17 runners ,including three whole newbies (Bryanne, Andy and Dan) and a last minute Stuart addition, met at Leisure World for our last group run of January. Tav gave us the exciting news that nationally GoodGym is very very close to its national target of 6,000 good deeds in January - this meant our run to Emmaus made a very important last minute contribution to this amazing target (which hopefully by the end of tomorrow will have been reached!). Well done all on contributing to this goodness! Other news included Emily being paired with her coach who she will run to on Thursday and Vanessa and Andy on their way to being mission verified.

After a brief but important warm-up in the cold, we headed up the hill and away to Emmaus warehouse in Colchester town centre. We met Jacko there who told us our task was to sort out the bags of donations and separate them into clothes, curtains and shoes. Most importantly, items in the black bin bags needed putting in to clear bin bags so that it was clear what they contained, for their future destinations. It is fair to say that it was curtains for the black bags. We steadily got to work in three teams, with a little bit of dressing-up in between. If the shoe fits... Kudos to Bob for the most fetching outfit and we think Chrissie has some close competitors for a traditional wedding dress! After 30 minutes of sorting we managed to bag roughly 30 bags of donations and cleared a whole section of the warehouse. Jacko was duly impressed and it is good to know that all the money raised from the selling of these donations goes directly back into Emmaus' great work with homeless schemes.

After the task, we headed to the outdoor gym near Leisure World for a fitness session with three parts: some running, some equipment and some squatting which got us all saying 'oh my quad..!'

We finished off with some stretching back in the warm at Leisure World. Hope to see you all back next week and/or at parkrun on Saturday. Good luck to Ian running Great Bentley half on Sunday - we hope he gets a wig(gle) on ;)