11 Goodgymers litter picked the skate park and alongside the river

Colchester delighted us with its horrific traffic for this run, as my paltry 1.5 mile journey took 40 minutes! I would have abandoned my car and run down, except I had the equipment for the task in my car boot. Nonetheless I managed to make it to Leisure World just in the nick of time, but as almost everybody had said something on the facebook group about traffic, we decided to allow a bit more time for everyone to arrive.

We welcomed Julian back for his second run and both he and Fay were sporting their new red t-shirts.

Unfortunately, due to the bad traffic, the weather and some illnesses our numbers were down on usual, but we still started our run full of enthusiasm.

We ran to the skate park for our warm up, and to assess the litter situation. Then we made our way back to the car park to gather equipment. We worked in pairs - 5 minutes in the skate park and 10 minutes along the footpath. Tav and James discovered that the ditch had sitting water in it and some quite nasty pieces of litter, but they were safe as using the litter pickers and gloves to gather them.

After a good womble, we made our way to our 'running track' to do some 400m repeats. We explained that there should be a 1:1 work to rest ratio on these repeats, as a full recovery will allow you to push as hard as possible in the effort, which will have a positive effect on the 2 key levels that determine your running fitness.

David joined me in a bit of a stretch as we'd both done an Insanity workout on Tuesday, so were both a bit sore! After the 400s we made our way back to Leisure World for some stretching and said our goodbyes.

Next week, we'll be tidying up the lawn for Firstsite sign up here