On a beautiful, warm sunny evening, 25 GG Yorkies ran to St Nicks to pull up Himalayan Balsam.

After welcoming an amazing five new runners to the gang, and doing a little coordination warm-up, we set off with Paul leading the charge and Tim bringing up the rear.

I had promised a fairly easy task on this very warm evening but Maria had other plans. She wanted us to not only pull up this invasive riverbank weed, but to dig a big balsam pit to throw it all in too. Undeterred by a bit of hard work, people grabbed spades and set to work.

Everybody else meandered along the path, (which I thought ran dangerously close to the edge of the beck) whilst ducking and diving over bendy tree trunks and doing a terrible job of avoiding nettles.

I am not wearing the right clothes for nettles - a vested and short-short wearing Leanne

Unfortunately balsam loves growing next to nettles and there was a lot of stinging and dock-leaf rubbing going on as people stuffed as much balsam into their blue sacks as possible.

A sting managed to go through my shorts and sting my bum! - Tim

Back at the pit there was a lot of grunting as quite amazing progress had been made in 20 minutes.

That is a very impressive hole - Maria

In the last ten minutes it was an all-action affair as everybody dragged over their bags of balsam to tip in the pit, including a couple of massive tonne-sacks that needed to be dragged through all the obstacles.

Regardless of all the stingy legs, nobody had fallen in the beck and we had a pit full of balsam, so I deemed the task a success.

We ran back and finished up with a little upper body workout, bringing back those wonderful press-ups!