At last a Monday evening with sunshine! What a treat to start and finish tonight's group run in daylight

We had a 2.5 mile run to get to the Castle Hill Community Centre. We have visited the centre several times during the winter to carry out painting tasks but this was our first outdoor task there.

We were met in the car park by Garath and directed to a massively overgrown corner full of bushes (which had morphed into a small forest of trees with huge trunks) and ivy everywhere. They needed the area cleared as the overgrowing bushes, were damaging an external wall and to re-landscape the area.

With limited tools available - 2 saws, 1 pair of loppers and a broom - this was going to be tough task. However everyone got stuck in immediately and within minutes a small skip was full to the brim with Clive jumping on the top to flatten it down.

Some real headway was made with some incisive sawing taking out huge swathes of bushes, branches and mangled roots. Tom managed to get swallowed by some of the bushes as he tried to lever out a particularly stubborn trunk / root.

The skip was now rammed and a growing pile of swan branches and chopped weeds and ivy was amassing on the ground.

Eventually we had to call a halt as time ran out but we'd made a massive impact in clearing most of the area.

The return leg of the run incorporated some train sprints and Steve led us home via his shortcut from last week.

This report can't end without reference to Kerry's story of arriving at Goodgym this evening - he ran from home down to the waterfront

While waiting the inevitable hour or two for the lights to change I thought to myself “that’s strange: I can’t see any runners in the building”. Maybe I was later than I thought, and everyone had already set off? No, looking at my watch I could see it was only 29 minutes past …… five. I’d fallen short in my little hand reading skills, and set off an hour early. Nothing for it to loop back home, sit down for half an hour, then run all the way back down again.

Brilliantly funny but also top dedication to run home and back again to meet us an hour later.