12 awesome runners ran 4k to help out at Royal Hill Community Garden!

We've had a bit of a dry spell of new runners recently but last night that ended when we were joined by the lovely Ellie! Welcome to the gang!

It was a bit of a chilly one, so we got going fairly quickly. We explained what each of us had for breakfast that morning to celebrate Croissant Day and only one person skipped breakfast and turns out he had skipped every meal since Sunday so that makes it ok! Lee I hope you had a nice post-fast dinner last night!

After a quick warm up we were on our way, taking the more scenic route to make up a bit of distance. All counts towards our January Challenge total!

We arrived at Royal Hill Garden and were greeted by the lovely Tony who had a few tasks lined up for for us. Bliss settled down with a cuppa while we distributed leaflets, one to promote the new Visual Geometry exhibition at the gallery and the other was a leaflet advertising for volunteers to help out at the garden. We split into two groups, my group took to the nearby streets off Royal Hill while Pieter's group headed for the Ashburnham triangle.

Meanwhile, Bliss and Alex drew the long straws and stayed inside to laminate posters! NICE!

After 20 mins, our leaflets had all gone and we headed back to the gallery to help put the posters up around the garden fence. Moments later, the other group arrived and we were all done!

Royal Hills!

We said our goodbyes to Tony and ran for the hills. Sadly they weren't lovely rolling hills in the countryside with little lambs bouncing around. These were more... shall we say, urban hills. We went to Point Hill and did 10 minutes of hill repeats, running uphill steady and controlled and then recovering nice and slow on the downhill. It's always so easy to stop when you are tired so a good way to make sure you push yourself a little bit more is to just say to yourself when you get tired you're going to count X number of seconds and push through the discomfort. Running is sometimes about learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable! But not always, it should primarily be fun and enjoyable of course! And if it isn't, then my best advice is to slow down until it is enjoyable!

After 10 or so minutes, it was time to jog back to the uni for a few stretches and then hometime!

Task force

Some of you will already be aware, but in case you aren't we have a GoodGym task force which you can get involved with if you have done 10 good deeds! As a member of task force you can help out with various things such as listing community missions of your own, coordinating social events, helping with social media or even writing the run report! If anyone wants to write the run report next week, or any week, please just shout, I'm sure everyone would love to hear from someone else for a change!

Great job on the task last night everyone! We got loads done and Tony was so pleased! See you next week!