Tonight, seven GoodGymmers met up after work to help out at Camden Highline's volunteering session.

Before we go too far into the nitty gritty of how we litter picked, here's a shout out to Latoya: Latoya reached her 50th good deed at this volunteering session, having been unable to make it to her regular Haringey group run last night. 46 of these good deeds have been since the start of the year, so that's super speedy work - awesome job, Latoya! 😄🎉👏

Camden Highline have recently been awarded some funding to help improve Camden Gardens park, which is located beneath the western end of the Highline route. Before they start any landscaping work, they need to clear the park. Consequently, they put a call out on Instagram for volunteers to help clear the site of debris. Having seen the call (and knowing the facility of our runners for clearing stuff), we Insta-ntly knew we could help (side note, I'm both embarrassed and proud of this pun).

On arrival, we were given a brief introduction to the project by Adam, who also unveiled that that night we could choose between sweeping some gravel and litter picking. Most, if not all of us, went for litter picking. This was potentially more from curiosity than from anything else: The park looked clean enough to satisfy even my mother, and it was intriguing to consider exactly what there was to litter pick! (At one point, Adam apologised for the relative cleanliness of the park, which must have felt like an incredibly odd thing to apologise for! 😂)

It turned out that the possibilities were more exciting than the reality. We found a lot of the usual culprits: cigarette butts, shiny foil confetti, and fragments of broken glass. At one point, we found a bottle cap that was attempting to emulate a chameleon by blending into the surrounding gravel (It's surprising how excited you get when you spot a premium bit of litter like that.) At another point, Dharmesh made up some sort of game involving his litter picker and a favoured stick. We didn't ask the rules, but we're sure he would be willing to share them for people to play along at home. Feel free to ask him the next time he's touristing in your area 😄👍

As there were a decent number of volunteers (both GoodGym and non-GoodGym), we finished up within 50 minutes of our start time and took the requisite photo for the report.

GoodGym Camden being GoodGym Camden, post-task we made our way to a local pub with some of the other volunteers and organisers for a quick drink. It was there that we were promised lots of (or at least some) heavy lifting on upcoming volunteering sessions that Camden Highline plan on organising. Keep an eye out for these on the GoodGym Camden upcoming run page for when they're arranged! 😄 (& Feel free to join us on a group run before that!)