An excellent turnout on the volunteer front to support 46 enthusiastic junior runners this morning at a still muddy, and slightly misty, London Fields - but thankfully the rain stayed away. The slippery conditions underfoot didn't seem to trouble our first three finishers, who ran as a pack the whole way round, and only the finishing sprint down the home straight separated them by just a few seconds...exciting stuff. Lots of (slightly breathless) happy faces then followed them into the finish funnel, setting 9 PBs between them - great work.

Twelve first timers joined us this morning on what was our second biggest attendance of the year, and thankfully our team of 16 volunteers, which included GoodGymmers Rue, Hilary, Bea, Louise, Sarah, Chandrima and Nick, did a great job of ensuring everything ran smoothly for another week - thank you all.

Same time next week under the big tree for more fun at the Fields.

A return visit to our favourite storage facility this evening for Hilary, Eugene, Adam, Fuad, Lise and Nick to do some more clothes sorting for the Care4Calais team, with clear instructions this week to sort out children’s clothing by specific ages so that the Care4Calais team could do a distribution during March.

Having learned a few lessons from our previous visit, including how to actually get into the facility and navigate the maze of storage to find the relevant lock up room, and to bring a couple of marker pens...we were able to get sorting pretty quickly this week, with empty boxes marked for the different age categories, and piles of donated items put into the corridors for the teams to go through and sort per the instructions from the team.

To the sound of a random playlist of 90’s/00’s tunes feeding through the facility’s speaker system, and our ongoing admiration for any clothing items made in Bangladesh to keep Fuad happy, plus the now familiar entertaining collection of somewhat unusual donated items (there was a whole dressing up box of items that we (mostly) resisted delving into), we soon had a “production line” going and filled 6 boxes, each marked with a different age category, by the end of the evening. There is still much to do, so another visit surely beckons before too long.