20 Greenwich runners ran 4km to pack rucksacks for the homeless at Clothes For Causes charity shop!

Well it was a beautiful day yesterday. Potentially even T shirt weather for the run (if you were feeling brave!). We had 5 new runners with us yesterday! Cally aka my little sis, Jo, Sarah, Nick & Charlie! Welcome to the Greenwich gang! Give them a cheer! We saw a few runners come out of hibernation! Welcome back Simona and Margaret! Also, one of our runners, Ben, is away living it up in Barbados this week but he still ran yesterday in his GG T shirt on! So he was with us in spirit :)

Warm up!

We dropped off our bags and went to do a little warm up which included lots of squats and lunges to wake up those leg muscles! Followed by a little Mexican squat wave. It didn't take us long to get warm as it was already so warm outside!

We set off down the street and arrived at the charity shop a few minutes later where we somehow managed to squeeze twenty bodies in there which was a task in itself! We were greeted by Veronique who gave us a little talk about the charity and the work that they do and also explained the tasks at hand!

There were two main tasks - number 1 was preparing care packages for the homeless which were made up of some hygiene essentials, food, drinks and some nice treats in there too! Popcorn, Kettle chips & a Cheezstring... NICE! The second task was sorting out loads of clothes into different piles, so dresses, shoes, tops, trousers, etc. Jo, Penny, Isabella, Helen, Claire, Margaret, Simona & Doyin went downstairs with Veronique for the sorting clothes task whilst everyone else got a little production line going upstairs with the bags.

There were red bags for ladies and black bags for men and a few differences in the products for each one. Ladies got some lady products and the men's bags had a manly deodorant but James thought it would be nice for the ladies to have one of those too... which then meant all the bags had to go through a rigorous quality control inspection at the end! But not to worry James, your generosity was much appreciated!

I popped downstairs to get away from the bag chaos and found the ladies focused, organised and working super efficiently! They had their own production line going that was seamless! Excellent work!

30 minutes later and all the bags were packed and stacked in the corner, rubbish had been put away, clothes were sorted into the right sizes on the rails, jeans were folded up tidily, all the clothes were sorted into piles downstairs! AMAZING! We took a big group photo and then went on our way!

Surprise hill (read: mountain)!

Since our run to the shop was relatively short, we ran a loop towards the river and then back around up Vanbrugh hill (sorry!) and down Maze hill back to the college. Ben & Vickie took the front group and Alex and I stayed at the back. I hope you liked the little mountain climb. We used to do them all the time in Greenwich Park but since it's been closed we haven't done many hills in a while!

Sadly George was having some trouble with his knee and Rina was suffering with that awful IT band, get better soon guys!. Alex & Mridula did a few laps of the square while we waited for the rest of the group to arrive and then we did some core work!

As I said last night, a strong core as a runner enables you to hold a better running form for longer which therefore means you don't get tired as quick. So all the planks and exercises we did last night are such an easy way to develop a stronger core. We did some plank shoulder taps, teddy bear rolls which worked a bit of our hamstrings too and finally some plank jacks just to get the heart rate back up again to finish off!

A few stretches and we were done! We went back to grab our stuff, ate some Oreos and called it a night :)

Excellent work last night team! We got so much done and the ladies really appreciated all of your help so thank you all for coming! Hopefully see you next week for our run and social afterwards!