A cool evening made it feel like Autumn tonight. With a slight chill in the air as the sun went down, long sleeve base layers came out for the first timein a while!

Claire joined us for her first Group Run and we celebrated the achievements of all those who ran and volunteered at the very soggy, but never the less, tremendous Felixstowe Coastal 10 miler on Sunday

Our task was delivering flyers on behalf of Age UK to promote their new shop on Prince of Wales Drive. The request was to post the leaflets in roads surrounding the new shop, so the run had a couple of challenging hills to get to our start point. I'd collect the flyers earlier that afternoon so we could begin posting as soon as we hit the outer edge of the delivery target area.

Once we got to the start point the idea was to split into groups covering opposite sides of the road and to "leap frog" the people in front. We set off and posting leaflets became a competitive sport, with our Goodgym runners charging along pavements , drives and gardens, racing to get to the next available letter box.

The geography of the area wasn't well known to many of us so google maps became essential as we plotted a course round the estates and developed a strategy to cover as many roads as possible. This worked well for the most part though there may have been 1 or 2 houses that received more than one leaflet!

We made our way across the estate to come out the other side onto Belstead Road. With a few hundred flyers nestling in letterboxes across Maidehall, we enjoyed the downhill run back to the Waterfront

Next week we're heading to one our long standing winter venues - Castle Hill Community - it will be one of our longer runs at just over 5 miles round trip - Find out all the info and sign up HERE

With a number of regulars having participated in the Great East Run on Sunday, our numbers were slightly below average. Kudos to Kerry, Keith and Robin who all made it tonight, despite feeling slightly tender the day after 13.1 miles around Ipswich.

Adam joined us for his debut on a Group Run - good to meet you Adam and hope you enjoyed your first taste of Goodgym.

Tonight's task took us back to the Spring Road allotments which we first visited a few weeks ago, and is remembered as the location where we upset a wasp's nest and had to beat a hasty retreat. Luckily we had no repeat tonight, with David directing our task in a different area.

It was quite a physical job again this evening with wood chips to be shovelled from a path into bags and an old compost heap to be be "decanted" into bags for the plot holders to have easy access.

We split into two groups - wood chips and compost - grabbing shovels,forks and the huge bags. The compost group fill one bag really quickly but soon discovered it was a major challenge to drag it to the final location on the pathway. The tactics were quickly changed to partially filling a bag dragging it with 2-3 hands on deck and then tipping into the main bag.

So with a pattern established a massive dent was made into the old and barely accessible compost heap, with three massive bags full of compost now available to use across the site.

The wood chippers also made excellent progress with two bags now filled and David expressing his gratitude - these jobs could just not be done in the normal scheme of things. Now the community using the allotments can take advantage of the accessibility to improve their plots.

It was just getting dark as we finished off and the still, warm evening and setting sun provide a beautiful back drop to our return leg run onto the waterfront for some high intensity shuttle runs under the floodlights, followed by a short planking session.

There was a final "sting in the tail" challenge planned but my chosen site for this was subject to a security guard having a heated debate with some youths - so that will be saved for a future session!