14 Runners take on a task for Rivercare

The second Wednesday of Wimbledon, and due to a last minute change of tasks, we would be wombling! Hurrah!

It was a lovely sunny evening and we welcomed Belinda, from Worthing, as well as several newbies to Colchester Goodgym - Antonia, Steve, Helen and Chrissie. Well done for coming - you're all very welcome and we look forward to seeing you next week. And well done to Nicola on completing the Southend Half Marathon in very hot conditions.

Due to the change of task we had a much shorter run tonight, but this did mean running to the Park Rangers' station to pick up the equipment, and then running with our litterpicks to get to the task location. As usual, when I removed the river rescue rope from the bag, it all unravelled (FACE PALM!) but David volunteered to put it back whilst everyone was sorting out their own equipment.

Once we'd gotten down to the river, we did our litter pick around the pond, which was its usual summer pea soup colour, but the ducks didn't seem to mind. Half the group went clockwise around the lake and the other half went anti-clockwise, and we got around the lake in record time - there wasn't very much litter.

We then made our way to view the new parkrun turnaround point before heading back into the park for more litter picking. David found a foam dice and we all got distracted by the game of guessing which number it would land on - it seemed to be 6 rather too often.

When this was all done and equipment cleared away we ran up to the bandstand and learnt some downhill running technique - we had a couple of attempts at this before making our way back to Leisure World for a Stretch and cool down.