Tonight we ran around 4km to help out at ECCO

Tonight we only had to run about half a mile to our task just past East Croydon station. We had been contacted by Jeremy from ECCO East Croydon Community Organization to help start work on removing some unruly ivy from the raised beds along the “Boulevard”. Tools and bags were supplied as part of Croydon Council’s “ Clean and green champions” scheme and they even arranged to pick up the bags of ivy and other weeds the next morning. We were joined by two of the local residents who were old hands at the clearing and weeding. We worked hard for 45 minutes and filled around 6 huge bags of green waste but there is still a lot to do so a return trip may be in order if they’ll have us back. We did find a few “interesting” items in the undergrowth with our favourite being the dinosaur with interchangeable heads – it has now been adopted as the GoodGym Croydon mascot and will be coming along on future runs.

After the task we headed towards Park Hill aptly named after the hilly terrain so guess what we did once we got there!? Hills are our friends and make us stronger – not sure if the runners believed me though. There was some impressive racing up the hills despite being told to run at their 80-90% effort and that it wasn’t a race – that fell on deaf ears!

The friendliest GoodGym in London welcomed Ray on her first ever GoodGym run and also Emma who was doing a bit of GG tourism and we hope to see her back soon. Well done to Rachel who ran the Reading half marathon last weekend and congratulations to the team for coming second in the Selsdon half marathon relay. Great weekend for us all.

Next week we will be heading back to Saffron Central to met Ally and see what we can do to help – it’ll be gardening related.