We met at Markeaton Park for a catchup and a route which took in two laps of the park seeing us do 5.50km

Challenges that were resisted along the way included lots of bbqs, cold beverages, an ice cream van and generally just a lot of al fresco group dining in the sunshine. I'm sure more than one of us contemplated a dip in the lake too.....It was great to see so many people meeting friends and families in the park, albeit from the point of view of us getting our exercise in and not being quite as relaxed as most visitors.

Tracey, Gwyn, and Ashley get extra GoodGym points for wearing their t shirts and giving a brilliant introduction to GoodGym to newbie Fatima, who came along to find out what we're all about. Ashley was our beacon in the car park for anyone looking to join us and had us all worried when he asked whether Fatima knew it was these tennis courts we were meeting at...so I've learnt something new about Markeaton Park today! Thankfully, Fatima not only found us but of course couldn't wait to make her way around the park after such a great intro from the gang and thoroughly enjoyed running her first 5km (she was still smiling at the end which is surely proof enough.) That's the power of the support from GoodGym! Well done Fatima - a brilliant achievement in the heat tonight.

We had a catchup about potential volunteering tasks and what people have been up to recently, whether they're still working from home or are back in the office. We also gave Fatima a few examples of previous volunteering tasks and the sort of things we get up to, hopefully Ashley has recovered from us bringing up the gloss paint incident again, sorry Ashley!

Homework for me is clearly planning some future parkruns as a tourist as the gang there tonight have many stamps on their parkrun passports!

A great takeaway from tonight came from Ashley who brought up how different GoodGym is to anything else he's been involved in and how, because we're such a diverse bunch who got into GoodGym for a variety of reasons, we're a run group that talks about more than just running! Great to celebrate running achievements and support goals but our members have such varied interests, there's always lots to chat about and to learn.