however, as many of the street lights had blown out, so we did a fartlek session. This is the swedish word for ‘speedplay’ and it refers to a run where you vary the pace but without a set rule. It's a type of interval training, without being so strict about when you run fast and when you run slow.

Because of the varying light conditions on the circuit, we used light levels as the determinant of speed on this session, and the challenge was to see how many circuits we could do in 12 minutes, going fast when there was plenty of light, and slow when there wasn’t much light.

A fun session, and I think the most laps achieved was 7. Next week, we will be going back to St Peter’s Church for some work in their Churchyard. Sign up here and if you don’t have a headtorch, please make every effort to get one before next week - you can always email me for a recommendation.

Run report written by Angela Isherwood