Nine runners ran 5km to do some painting at the Electricity Sports cricket ground

We don't like cricket, oh no, we love it! Since cricket badger Huw took the reins at GoodGym Leicester it was only a matter of time before he got some cricket involved with our weekly group run. Tonight we visited local club Electricity Sports CC for the first time to help with some painting on their famous old pavilion building. Huw took the runners on a 3km trip along the river to loop round the long way to the task while Dave, Mel and Lindsay took the more direct route to meet us there.

Between 1901 and 1939 the Aylestone Road ground was home to Leicestershire CCC, hosting 399 first class games including matches against touring international sides of Australia, South Africa, India, West Indies and New Zealand. Legendary players such as WG Grace, Sir Don Bradman and Jack Hobbs are among those to have played cricket there as did the less legendary cricketer and GoodGym trainer Huw in the early 90s as a young whippersnapper who soon learned not to bother trying to be a fast bowler after being whacked onto the roof of the nearby building that then was a Staples store on Raw Dykes Road. Pictures of WG Grace and Bradman's touring Australians at the ground are included in the report.

Today the ground is home to Electricity Sports CC (they still retain the name from the time when the electricity board owned the ground) who are a volunteer run community club offering cricket to children from the age of 5 and upwards as well as four Saturday senior teams and a women's team. Find out more about the club here. While the 'Lecky' senior squads took part in their net practice on the ground the GoodGym team set to work painting a variety of wood and metal panels on the back of the pavilion. Lisette used her artistic skills to leave our GG Leicester mark and we worked in pairs to cover as many panels as we could in our time slot. Hopefully we can return soon to finish off the pavilion work and paint one of their sight screens.

The club kindly allowed us to use their outfield for our fitness task so a cricket based fast bowler's fitness drill seemed most appropriate. On average a fast bowler has a 24 second recovery after bowling each ball before they have to run in and bowl again so we did reps of 30m sprints starting every 30 seconds with whatever time you had left in the 30 seconds after the sprint to use as the recovery time. Everyone put in a fantastic effort for the session, hopefully it was an enjoyable and relevant drill for our location.

It was interesting to note when we took our post-task picture that when I asked for a 'cricket pose' that Stu, Lisette, Sheila, Jimmy, Mel and Lindsay all opted to bat, with Sharon bowling and Dave providing an umpire's signal of four runs the only deviations!

Our work complete we took the direct route back to base before stretching off and heading our separate ways.

Watch out for news this week on Facebook and on the weekly email of a potential community mission to Coalville and remember the upcoming races we are supporting the Rothley 10k and Watermead Challenge are both listed on the website. Next week we're going to help LOROS delivering their event booklets.

Happy running, HD