21 awesome runners ran nearly 4km to help at the Christchurch Peace Garden!

The sun was out for Yorkshire day and we welcomed two new runners to our squad. Yorkshire gal and Lewisham runner Vic and new GG runner Tarek, welcome both!

100k good deeds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This week, we surpassed an amazing milestone and celebrated 100,000 Good Deeds since GoodGym first started.... ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND! Isn't that just crazy. So well done for being a part of it over the last few weeks, months and years, you have made such a difference to so many people's lives and you should be so proud!

We celebrated by doing a combined total of 100 laps as a warm up (20 of you guys running 5 laps each!) then did 100 reps of various exercises, 20 squats, 20 walking lunges, 30 star jumps, 10 burpees, 20 high knees! Then I think we were suitably warm so we set off along the river, had a photo and arrived at the garden a few minutes later!

We were greeted by Kate who used to be a teacher and you can definitely tell by how organised she was! There was a flipchart with all the jobs that needed doing and a crate full of tools and gloves so everyone grabbed something and got stuck in!

There was a bed of gravel which needed to be shoveled out and relocated, there were LOADS of weeds between the paving stones to be ripped out, bulbs to be sorted, benches to be moved, trees to be pruned into love heart shapes, plants to be watered, and lots of sweeping!!!

So much to be getting on with, we had half an hour and everyone was working at a nice fast pace! After 15 minutes, most of the gravel had been removed and transported via the flat tyred wheelbarrow and was looking pretty neat and tidy! Loads of grass and weeds had been plucked from between the bricks and after an initial sweep, it was starting to look pretty good!

Another 10 minutes passed and it was time to stop digging and start tidying. Tools went back in the crate and we had 2 brooms on the go sweeping everything whilst other people were bagging up all the debris! We took a photo and then waved farewell to Kate and set off for leg 2 of our run!

We zig-zagged through the park and arrived back to the uni for our last 100 themed thing which was 100m strides! Strides are a great thing to include in your runs each week, ideally just at the end of an easy run and it just gets your legs used to running fast and promotes good running form whilst strengthening the legs without putting too much stress through them (like a normal track session would) so you don't need much recovery time afterwards! We picked the bollards as the start and end points and did about 4-5 sets running at 90-95% effort and then slow jog or walk recovery back to the start to bring the heart rate down so you are fresh to go again.

Well done for putting in so much effort into your strides! It was awesome to see you all running so fast and really give it the beans!! After that it was time for a well earned stretch! And then we called it a night!

Well done everyone! Amazing running and great effort with the task, we got so much done! See you next week!