Sunday 8th May 2022
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Report written by Julian Osman
The Hospice Mini Marathon is organised by Greenwich & Bexley Community Hospice so that families in the local community can receive free compassionate and special hospice care. The event is a 2.62 mile run for children aged 5-16. This year 400 children signed up to take part.
The Mini Marathon takes a lot of setting up and 4 bleary-eyed Good Gym runners made their way to Greenwich park for a 7AM start. First up the team helped to unload gazebos, tables and, most importantly, boxes of goodie bags and medals for the marathon runners. Then it was on to the most challenging part of the day: inflating the start/finish arch. This has not gone well before, but Good Gym are now old hands at this and we before long we had the arch looking perfect. Now the arch was set-up it was coffee time, both JC and Julian having remembered that there were no shops open at that hour produced some flasks and JC had fortunately also remembered some cups.
Next were the two runs, after a quick warm-up for the runners (and some of the Good Gym volunteers!) we set to our tasks, with Geraldine and Julian marshalling runners at the start/finish lines, Alex directing the runners where to go and JC bringing up the rear of the races as tail walker. Both runs went really well at what was a lovely event and it certainly looks liked all the kids enjoyed themselves.