It's never a great thing to find yourself without an organisation to help for your Group Run, but tonight we managed to spruce up a few areas of the city with some plogging, while dropping off postcards about GoodGym Newcastle to spread the word of our brilliant group on the way. It ended up being a double win, helping others while we helped ourselves!

The cold wind and rain didn't put 15 hardy GG NCL runners off and we treated (?) ourselves to an extended warm up, completing drills and playing a game creepily called Body Parts which I lifted from a PE session I once taught to a group of 7 year olds. Kids shouldn't be the only ones to have fun!

Warm up done, time to dash off through the city centre!

It was great to have new runner Niveditha along and I also had a nice chat on the way to Hannah who has THE most passport stamps I have ever seen during a doc check. These things impress a nerd like me! We arrived at Claremont Road car park where Peter had very kindly brought along his stash of litter pickers for us to use and we spent the first ten minutes of the task time collecting all manner of treasures from the car park itself, including many many fast food containers, a nappy and a pair of underpants. We didn't quite get the A-Z of litter we achieved in the summer but we weren't far off! What I liked most was Tom's manifesto of charging McDonalds for all the discarded cups we found, and he gets my vote if he ever goes for Prime Minister.

VOTE TOM

Part 2 of the task involved more litter picking whilst dropping off GoodGym Newcastle postcards to the residents of Claremont Road, home to students, professionals and everyone in between. Hopefully this publicity drive-by-paper will get us some awesome new tasks and runners in the next few weeks! Another quick dash to Exhibition Park entrance followed and on to one of my favourite fitness sessions: a triple-station tabata of short intervals (20 seconds on, 10 seconds rest) between squats, stair repeats and sprints. You could almost see the steam coming off everyone's legs as their quads burned in the light of the underpass.

Poetic!

It's a big weekend for some of us taking part in the Town Moor Marathon and Half on Sunday, and we are also manning one of the main marshal points on the course. Come along from 9:30am to wave and cheer on or just to bring hot drinks and treats to those marshalling!

We are back at the amazing Newcastle University Students union next week. I can't promise it will be quite as big as last time, but it will definitely contain great people doing great things. Who knows, Evan may even arrive on time to this one and not have a pint on the way. Sign up here

Happy running! Anji x