The only time you’ll be glad to find litter is when you’re doing GoodGym’s litter pick bingo!

Wednesday’s group run saw five of us, James, Anne, Katie, Alys and Adam, on a mission to complete our litter pick bingo. This was a very special group run, as it marked Katie’s 50th mission!

We were looking for items like face masks, bottle caps, sweet wrappers and plastic bottles to tick off our list.

We started in Woking Park but didn’t find much aside from a few cigarette butts and an abandoned tote bag full of empty dog poo bags. But we can’t complain about a clean park - it was great to see!

However as soon as we walked out of the gates onto the road, I spotted a plastic bag that had spilled rubbish out all along a bank on the side of the road. We reckon someone must have chucked it out of their car, or it got swept up in last week’s wind!

It was like a bag full of (gross) treasures; plastic and glass bottles, covid tests and even a sock! We carefully worked as a team to clear it all up, with James acting as a traffic marshal…good thing we were were all wearing reflective and lights! #runsafebeseen That helped us tick more than a few items from the bingo.

Rubbish cleared, we made our way up towards town cleaning as we went and in a Woking GoodGym first, we had one man tell us “great job guys” and another who lived nearby to stop and chat to thank us.

We found a few more hotspots as we got closer to town that we cleared up. We also ticked off our random and ‘too big to bag’ items; part of a traffic cone, and an old road sign which James transported until it dispensed a large spider on him! But I can confirm it was deposited safely by a bin (the sign, no idea what happened to the spider)

As we got close to the station, we found a couple of bins where we could dispose of our findings and then made our way to a local pub to have a celebratory drink and discover if we’d got BINGO! We didn’t find any coins as indicated on the bingo, which is a shame as that could have paid for our drinks...

A huge congrats to Katie who has now completed 50 GoodGym missions! Time to order a brand new t-shirt that fits properly hey Katie?!

And a massive ‘Good luck!’ to James and Adam who are running the Surrey Half on Sunday. They will be accompanied by Anne and Rebecca who will be volunteering handing out medals - we’ve created a mission if anyone else wants to volunteer at the event, just make sure to contact the organisers first.

No junior parkrun this week due to the half, so hope to see you all at next week’s group run!