🌍 LSE Summer School x GoodGym #3

Once again, running has proven it has the power to bring people from different cultures together. Denzel the GoodGym run leader took students from New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Denmark & Belgium through the streets of London.

This was the 3rd of the LSE Summer School x GoodGym group run series, ongoing until mid August.

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Once again, all of us meet outside of The World Turned Upside Down globe where everyone got acquainted before we got into our warm ups. With the weather being a bit cooler, it made the run a lot easier. The team found out very early on that running through central London in the afternoon can be a bit of a challenge so I gave them tips on how to navigate the busy streets safely.

The run reached it's more enjoyable stage once we reached Green Park. A good number of the team wanted to find good running spots in central so running through Green Park was like finding gold to them. As we enjoyed not having to swerve in and out through groups of people, we eventually ended up at Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately the front of the gate was very busy and the group wanted to finish in time to watch the England match, so I made sure to get a picture for them where we could get a lot of Buckingham Palace in the background.

From there we ended up running down The Mall, a very iconic running spot as it's where the finish line is for the London Marathon. This lead to a whole conversation about marathons in general and who would actually run one. We were happy to find out that Johannes and Elias have both already run a marathon, both in under 4 hours.

We soon reached Westminster where everyone got to see the iconic red phone booth, it was a big surprise for them to find out that modern Londoners don't actually use them anymore. Everyone got their cameras out when we reached the Big Ben, everyone knew it would be big but the actual size was a big surprise. The team were then blessed with another great central running route, a straight line down from Westminster to Temple near the Thames. The route only had a small amount of crossings and there's a lot of space for groups to run through without disturbance.

Now we've reached the final stretch where we ran up a hill in Strand before taking a short route back to LSE. The team all had a good amount of running experience so the distance wasn't a problem, plus they really enjoyed getting to explore London properly. I took the team through some cool down stretches then we parted ways to go watch the England match. Another successful run.