23 runners ran 4km to help out at Clothes 4 Causes charity shop!

A great start to the year so far from GoodGym Greenwich! We had 4 new runners join us last night, Finn, James, Ophelia and Mahim... welcome all! Hope you had a good first run with us!

The grand opening of Greenwich Zoo!

With a shorter run on our hands, we had a little bit of extra time to have some fun in the warm up! We played a little game where everyone was given a bit of paper with an animal on it and then you had to run around acting like the animal with the aim being to try and find the other person in the group who is the same animal as you! Lots of moo-ing, baa-ing, squeaking, neighing, barking and hissing going on... now I know how Noah felt on his ark... crikey! After a couple of rounds, we headed off on our run!

I forgot to take a group snap the beginning so we stopped along the river with a lovely lit up London skyline as the backdrop... beautiful! Then we continued our journey and arrived at the shop a few moments later.

We were greeted by Veronique who sadly broke the news to us that they had recently been flooded so had to move out a lot of the clothes that we were meant to be sorting. Instead everyone got stuck in with tidying the shop, making sure everything was nice and neat and in colour order. There was also loads of rubbish from the downstairs room which needed bringing upstairs to be collected by a man (or lady!) in a van tomorrow!

Amongst the rubbish were a few wicker baskets which looked far too good to throw away and were quickly snapped up by Nina and Marta! And the only price they had to pay was running back carrying them! Not bad!

15 minutes of tidying and sorting and we were done! It doesn't take long when you have 46 helping hands!

Strides!

We ran back the way we came, past the Cutty Sark and a little further along the river where there was a nice long straight, perfect for our fitness session which consisted of 5x 20s of strides with jog back recoveries! This is something you can do once or twice a week at the end of a run and it will really help improve your running form. If you want to read a little bit more about it and the benefits, have a look here. All you need is a nice straight bit of road! Give it a try next time and let me know how you get on!

After everyone was suitably puffed, we headed back to the uni for a cool down stretch and called it a night!!!

FB group

For you 4 lovely new runners, please feel free to join our GoodGym Greenwich Facebook Group where you can find out what other people are up to. We've got loads of Greenwich runners doing all sorts of races which you can of course get involved in as well! Christian has managed to get us 10% discount for the 10k race in Greenwich Park and we're getting a good crowd together so feel free to join!

Well done last night everyone! Top work on the task and great running all round!! See you next week!