First up we celebrated Vic's 250th good deed, she's always running and cycling from group runs to community missions to parkrun volunteering. Give her a cheer!

The end of the pile

Everyone at tonight's group run had visited the embankment before so we had the shorter safety briefing and more time shoveling the last of the soil! We had a couple of areas of exposed cardboard to cover, we split into teams to get the job done:

• one group shoveling soil
• one group raking the soil (in a very specific fashion)
• one group carrying the containers of soil

As an extra task we began moving leaves from around the edge to cover as much of the area as possible with wildflower seed.

The 20 tonnes of soil reduced to a thin layer and it was job done for us, we gathered in a group whilst the soil had one last rake. It's been a lot of hard work, a lot of soil to move and it couldn't have been achieved without you all - well done!! We will revisit in summer to see the results of our hard work.

It was a last min change of plan this week instead of heading over to Hither Green station embankment, we were heading over to the other side of the station and to Springbank Road Community Garden. We all gathered outside Glass Mill and the temperature was dropping by the minute (or so it felt like). We did a quick warm up with star jumps to really get our heart rate up and warm us up.

We arrived at Springbank Road Community Garden to be met by the wonderful Anne-Marie who explained what tasks for the evening, these included:

• Painting the fence
• Planting 300+ bulbs
• Painting the obelisk
• Digging up the allium
• Wrapping the peach trees in fleece
• Cutting back the Flax

Everyone got stuck straight in and using our extensive GoodGym knowledge of plants and weeds managed to plant all the bulbs safely around the plants. With 5 min to go we brought our tools back to the entrance of the garden (double checked we hadn't left any behind) and gathered for the group photo which looked slightly like a GoodGym version of a school photo.

Wow, what an evening!

Firstly, a very warm welcome to our new runners Romona, Taz and Zac - go and give them all a cheer! And also worth a huge cheer is Vic's fantastic achievement of a 24 month streak of group runs! That's two whole years of running and doing good, what a wonderful woman!

After a rather dog-eat-dog (or rather, runners-watch-dog) warm-up, we soon set off towards Lee, stopping at pretty much every set of traffic lights along the way. Thanks to the lovely Jacqueline, Clare and Oli for helping to keep such a big group together and safe along the busy route to Lee.

As always, there was plenty to do at Big Red Box HQ. There was a huge new donation to sort, many bags of which had been collected by our friends at Hilly Fields parkrun over the weekend. The packing station needed to be replenished, boxes had to be assembled, and pallets lined up ready for the 5 minute challenge.

You gotta be tin it to win it

We got not one, but two attempts at the hotly anticipated 5-minute challenge. For the uninitiated, this is one of the most glorious human chain experiences you could ever hope to be a part of, with each empty box making its way from one end of the corridor to the other, being packed full of one of each type of food, before being closed up with a lid, and stashed on a pallet ready to be sent out for distribution.

(Pal)Let battle commence!

After a fantastic first attempt where 35 of us managed to pack 36 boxes in just 5 minutes, a 2019 record. We restocked our food stations, assembled a few more boxes ready for round two. Nicely warmed up, and either enthused or intimidated by my constant shouts of "pack smart" and "tesselate harder", we managed a whopping 52 boxes in our second round! A Big Red Box all-time record! If you add in the extra boxes we finished filling after the countdown was over, that's well over 100 boxes in less than an hour. Just think what a difference that will make to so many people in our community over this festive period.

Official heavyweight boxing champions

There's plenty more festive fun to be had in the next few days, including putting up decorations at St Christopher's Hospice with our friends over in Bromley tomorrow night (nice to see you Ian!), the GG x Xmas Xtravaganza! where you can meet GoodGym runners from far and wide, distributing Christmas trees for Kings who we were supporting this evening, and a trip to Crofton Books next week where no doubt the Christmas tunes will be out in force.

Thanks to Marta for this week's run report title, and to Oli for the smattering of puns (as always!).