A Boulder Approach to Running in the Heat

20 people ran in 30 degree heat to help Castlehaven Community Centre and 2 people ran 10k to wash an elderly couples windows

30 degrees huh! Blimey. We're not complaining though- bring it on! We pay to sit on easyjet planes to experience weather like that.

We had two jobs to do this evening. One was a mission. Winifred has been a full time carer for her husband for the last 13 years but has recently been struggling to keep up. She really wanted to give the windows a wipe but it was proving difficult. We sent lovely Pritesh and Will Dowsett to help.

An Englishman's home is his Castlehaven

The rest of the group headed to Castlehaven Community Centre. They're a great community association with projects from the under 5's to 60+. They have taken over the maintenance of a piece of public land around the centre and are turning it into a thriving growing space. You can check out what the volunteers are up to here.

There were 4 major tasks we were set to cover.

Paving the way

In a few weeks Castlehaven will be having a small festival in the garden, but at the moment the paved area where all the stalls are due to be erected is infested with weeds. Our job was to pull, scrape or yank out anything that didn't have a flower. With a wheelbarrow full of trowels, hoes and gloves a group of 6 girls got down to it right away.

Heard it through the grapevine

Armed with a ladder, and a couple of secateurs Gemma and Rachel scaled a fence and chopped back a huge dead vine. Nice work ladies

Pond life

4 hardy gents climbed into a drained pond and lifted out a massive load of boulders, rubbish and rubble. The hardest thing wasn't the heavy lifting but putting up with the pungent smell of warm dog mess emanating from the corner of the park.

Forking hard ground

The rest of the team were charged with attempting to start creating some new beds. Before they could start breaking up the ground with the spaces and forks they had to pull out all the weeds, and rake up all the leaves. That was no mean feat in itself but the forking....cooor that was difficult. Still we made our best effort and in 40mins we had made significant progress.

The crawl home

After 40mins, (in which roughly 20litres of sweat had been perspired) we down tools, locked them back in the shed and made for the exit. We were all a little bedraggled to head to Regents Park for a run so decided to head on a shorter route home to the Community Centre. Another cracking evening y'all