With a late change to our scheduled task, we had a slightly longer run than first anticipated last night, but nothing holds back team GG! The Whale Company asked us to help them collect branded bottles from the shoreline which they are then going to turn into a huge raft which will be raced down the Thames by an ex Olympic rower in a bid to raise awareness of the level of plastic polluting our waterways. What a good idea!

It was great to welcome Richard all the way from Bristol doing a spot of GG tourism, while Carolina came along for her first every GoodGym run last night - give them both a cheer!

A little reminder that we have two community missions coming up (for which you don't need to be DBS checked) on the next couple of Saturdays - check out the website for all the info.

Just before our warm up we started with a little runspiration courtesy of writer Haruki Murakami:

"Exerting yourself to your fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running and a metaphor for life"

With that we popped outside to get our legs pumping and our heart rate up, and also to find out which skill that we don't already possess would make our lives better. The answers ranged from the achievable (bike maintenance and learning a language) to the more ambitious (time travel).

We thought we had a 3k run ahead of us - eventually it turned out to be 4k - and we set off down the streets of Chiswick on our way to meet Carolyn from the Whale Company. We found her waiting with bags and instructions, and together we jogged the extra stretch to the most polluted part of the shoreline. As we got stuck in, finding masses of plastic detritus, bottles, cups, cotton buds and far too many lollipop sticks, we were kindly offered free drinks by the manager of the pub opposite our patch of river. Nice!

Less nice was the dead eel and massive fish head we came across as we picked up bottle after bottle, but it was all in the name of a good deed. Well done to Will for flicking it back to its final watery resting pla(i)ce.

We took the run back in two groups arriving back after another 3k at around the same time. A special mention goes to Jen who smashed her longest ever run yesterday. Nice one!

Next week we're back to the river to help prep for Thames Tidefest where we'll be finishing off that rather lovely path we started down to the water's edge. Sign up here for more GoodGym fun and hopefully fewer eels.