Joining us for their first Group Run tonight were Rebecca, Jo and Ashok - a big welcome to you all, hope you enjoyed the evening.

Before we set off we congratulated all those who had run in races on Sunday including the Woodbridge 10k and the Colchester Zoo Stampede 10k which sounded like great fun.

Our destination was Brickmakers Wood which is a very short distance from our meeting point, so the plan was to take a circuitous route to get there. After a brief warm up consisting of variations on the "Running (Wo)man" pose we headed off east along the Waterfront and then took on a scenic climb through Hollywells Park, before descending back to the towards the Waterfront and then back up another small incline to arrive at the wood.

We regrouped outside the entrance, before heading in. We noticed a massive transformation from our previous "daylight" visit last September. with a massive pond now in place in lower area.

Our task was described by Jo - our challenge was to move 5 tons of soil (currently sitting in 5 x 1 ton bags) and spread it on an area that would be developed as garden for children and other visitors.

This looked like a big ask, but with the usual enthusiasm everyone got stuck in immmediately, laying membrane, shovelling the soil into wheel barrows and running them across to tip, while a team of "rakers" spread the soil evenly.

The awesome teamwork resulted in the earth moving for all of us!

It only took about 20 minutes. As we still had some time rocks were sledge-hammered into pieces (by Rob the owner of the wood) to be barrowed across to the external gates and old trees stumps were moved, decking was swept and plants re-planted. Jo then took us on a quick tour of the wood, showing lots of hidden ares and describing their plans. We made some amazing discoveries on the tour including a Ty-rinal in the compost toilet and fossilised dinosaur poo!

With our work complete we headed up hill again to the adjacent Alexandra Park where we had just enough time to fit in a bit of speed work with some sprint relay intervals.

Finally, having acesended several small hills on the run out, we enjoyed the down hill run back to base

I really thought we might struggle to complete the task tonight but once again the enthusiasm and teamwork was outstanding and we smashed it!