26 amazing runners ran 7km to sweep pavements, wash windows and clear litter at Charlton House!

We were back up to our usual numbers yesterday (hooray!) and welcomed quite a few new faces too! Please give a big cheer to Oli, Nina's uni friend Mic, Amy's mum Jo and finally GoodGym tourist ALL THE WAY over from GG Bristol with a huge 168 good deeds to his name... the lovely Richard! Welcome everyone! Hope you enjoyed your first run with us! :)

HAPPY 50th to VB!

Last night was also a special evening because the amazing Vickie was celebrating her 50th good deed!! Since she's started GoodGym, she has done some pretty spectacular things.. she whizzed around the Manchester marathon course in a mere 3 hours 27 minutes qualifying her for London AND Boston, she completed a 55km trail race up in the Lake District a few weeks ago with her dad and then 2 weeks after that she did her first 100km race.... INCREDIBLE. This girl can run far AND fast! Can't wait to see what the rest of the year has in store for her :)

So whilst on the Vickie topic, we spent 5 minutes after the intro going round the circle trying to guess her middle name. Some interesting choices were brought to the table... Victoria was one. Vickie Victoria Burns.. yep, sounds viable. And Mickey was another. Vickie Mickey Burns.... also sounds great. But then in the end, after keeping us in suspense... she didn't even have one!!! But I have no doubt that when she gets married later down the line, when the time comes to change her last name, she will think "well I might as well give myself a middle name while I'm at it".... and will choose Mickey.

Team bike

So sadly, as much as running is AWESOME, it can also be really annoying at times and give us injuries. Unfortunately Mridula and Ben P were in the injured camp but in true GG spirit they still showed up, although not on their two feet but on their two wheels! So even though it's sad they weren't running, at least they got to keep each other company and Mridula even learnt how to change gears! RESULT.

We set off on the run and 2 miles and a big hill later, we arrived at Charlton House which was looking even more lovely than the last time, decorated in lots of flag bunting! Super cute! We waited a few minutes for everyone to arrive and then assigned jobs! Thankfully the people at Charlton House had got a little bit more equipment since last time so we had 7 brooms between us rather than just the 1! There were loads of sponges to clean the windows, a bunch of gloves and even a couple of litter pickie stickies! Which makes picking up litter about 1000000000 times more fun.

Everyone grabbed something from the pile and got to work! The ground floor windows were crying out for a clean (probably after we just smeared the dirt around them last time ha!), the pavements required some sweeping and the surrounding areas needed to be cleared of litter. It was great to see everyone getting stuck in! If you scroll through the photos, there is an amazing one of George defying gravity cleaning the windows!

20 minutes later and we were done! Loads of bin bags had been filled with litter and leaves, all the windows were sparkling (well, more so than before anyway!) and the grounds were litter-free! A few of the guys took the bin bags to the bins with the security guy who, no word of a lie, was called Yummy. And then we set off back to the uni!

The good thing about going uphill on the way there is of course the downhill on the way back! We arrived back quite late so, much to everyone's disappointment, we skipped the fitness session and had a nice stretch instead.

Stealth mode!

Then it was time to try and sneakily get everyone to sign Vickie's card without her seeing! We went to Bill's for some dins and Mridula had kindly baked some AMAZING cheesecake cupcakes for the occasion. Not the easiest of things to eat, as Brin found out after it fell to pieces all over him... but delicious nonetheless!! What a lovely evening it was :)

Thanks so much for coming last night and for getting so stuck in! Awesome job on the run too! Next week we are heading back to the Deborah Ubee Trust so hopefully see you then! Oh and please remember to tick the Gift Aid option in your settings!!!!!