Love your neighbourhood? You bet.

A large group of energetic runners, keen to do their bit for de-littering their borough, made their way to beautiful Victoria Park, to join the Council’s fourth borough-wide Big Clean Up, part of its ‘Love Your Neighbourhood’ campaign.

We were met by Richard, our task owner for the evening, and Mark, from Veolia, who wasted no time in dispatching us to the four most needed corners of the area, after kitting us all out with hi-vis jackets, litter-pickers and gloves, after our extensive health and sfatey briefing.

Festival goodies

As usual the Good Gym-ers covered an extensive area, heading deep into the park only satisfied as their bin liners began to really fill up. Post-festival litter was in abundance: a rather- well-hidden pack of Guinness was found under a bush, along with several strange looking vials and some er… undergarments. Thank goodness for litter pickers. As usual, the runners were loathe to be pulled away from the work: “Come on, come on, you’re late back”, prompted the response, “But there are so many cigarette butts.” This sums up Monday night runs for me.

Masterclass: Catch Becky and Core Lucky Dip

Before we knew it, we were saying farewell to Richard and his team and heading to the wooden canoe, the area that was to be our fitness playground for the next 15 minutes. Tonight we were playing “Chase Becky.” Becky headed out for a lap of the park with a 10-second lead, then Bryon headed up the team to catch her, before everyone raced back to the wooden canoe to play Core Lucky Dip. First and last runners picked a number between 1-7 from a delightful list of exercises.Thanks to Yesh for unknowingly picking the two-toe-touch plank; Sarah for the butterfly crunch and Leanne for the speed-skater-squat-on-steroids. Yesh then headed the chase back out of the park.

…And so to the thankyou’s

What a very busy evening. Thank you’s in abundance tonight! Thank you to Bryon, such a terrific task force member, for leading both the run to the task, the chase for Becky and for behind-the-scenes planning.

Thank you to Becky for being a brilliantly fast and fun real life greyhound hare, and to Yesh for an impromptu last minute sprint.

Thank you to Leanne and Domitille for back-marking, and to Sarah and Leanne, our brilliant task force members, for welcoming our first-time runners, and to Gabrielle for much-needed delegating, and organising the start of the run, following an unanticipated DBS delay.

Welcome to new runners Eszter and Karris - well done on a busy, and big workout, night for your first run. We’d love to see you again soon.

It was a mega-blast tonight! Thank you all so much: for your ideas and input; for being such fun, for being such determined litter-pickers, for working so hard at your fitness…The list is endless, as always. I just can’t WAIT to do it all again next week: sign up for water-carrying at Meath Gardens - AKA The Human Chain Task - here.

*Apologies for the limited photos from tonight’s run – an unprompted, mid-task, IOS update meant we’ve just got before and after pics this week.