That was a cold one!

...but that didn't deter 13 of us from lacing up, heading out and helping in our local community! We were also joined last night by 3 new runners, big welcome to Alex and Riya on their first ever GoodGym experience and a lovely warm welcome to Anwen who is the new trainer for Oxford which will be up and running early next year!

Starting with a whip around of names and favourite things to eat if we are doing a longer run (lots of your fueling on jelly babies!) on this very cold and wet evening we were in need of a warm up so we headed over to Haven Green to jump up and down and get ourselves moving! It was then just a short run up the hill to Hestia's Ealing accommodation site where we knew we'd be nice and warm for the duration of the task which this week was helping with some cleaning tasks around the facility.

Hestia provides housing support and empowers vulnerable people to enable them to make positive changes in their lives!

Sandra welcomed us to the site and split us up into groups doing a few cleaning tasks, this little bit of help we provide doesn't seem like much but it really helps free up the staff there and enables them to focus their energy on other areas of the organisation where it's needed most.

So a little bit of scrubbing here and there really does make a difference, what we do in half an hour could take one member of staff a full day, that's a whole lot of help!

With a lot of man power between us last night we got all the areas scrubbed up in no time at all which (much to some of the groups dismay) left us with lots of time for our planned hills session. Off to West Walk we went! For those of you who've been tortured by me here before you'll know this little path provides a great area to complete a hill sesssion! It's just steep enough to keep your efforts strong throughout, it's a little sheltered, well lit and pedestrianised, PERFECT for what we had planned this evening! Normally we'd run up fast and recover down but this week we mixed things up with power walking or light jogging up for the easier effort and pushing hard on the downs.

Every lit-HILL helps!

We aimed for between 4-6 reps each with everyone working hard at their own pace and despite the miserable weather we all battled through! Even those who didn't take part due to injury (there's a few of us a bit benched at the moment!) stayed and cheered on the other runners keeping everyone motivated to get the session done!

With warmth on the horizon it was just a quick jog back to the start for stretches and a debrief. Thank you all for coming out in that miserable weather and hopefully see you all again soon, I can't promise the weather will be any better (fingers crossed it's not worse!) but I can promise we'll be back at the same time next week doing some more good and getting fit!