8 keen runners braved the wind to help a local resident

We met at the ARU Mildmay Sports Centre to discuss when the best time to put our Christmas trees up was, oh and do some good work for the community! The majority of us will be popping our trees up this weekend, as soon as it hits 1st December but Paul said he's a Christmas Eve up, Boxing Day down kind of guy. Outrageous. Next he will say he doesn't consume his entire body weight in pigs in blankets! We posed for photos with Catherine and Rachel's new best friend, Manny and then set off. Sadly Manny didn't want to leave ARU so he stayed behind.

We ran up the bunny walks, along Sandford Road and got to Brian's. A lovely 2.5km warm up. Brian is a local, elderly resident whose garden is disputed ownership between himself and the Council and therefore the hedge gets completely overgrown, blocking his downstairs windows. As you can see from the before photo, it was in need of a good trim! Team treble J (Joel, Joseph and James) grabbed the shears and got stuck in while the rest of us had smaller secateurs. Over the next half hour we got stabbed, slashed and prodded by various plants but did it all with a smile on our faces. You can see that we did an absolutely superb job and this will Brian to have daylight flooding his living room and kitchen. This will make a massive difference to his quality of life in these dark winter months where daylight is oh so fleeting. Thanks guys.

We set off a different route back, with everyone voting for the longer option! I was shocked at that too! We upped the pace as it was starting to rain a bit more and stopped with 200m to go. From there were finished with a sprint that almost killed me. Laurie led the stretching, and discussing the plans for December's GoodGym tasks, thoughts turned to the Xmas social. With the roaring success of the quiz (aside from the fact neither team won...) we will be getting a date in the diary soon. There will be a GoodGym awards ceremony too! Please email any suggested award categories to davidc@goodgym.org - nominees will be selected by an expert panel, with everyone getting an opportunity to vote on the winners!

Happy running!