Seven runners ran 4.6km to help serve food at the Open Hands Pie Night

At my age a quiet birthday is more than welcome and GG Leicester enjoyed a similar but incredibly fulfilling birthday of our own tonight. With a mixture of holidays and other commitments leaving us with a small squad tonight we visited Open Hands for the very first time to help serve a hot meal to those in need at their weekly pie night. Jimmy debuted his new GG Angel shirt that marked his recent achievement of completing 100 good deeds. We welcomed Matt and Matthew (good coordination for those who struggle with names!) to their very first group run and set off across the city to our destination. On arrival we found plenty of regular volunteers already beavering away preparing food, our team of seven proving just about the right size to complement the existing volunteers - we love it when a plan comes together!

After preparations had been made for the doors to open at 7pm we were met with an influx of incredibly polite, friendly and grateful guests who we served with a hot meal of pie (all steak, meat and potato or vegetarian), jacket potato and beans with a cake and custard dessert. We served food and hot and cold drinks, helped clear tables and chatted to the guests. It was an inspirational experience for everyone seeing such a good thing for the local community running like a well oiled machine. We'll definitely look to come back and visit soon, especially as we were told they distribute around 70 tonnes of food during the harvest festival - packing that food up sounds like an ideal GoodGym task!

The return run was slightly quicker due to the inverse hill of New Walk, a particular well done to Matthew who is looking to get back into running after a period of absence, a super effort. It will get easier!

After stretching off some of us retired to the hostelry to raise a glass to mark two years of GG Leicester, here's to the next two!

Next week we're off to Belgrave Lock again to carry on staining the sleepers alongside the waterway. Before then there's an opportunity to sneak in a community mission at Leicester Animal Aid on Thursday morning, details are here if you are interested.

Don't forget that several runners from GG Leicester, Coventry and Birmingham are taking part in the Silverstone 10k in September, details on that can be found here if you'd like to join us for a cheap and fun race with like minded GoodGym folk.

Happy running, HD