What a day, the excitement was building for the Hackney Half even at 8:30 when I arrived to help set up for the parkrun. I caught up with Mas, and was so pleased that @sooz was on her mobile as we negotiated lost keys at London Fields Lido, eventually we were able to access our kit and start the set up - me to rush around putting up the markers (with a lot of help from Sammy, and for Maz to do the finish funnel and corral the runners ready for the warm up. We were also grateful to be able to get some watching parents to join in with marshalling and other tasks. The warm up is always a lot of fun, then we got set. I gave the countdown and pressed start timer, they were off - I never tire of the joyful sight of lots of littlies going full gas across the field. Quite soon they had settled into their paces and were putting in impressive performances on the two lap course. The conditions were perfect and the little lad visiting from Perth in Scotland produced an incredible effort to secure first place. Taking my time keeping duties seriously I ran between the cheering corner and the finishing funnel to give a hero’s welcome to everyone who crossed the line. They really were super impressive. By 9:30 it was all done and packed away - bish, bash, bosh! until next time...

GoodGymmers helped 35 Hackney youngsters to run junior parkrun this morning. There were a massive 16 personal bests from the kids, all helped as always by some super marshalling from the volunteers in the East London sunshine.

It was a wet Sunday morning so it was great to see a bunch of eager volunteers down at London Fields.

First timer to London Fields juniors, Rupert, made the critical Timekeeper task look easy, tracking all 20 budding young runners round the 2 loop 2km course at London Fields.

In less than half an hour, every youngster had made it round and the cheering coming from the finish line helped spur them on!

Rupert and Sooz made light work of packing away and soon junior parkrun was complete for another Sunday.

Hope to see many more GoodGymmers down next week!