TEN wonderful Waltham Forest runners joined me to run 3km and do an amazing job helping Greenleaf Road Baptist Church!

With Ant away it was time for me to vist the wonderful Waltham Forest group. We had a great task, a brilliant group of people and a nice spring evening - a recipe for a great time!

First of all we gathered together for the intro welcoming Sarah on her first GG run, congratulating Ruby on running Brighton Marathon (so much kudos for being back at GG already) and gave advance congrats to Ruari who'll be completing his 100th parkrun this weekend. With a quick warmup dispatched it was Pippa in charge and she led us on the very short run to the church.

90 seconds!

Really really short run, my watch made it exactly 90 seconds! Arriving at the church we eventually found Jenny and then made our way in. The task at hand was stripping the walls in what used to be the creche. the space is going to used for a youth club before much of the building is going to be renovated (but not for a couple of years!).

We split everyone around the room and split jobs around taking boards off the walls, scraping the resulting glue off the walls, wiping down the walls and then some painting.

Armed with every conceivable piece of cutlery (cake slices, spatulas, fish slices...) and a few paint scrapers everyone went at it with varying degrees of success on wall s craping and the others worked hard to get paint on to the walls (a bit of a gloss vs matt issue). In 40 mins we made a massive difference and the room was looking great. We'll be back in a couple of weeks to do some more work.

~Kitchen Utensils

Jenny kindly set out some drinks and biscuits (jaffa cakes - cue the debate) and once we were refreshed we said our goodbyes and headed off to Lloyd Park! There we did a shuttle run exercise throwing some set of exercises too to make sure that everyone had got their blood pumping! with the light starting to fade and our breath back Pippa led us back to base where we stretched and then some of us headed for a drink.

Fantastic night, thanks for looking after me and great to see you all again.

Cheers, Pritesh