We welcomed some lovely new runners tonight with a Starter Session to create a new wildflower meadow at St Nicks.

St Nicks is an amazing nature reserve built on the site of a former landfill. To turn parts of that into a wildflower meadow though, is tough going. The thick, tussocky grass needed digging up, along with a layer of topsoil. Jonathan (the Reserve Manager) gave us a demo of how to do this effectively with spades and mattocks.

Whenever Jonathan demonstrates anything he makes it look effortless. So everybody started very confidently and quickly realised how hard it actually was. We got into a flow though, with people taking breaks to have a go at scything in another part of the meadow.

Soon enough, the wheelbarrows were filling up with thick layers of turf and soil. There were lots of tiny celebrations every time someone got a really good bit up and some hard efforts with extremely heavy wheelbarrows!

After 45 minutes of hard work, we'd cleared a decent patch and our reward was to rake it all over and sow some wildflower seeds, finishing up with pressing and stomping the seeds into the raked soil.

Fitness Time!

The focus of the fitness session was on making the joints strong for running. We used hurdles to do a series of great ankle strengthening and balance exercises before breaking into a circuit session, including:

• squats
• walking lunges
• resistance sprints
• hopping drills
• glute bridges
• reverse lunges
• can-cans

We'll be heading back to St Nicks for another Starter Session on the 7th October, come and join us!