8 runners ran 5km to the Montessori Education Centre and completely transformed the front garden!

What an evening last night eh? Super hot and super sunny, but that's how we like it, because it makes us sweat more!

This week, we welcomed more new faces to the squad which makes me so happy :) We said hello to Tom who is trying to beat his mum's 10K time. Don't worry Tom, you've got this in the bag! We also welcomed another new face, Cameron, to the crew! Thanks for coming gents, hope you had a good first run! Then we had Margaret who has now fully recovered from the Edinburgh Marathon, superstar Good Deeder Imogen, the lovely smiley Ali and the fabulous Greenwich regulars Amy and Ben.

Fun in the sun!

As always, we kicked off with a little warm up on the grass just to get the blood pumping. We saw some beautifully high knees and some ultra fast feet! A few rounds of that and our hearts were certainly elevated and that combined with the sun ensured our bodies were nice and warm so off we went!

Down along the main street and turned in towards Maze Hill station and there was pretty sizeable hill (it would make sense that Maze Hill station is on a hill, the penny finally drops). Luckily for the group, my sense of direction isn't the best and just before we were about to scale it, I realised we had gone too far so back we went avoiding said hill! A few twists and turns later we arrived at the Montessori.

We were greeted by the absolutely lovely Wendy. I don't think I'd ever met anyone so friendly! She explained the task at hand, which included cutting back the trees, pulling out some weeds, tackling a pretty stubborn tree root and if we had time, some lifting to be done inside. With a lovely array of tools that Wendy had kindly laid out for us, Tom got straight to work on the root, you could see the determination in his eyes! Cameron & Imogen got to work on the weeds on the left side and pruned back the big green shrub. Amy opted for the branch cutters and started trimming the bottoms of the two front trees, Ben worked on the front of the garden whilst Ali & Margaret took on the right side. In just a few minutes we could see a huge difference! Black bags were being filled at the speed of light! These runners don't mess around!

The root cause of the problem

Well Wendy wasn't joking when she said that root was stubborn. Tom had managed to hack away at bits of it, but sadly after a while you could see it in his eyes that he was going to lose this battle. Root 1 - Tom 0. But don't worry Tom, you made the root smaller so that's better than nothing! Good effort!

Money, Money, Money!!!

After 15 minutes of weeding, Imogen found some hidden treasure! A five pound note! It was slightly defaced and had a few holes in it and was a little grubby, but hopefully Wendy managed to clean it up and put it in the funding pot :)

The garden was getting pretty messy with dirt and various weeds & twigs (sorry Wendy) so the clean up operation began a little earlier than normal. Two brooms required to sweep the dirt off the patio, and even more black bags were being filled! Fantastic work everyone, I think you will agree you made a real difference there last night!

After a group photo or 5, we waved goodbye to our lovely hosts and set off back to base camp. On our way back we did some speed work which us runners very rarely tend to do when we're on our own so really important to get those fast twitch muscle fibres trained up to make you a faster runner! 5 sets of 15s 90% effort sprints and these guys absolutely smashed it. 15 seconds is quite a long time to go pretty much all out but these guys did great. After the final sprint, and a few photos by the river, we were ready to cool down and have a stretch.

Really amazing effort last night guys! You were brilliant on the task and there was fantastic running going on all round so you should give yourselves a pat on the back! See you next week!