What a night! Our biggest group of the year helped the Julian Trust to prepare their night shelter for the homeless and smashed some Fartlek training in the process.

With a humongous group of runners including a metric ton of newbies we all met and warmed up at Vivo. The run was short but our enthusiasm was not. We tackled the 1 mile run their like it was nothing and met our host Richard at the shelter in St Pauls.

5 nights a week the shelter offers 18 people a bed for the night, some food and washing facilities. They have no prejudice of who can come they just offer the places on a first-come-first-served basis.

Our job for the evening was to help Richard and the team to prep the shelter for tonight's guests. Richard took us through our tasks and then we split into teams to tackle the jobs. We had bed linen changers, laundry room attendants, floor moppers, bread butterers, table wipers and a big group of litter pickers to tidy up the outside area, especially a patch around the back where some fly-tipping had taken place.

A few highlights were -

• Emma and Charlie were keener than an over-excited puppy covered in mustard waiting for his first walk of the day to get their hands on the bread and butter. 4 loaves were some prepared with precision spreading.

• Jenny and Elly's completely baffled faces trying to work a dryer then realising they needed to switch it on at the wall.

• Mel getting incredibly into unblocking a storm drain in the yard.

• Sarah and her one-lady mission to clear the bushes of litter.

• Nick's domestic pride when it came to mopping the floor (sorry about the footprints at the end!)

That was not even the half of it. Everyone put in a good shift and Richard was really chuffed with our efforts. So after saying goodbye and running back I still had time to fit in some great running fitness training in the form of Fartleks around Queen Square.

We stretched and chatted before congratulating some milestones. Massive well done to Jon and Emily for hitting 50, welcome to the black t-shirt gang. Another big lump of red t-shirt respect goes out to our very own Paul Becker also for completing his 200th run on Saturday for which we bestowed him with the pink panther wheelbarrow custom 200 t-shirt. To celebrate we headed off to Atomic Diner and ate, sang and were merry.

Thanks to everyone who made it along tonight, especially those who came out for your first run with us, it was a marvelous effort.

See you next time,

Gary