Today a mixture of newbies and old faithfuls helped to support and successfully bring back our local junior parkrun.

We look forward to welcoming the 3 newbies back to another task soon (we hear they like gardening).

Also, a massive congratulations to one of our mini goodgymers Zosia who after over 14 months of waiting received her half marathon wristband x

You know it’s cold when Paul decides it’s time to wear his gloves for the very first time this year. It was so cold that Jenny brought her “other half” with her so he’d keep her warm. It did not, however, stop 6 runners from getting up at the break of dawn (or at least that’s what it felt like) and heading to Lloyd Park.

The runners started to arrive at 8:30am and before 9am everyone was waiting at their designated spot. A few of us were given big cheer gloves and (cow) bells.

Our supermum runner Dovile chose this opportunity to introduce her daughter to junior park run, she put her best Sunday gear on and ran the whole distance with Rebeka. Well done!

The other GG runners were eagerly cheering on the smallest and biggest junior runners and it made a big difference on the little faces of those children, who were finding it a big harder. Having received some words of encouragement or a high five, they would speed up and run towards the finish line. One of the cheeky boys managed to high five Magda so hard, that he’d run off with her glove! From time to time, we could hear the faint sound of bells jingling, was it Paul’s teeth or Santa’s sleigh?

And let’s not forget about another boy who ran with Lloyd the Lion and kept roaring at the volunteers!

Hannah struck up a very close friendship with a lovely dog (too close for her liking?), perhaps because of her height, but that’s another story...

Unfortunately, the cafe is currently closed so we couldn’t warm up with a hot cup of tea on this occasion (Nikki and Ingrid’s smiles made us feel warm inside though!) but fingers crossed it’ll soon reopen!

This evening we ran over 5km to put right the litter and mess in the park

A (relatively) mild evening tonight – a relief after the snow for Sunday’s Starter session! 12 runners met up at Solution Health and Fitness and after the briefing and group photo kindly taken by a gym user, who has said she may come next week, we headed off for our warm-up and then onto Lloyd Park.

The group split into two after the warm-up with Amatare leading the speedier runners while I had a lovely time chatting with the rest. Once we arrived at the Parklife Café in Lloyd Park we chatted to Claire about the task which was a fairly straight forward litter pick in the car park, around the pavilion and the tram stop. Three intrepid runners even headed across the very dark park to the Children’s playground to see what they could find there. The find of the evening was near a recycling bin where a full set of Christmas lights had been dumped.

After we’d finished Claire and her daughter treated us to tea, coffee and the most fantastic homemade cakes – I know where the best Banoffee pie can be found now! I think we got slightly too comfortable in the café because all of a sudden it was after 8.15pm and we had 2.5km to run back fuelled/weighed down by cake. We made it back slightly later than normal but as it was due to cake nobody complained!

Special mention to Tim tonight who headed off with Amatare’s group although he was a little worried about how he would cope but he definitely did himself proud – well done.

Don’t forget to log your runs during the week so we can stay at the top as all your runs count towards our total. If you set it up yet then go onto your account, go to profile, settings and finally Strava/Runkeeper and follow the instructions there.

Next Tuesday evening’s run will see us heading to Birdhurst Community Gardens where we will be helping prepare the ground for railway sleepers to be laid.