To keep us all motivated to keep fit while are spending more time at home because of lockdown we set ourselves the ambitious challenge of running and walking a combined total of 3408m uphill in a single week. We took our inspiration from the famous '3 peaks' challenge and this figure is the height of the tallest mountains in each country of Great Britain (Scotland, Scafell Pike (978m); England, Ben Nevis (1,345m); Wales, Snowdon (1,085m)).

The previous 7 days (24th April - 1st May) we managed 1542m in elevation, so we had some serious work ahead of us if we wanted to meet our goal.

By Tuesday we had climbed Snowdon and by Friday we had climbed Scafell Pike and then the last day of our challenge Lucy climbed to the summit of Ben Nevis (by way of Kelston Roundhill!).

I certainly don't do this much hill training usually (instead preferring the flat of Bath's canal path) but this challenge motivated me to run up some of those nasty Bath hills. I hope this will give us all some more motivation to add in hill training from time to time to make it easier for our regular Group Runs once they get started up again.

Well done for such a fantastic effort to everyone to took part and thanks for getting involved to keep our community together in these difficult and isolated times.

Last night we were originally due to paint and reorganise a communal space at Pathways, but due to a change of plans we ran to Odd Down Sports Ground to paint the inside of their community cafe and clean their children's toys. The route we took was essentially one big hill and were all pleased to complete a steep 7km training run.

Welcome, Sophie, Luke and Stephen!

When we met at the leisure centre we welcomed three runners to their first run with GoodGym Bath. Sophie and Luke have run with other GoodGym groups before and it was Stephen's first ever GoodGym event. It was great to have you all along to join us and thanks for your help. I hope we see you again soon!

Latest GG News

• Thanks to Phoebe and Rachel for representing us at a Community Mission at the weekend with Dry Arch Growers. You can read about what they achieved and the interesting wassail ceremony here.
• Rachel has kindly set up a GoodGym social for next Tuesday after the run. Please sign up so we have an idea of numbers to book a table.
• There is still time to sign up to the Dark Horse, a fun nighttime 10km in Bath. Several GG runners have already signed up so there will be friendly faces to see there!
• Next week we are running to help The Nest.

A night of two tasks

The first main task was painting the walls around the room. The community space is used a lot by different sports groups and members of the public and so they get quite mucky. There were spills on the walls by the teas/coffee area and there were marks from where old posters have been removed. We split into teams to improve the walls: some of us covered the edges with frog tape, others cleaned the walls down, others used the big roller brushes to clean the main areas of the walls and finally other runners swept in behind to paint the edges and skirting board with finer brushes. It required a lot of team work and coordination to get it right in the short amount of time we had and we were really pleased to get it all done.

The second big task was to spray and wipe down as much as we could. The cafe has a large collection of plastic and wooden toys and there are lots of tables and high chairs. A group of runners put their gloves on and got to work. This was a really important job to keep the cafe clean and free from germs.

Finally, we thoroughly cleaned and tidied where we had been. We took a group picture and then ran back down the hill to the leisure centre.

Thanks!

Thanks to Ali and her team at the cafe for hosting us at such short notice. Thanks to everyone who turned out last night to make the task a success. It was a classic example of where we can make a huge difference in a short space of time. And also thanks in particular to Chris, Emily and Rachel for backmarking for us.