Not letting the hills put us off, 15 of us ran up Bloomfield Drive to do a 'deep clean' of a community space at St Phillips and St James's Church. We managed to achieve a massive amount and, despite the rain, we ran a huge 7.2km!

Welcome Emily, Emma and Kathryn!

At our usual meeting spot at the Leisure Centre we welcomed three new runners: Emily, Emma and Kathryn. They had heard about GoodGym through a friend and were keen to come and try our fantastic combination of keeping fit while doing good in the community. It was great to have you join us and we hope you will return!

Bloom(field)-in' heck, that was hilly!

After a thorough warm-up we made our way along the river path, up Holloway and then all the way up Bloomfield Drive. This is one of our longer routes and is definitely the hilliest one we do and so I am really happy with how everyone kept on going and didn't give up on this one!

We met out host Andy at the church and he brought us round to 'Manna House' which is one of the rooms owned and run by the Church. This room is frequently rented out to community groups and gets a lot of wear and tear! Andy explained that although his team regularly clean the room after use, it rarely gets a thorough 'deep clean'. It sounded like exactly the kind of task that we GoodGym runners are awesome at doing!

We were done in a Flash!

We broke into small teams for this task. Andy had kindly set out some cleaning equipment like gloves, Flash cleaning fluid and bowls of warm water.

Some of us were down on our hands and knees scrubbing the floors with brushes and Flash to give it a really good clean. There was lots of dirt ingrained into the floor that doesn't come off with a standard wipe over, so we really had to work hard!

Other teams took everything (and I mean everything!) out of the cupboards and drawers and gave all the shelves and inner surfaces a thorough clean. Some were wiping, others were drying and another group was re-filling. Good teamwork everyone!

We all came back together at the end to make sure we left everything clean and tidy once again. We got so much done and Andy really appreciated the hard work we did for him and his team. We shall return soon!

Thanks!

Thanks to Ollie and Emma H for backmarking for us. And thanks to Andy for this week's cleaning-related pun!

Next runs

• This Sunday: Training run along the canal, lead by Emma H.
• Next week: Flyering around Bear Flat for charity places in RideLondon