The rain stopped and 8 Ealingers headed to the canal to help clear the rubbish and spread the joy!

After the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday last night was #givingtuesday and we had two new runners to help us give back to our local community, big welcome to Ania and Francesca and major kudos for not being put off by heavy rain we had earlier in the evening!

After cowering inside for as long as possible we headed outside for our warm up and as if my magic the rain had stopped! Suddenly we had renewed enthusiasm for the task ahead and were all raring to get down the the water and make a difference! We did a quick whip round introducing ourselves and talking about favourite events we've taken part in and we had everything from Beachy Head Marathon to our very own Ealing Half Marathon.

With a 2 mile run each way tonight we got down to business and headed west towards Hanwell, this is a stretch of canal we've visited regularly over the past couple of years and we know how much there is we can do there. Fortunately everytime we go the situation does get better so we're hoping by heading down and keeping on top if it we are encouraging everyone else to respect the space too!

We were met there by our wonderful taskforce member Jenni who is under physio's orders to do no running at the moment (boo!) so she drove down with all of our litter picking equipment which was kindly donated to us from The William Hobbayne Charity.

The equipment we now own means we can do tasks like this really easily and can help The Canal & River Trust at anytime!

Geared up with high vis, litter pickers, bag loops and gloves (and the all important hand sanitiser for afterwards!) we set out to pick up as much litter as we could around our lovely canals! Our aim was to keep recyclables and rubbish separate so that we could take everything possible to the recycling bank on the way back to the start.

Slim pickings on the canal

Thankfully there wasn't too much litter to be found on the canal itself and after a little walk in each direction clearing what we could find we headed back up to the entrance to the water which always seems to be the worst affected area.

Three bags full

After about 20 minutes of picking we had filled three huge bags of recyclable waste and just one bag of actual rubbish. It was really good to know that lots of what we picked up could be taken to the right place at the recycling centre and not end up in land fill!

With that we headed to to recycling bank on the way back to the start to put everything in it's rightful place. A very satisfying end to the task!

Thank you to everyone for coming out on what could have been a grim evening but turned out to be a wonderful run and task!

• Special mention this week goes to Tash who sneakily completed her 50th good deed on her coach run on Monday evening, we'll be celebrating at the next social!
• Also a HUGE thank you to Jenni for coming and helping out when she couldn't run, we couldn't have done it without her!