GoodGym Tower Hamlets convened at the plush Town Hall Hotel (that we’ve now become quite acquainted with) on a balmy midsummer Monday.

Eighteen runners squeezed into the suite, with a healthy mixture of red shirts, black shirts, and some multi-coloured newcomers welcomed into the fold. After our arrangement with the Victoria Park rangers fell through late in the day, we instead headed to our usual corner of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park to take on our old adversaries - The Nettles. Five of us departed from the main fellowship for a separate mission to help clear the garden of a local blind lady, while the rest of us threw on our £1 pairs of gardening gloves and headed to the Park.

We soldiered on into the evening, reclaiming previous areas where The Nettles had begun to return, as well as forging new territory. It turns out that £1 pairs of gardening gloves aren’t all that effective at stopping nettles, but we battled through the stings, as well as the incessant bites from insects and the odd badger.

We bagged up our former foes, and started the run back, stopping off at the foot of Mount Mile End for a bit of ‘beasting' with the new recruits. We conquered the hill in twos, ending the evening nicely exhausted. It was all very ‘Lord-of-the-Rings’, but with more lycra and squatting.

I’m sure we’ll be returning to the Park again. We may have won the battle, but the war is still to come…

Luke

Write up from the side mission;

After the briefing in the hotel and Varon's plug for GoodGym Haringey we set off with the group for a short run before four of us peeled off to do a mission for an elderly lady who is partially sighted and needed help with her gardening.

Tonight we mucked in to do some general weeding, trimming, cleaning between the paving slabs and rehousing the biggest population of woodlice we'd ever seen! A solid forty minutes or so later talking about GoodGym, programming, school trips and minecraft, we had filled four bags of green waste: a job well done. We said our goodbyes and jogged through Victoria Park to get back to the hotel. The group were not in sight so we could only assume that Tom took the "no supervision, no time limit" rule quite literally; they could still be there!

Patrick