Goodgym Kingston runners Rob and Kate met Lorena and her sister Milena at Las Aguas to begin our great debut plinternational ( plog international)! The goal was to clear the walkways leading up Monserrate of litter. Monserrate is a hill that dominates the city center of Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. It rises to 3,152 metres above the sea level, where there is a church with a shrine, devoted to El Señor Caído.

Rob was keen to lead the stretches and warm up inspired by our Kingston run leader Mark. While Kate was pleased to point out that because we were warming up for our jog and task at 11:30, we’ll still be mid -plinternational at exactly the same time as our Kingston group run was warming up outside the Guildhall, because they’re 6 hours ahead of us in London. It’s like we’re doing a split task litter pick on two continents with team Kingston Goodgym this Tuesday!

Post warm up and we were all stretched and planned out. Lorena came prepared and got out the bin bags and she donned her gloves. There was plenty of plastic litter to be picked up provided by Coca-Cola and Gatorade as well as many plastic cups, countless plastic straws and lolly sticks, plastic spoons, sandwich bags and water bottles. We were so pleased to be able to clear up the area and couldn’t bottle it up! The climb soon became a bit trickier and Rob mentioned feeling a bit dizzy from the bending down to pick up litter at over 1500m at that point. It seemed like the hill kept on going and we were getting tired but we knew we’d get over it! We kept a positive altitude and felt better after a little encouragement from some locals. We passed many people on the way up that saw us gathering rubbish and said ‘muchos gracias’ and ‘buen trabajo’! Someone even stopped us to take a photo of us and say that he likes what we’re doing and is happy to see us cleaning up the rubbish. He also asked Lorena about our Goodgym group. As we’d almost filled two bags of rubbish we were relieved to find some larger bins to deposit them into near the top and could continue the climb on what was more than merely a slight incline as Mark might say but was certainly a solid hill! The views of all of the city of Bogotá at the top were a great reward!