We ran around help Saffron Central return its original condition

A sad night tonight as we headed over to Saffron Central where we have helped out on a number of occasions. Saffron Central is the baby of Ally and his many helpers and is the largest pop-up saffron farm in Europe. It's been on the site of the old Croydon council building (Taberner House) for over two years but sadly has to be handed back over this weekend for development. In addition to planting crocuses there has been a Pride flag created from flowers, artwork, herb growing and even yoga in this space and we will be sorry to see it go.

So off we headed from Solutions after the obligatory group photo ready to get down to some hard work. Our main task for the evening was moving pea shingle into bags for residents to take at the weekend. Two teams were formed and armed with spades, wheelbarrows, bags and elbow grease we got stuck in and bagged up around 2/5 tonnes - pretty impressive I thought. Once we'd finished we said goodbye to Ally with a promise to help him on any future ventures he takes on. His daughter (who was really the boss of the evening) came out to join us in the fitness session.

As the run was fairly short I sent the group to warm-up again around the new council building and back to Queens Gardens where Sally and I had set up the fitness session. Tonight we worked on agility by fast stepping along the ladder and also hopscotching - some with more grace than others! While one runner was scampering along the ladder the others were squatting, balancing, lunging and jumping - well we wouldn't want to get cold would we! We finished off with a quick game of Duck Duck Goose - lots of giggling and no slipping on the slightly wet grass.

It was lovely to welcome two new members tonight Daniel and Jonathan and hope to see you both back again very soon.

Next Tuesday evening’s run will see us heading towards Ikea to help Unique Roots in their community garden. It is a slightly longer run but don't be put off as it's pretty flat and there is the tram option for the way back if you need.

Finally... the monthly London GoodGym social in May will be hosted by our neighbours in Bromley so why not sign up and meet some other runners.

Tonight was the first Croydon group run during British Summer Time this year. To take advantage of the extra sun, we popped back to the saffron field site we'd done some work at last year.

Tonight we welcomed back Philip and Sarah for their second runs with Croydon, and welcomed Matthew for his first with us! Well done to Rachel who has logged a brilliant 60.2km on Strava this month. Anyone want to challenge that in April?

While it's not the right season for planting more saffron, we did have a fantastic new task to keep us busy. Our enthusiastic task provider, Bonnie, greeted us by banging two frisbees together as we ran into the Queen's Gardens. She and Ally led us into the site; here, with much frisbee based percussion, we were told what our task(s) were.

Both are in preparation for Croydon's second PrideFest celebration in July; a celebration of Croydon's LGBT+ community. The first task was filling pots with soil and planting seeds for flowers of each colour of the rainbow, ready for them to later be arranged into a massive rainbow flag in the long flowerbeds we planted our corms in last year. This kept most of us busy for a while!

The others got started with the second task, which was to add to the beautiful paintings adorning the hoarding around the site. I saw some fantastic rainbows going up, accompanied by the amusing sound of half a dozen adults murmuring 'Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain' to themselves. Once the first task was finished, we all joined in with the painting for a bit before heading off for our fitness session.

For this, we headed in the direction of Park Hill, and did a quick time trial of the block around Park Hill school. We all did well, but particularly Matthew and Philip who managed to squeeze in an extra lap. After that, we indulged in an old Croydon favourite; heads or tails, which gives a different 30 second exercise based on whether you guess a coin toss correctly.

After this, we ran back towards our start point and did a cooldown. We had a chat about our next task, and I spent some time talking about coach runs and missions; hopefully we'll get more of those done in Croydon this summer!

After all that, we headed along to Box Park for a much deserved monthly social. Cracking job, GoodGym Croydon!