14 awesome runners ran 3km (ignore the 7 up there ↑) to shift a serious amount of gravel at Christchurch School!

So It's finally light again in the evenings... WOOHOO! Outdoor tasks automatically become far more pleasant when you can actually see what you're doing and you're not freezing your fingers off! :)

We were joined by two new runners last night: Matt brought along his lovely girlfriend Naomi who will no doubt soon be running crazy back to back ultramarathons with him! And the twins brought their new housemate Rob along with them! Welcome to the gang! Hope you had a nice first run with us :)

After some smack talk from Vickie and a round up of everyone's Easter plans, we dropped off our stuff and headed out for our warm up, hoping the rain would pass.... and sure enough it did!

We ran out of the uni, along the river and arrived at the school about 10 minutes later. We were greeted by Fiona and Sarah who had a pile of 50 grey rubble bags, half a dozen shovels and a WHOOOOOLE LOTTA GRAVEL. They plan to make the space into an outdoor classroom which sounds like it's going to be lovely, but before they can start, all the gravel needed to be removed. Which is why we were there!

Bag it up!

Everyone partnered up- one person held the bag open while the other shovelled the gravel into it which seemed to work very well! Unfortunately it wasn't just a thin layer of gravel, it was 6 inches deep so it took a lot of work to get through to the floor but sure enough, gradually we were starting to see patches of ground emerging!

20 minutes in and we were down to the last few bags! It was now time to take the full bags out of the area and it was all hands on deck! We had wheelbarrows and trolleys on the go transporting the bags in the most efficient way possible! By 8pm, all the bags had been shifted and yes there was still a lot of gravel left but it was very sparse in comparison to how it started out! And most importantly, there was also A LOT of gravel OUT!

After a few group photos, we kept the run fairly short since we'd basically just undergone a 30 minute full body workout at the task! For the fitness session it was a festive relay competition which basically involved running for chocolate eggs... I've never seen people run so fast!

It was awesome to see everyone push themselves and it was neck and neck for a very long time but team 1 just clinched it by 1 egg. But because it's GoodGym... everyone's a winner so it was chocs for all!!!

A few cool down stretches and we were done!

Amazing work at the task last night everyone!! Hopefully we can go back in a few weeks time and finish what we started! See you next week for some bench building!