Kirsty, who walked, and Anne, who ran, met at the gate of Knaphill Lower School. We were a bit confused as there was no one who could give us any information about the Forest School site we had agreed to help clearing up…

But Kirsty being an “old mum” 😉 of the school, guessed where we should go and bingo 🎉🎊 , we joined a couple of families also aiming at the Forest School.

Vikki, from the PTA, welcomed us and gave us a tour of the area. There were two main jobs to achieve this morning: clearing the pond and raking all the leaves from the site; the aim being for it to be ready for the children to start Forest School sessions soon.

Off we went, armed with rakes, gloves and big builder’s bags 🧤🧹🧺. Kirsty and I decided to concentrate on raking the leaves; helping with the pond involved jumping over a fence 🤸‍♀️, which, somehow, I did not fancy at all! The bags were promptly filled, and we deployed all our strengths to carry and empty them over to the waste area. We could have done with Wayne’s muscles 💪 this morning!

When more families came to the rescue, we decided to walk/run back to our respective homes. We might be asked to come again soon, as we were so good at it today! 😇

Will you help at junior parkrun tomorrow morning?

Happy running, walking or cycling to you all!

On the lovely Wednesday afternoon, as Adam got to the meet-up point Kirsty and Brian were outside the leisure center ready and waiting for the training session to start.

Brian promptly got involved with stretching as we waited for the birthday star to arrive, fashionably late as always.

Once James got there, Adam went into details of the fitness session, going through the warm up drills moving on to the main fitness task, 80 meter sprints following up with squats and start jumps until everyone has returned to the start.

We started with a light jog around the leisure center, to an area where we can start the warm up game. The game was to run in a specified area, a person would shout "5". From there you would find the person closest to you and play rock, paper, scissors. The winner would choose the exercise, and the winner would do 3 lots of those exercise while the person who came second, would have to repeat the exercises 6 times.

We started running in the area and Adam shouted 5, to start the game. Adam faced Kirsty, while James faced Brian, where all people quickly started there specified exercises. Next James called 5 and the game started again.

Once everyone called 5, we focused our energies on the sprints. At 80% effort we all went for it. Adam and Kirsty were the first to get back to start, and straight into the squats and start jumps. when everyone arrived at the start, we all had a 20 second reset before starting again.

Within the twenty minute target time to get the sprints in we all managed 11 sprints in total.

To finish off a great workout we all heading to the pub to rest and recover and to celebrate James' birthday. Well done, as everyone gave a great effort during today's session.

Woking Junior Park Run

This morning Wayne, Kirsty, James, & Melanie met at Woking Park to carry out various volunteering roles at the junior park run 🏃‍♀️.

The sun was out ☀️ and so were 103 young runners who tackled the 2k course.In total there were 23 PB's with the fastest time being a fantastic 07:32.

Great running by everyone 😄

On a lovely sunny Wednesday evening, Anne was already waiting outside the sports centre as Adam arrived with a coffee to sharpen his energy levels.

While waiting for the other runners, Anne was talking Adam through the route she was thinking of as she had passed plenty of litter.

It wasn't long before Julie arrived and we had a quick catch up as Kirsty arrived. We decided that we will start with the run and plogging as we can keep Melanie updated with our location as we move along. So from the leisure centre we headed towards Woking park along the stream. Onces we got to the bridge we quickly crossed it only seeing very little litter to pick up. We quickly made it down the path to Elbridge Lane. There were lots of plastic bottles which were thrown over the wired fence making it tricky to get hold of but the GoodGyming persistence paid off and we manned to get most of it.

We then turn to go back into Woking park as we recalled the route being messy in places around the parkrun route. Once in to wooded area there were pieces of litter in little spots to the left and right as we made our way through the wooded area, as the litter became less and less which was a great thing to see something else took our notice!

As we followed the path around to join the stream we quickly noticed some Himalayan balsam along the stream. The first batch we saw was too close to the steam bank to try and tackle and remove it but we quickly came across some more further down. Before a word was said we all dived in and started removing them, and quick stamping then down. It was at this point Melanie joined us feeling a little irritated being late from work. She was very ready to get involved and stomp down on some Himalayan balsam and found hearing the crinkling sounds of crashing the Himalayan balsam rather therapeutic.

Once we noticed we had been crushing the Himalayan balsam for a long time! We decided to get back to plogging on our way back to the lake centre with the two full bags of litter we collected.

Awesome work from Woking GoodGymers 😁