A lovely Community Mission took place this morning at Aston Hall.

Yes GoodGym Birmingham have been asked to be part of the launch of the Aston Hall Parkrun. Hence the pun, from a classic old skool dance track!

Today we were helping out at the 'test event'. This meant around a dozen people would run the route with the rest of us marshalling.

Jo and Jonny had biked to the Mission therefore they biked to the furthest point of the course to marshall there. That was right by Villa Park, so of course we had a couple of pics. Jonny's been to Villa Park a couple of times, not to watch Villa I might add, but his team Hull play Villa!

Rahul, Kanchan and Madan were marshalling nearer the finish. Madan was here for his first ever GoodGym Mission and did a sterling job marshalling and supporting the runners.

Once all the runners were back in we had a group photo outside Aston Hall, joining us were Rahema and Sally from Run Birmingham.

It was a successful morning and we were able to provide some valuable feedback too the Parkrun director. There will be another test run in a few weeks with a few tweeks to the course and organisation etc, so please look out for it on the website :)

We arrived slightly early for duty on a rainy evening, looking out for the team and hoping our task wasn’t cancelled due to ‘the virus’...

Of course, Sharon greeted us shortly after with a brilliant bunch of volunteers from the church, too. We welcomed Kanchan, who has been involved with the Perry Hall parkrun missions and was new to the food bank task. After a reminder of our hand-washing techniques, we rolled our sleeves up and got going.

We started with a big trolley of all sorts from Birmingham City Council, with some super-organised central weighing stations - Liam and Ben were doing some brilliant lifting, Kanchan was straight to it with the sorting and George took on the brain-busting challenge of heading up the number crunching - whether in kilograms or pounds, he managed work it out!

We then got stuck in with the huge wall of boxes, initially looking a little mysterious behind big black curtains! The contents were anything but foreboding - in fact, HSBC had donated countless boxes of essentials; cereal, soup, pasta, tea, coffee... They thought of all kinds of comforts and staples people might need and included notes with kind words!

We were pleased to hear positive feedback about our helping hands from the church pastor, who popped in briefly. We shortly after pondered our pun for the evening, and being stood next to the mountain of pasta, it was a no-brainier!

Before long we were in the depths of dating (some very impressive ‘speed-dating’ by Liam!), transferring and then stocking the main shelves. The other wall of donations from HSBC will have to wait until next week, but we could certainly head on home after some great team work in the confidence our graft was worthwhile.

Until next time!

There were lots of doubles and singles at parkrun this morning, as I’m sure there were last night in the New Year celebrations. Chris ran Sutton Park in 22:50 and volunteered at Perry Hall, managing the funnel. Lisa (37:35 & 36:29), John (22:10 & 20:34), Fiaz (27:42 & 30:08) and Rauul (33:15 & 35:12) did the double at Sutton Park and Perry Hall respectively. Chris did Brueton in 22:07 and Kingsbury in 22:36. Miriam did Perry Hall in 34:15, Slin in 49:27, Balal in 29:49, Kanchan in 41:14, Bal in 38:59 and Tousif in 32:51. It was great to see so many people out to make a great start to 2020!