Another super long run on the cards tonight... 11.5km in fact!

We welcomed new runners Jonny, Jane and Holly - you picked a good one for your 1st ever GoodGym run :-)

Considering the distance tonight of this evening's run, I was very impressed with the turnout of 18 runners.

We did a little squat based warm up... not sure what everyone thought of the 'in & out' squats though!

Dan volunteered to be back runner this week and so we headed off to Bowthorpe Heritage Community Gardens.

It was good to see David aka Stick Man return and he duly found a stick to run with again this week :-)

So we arrived at the task, in quicker time than I anticipated actually and were greeted by some lovely volunteers of the gardens. It was a very pretty site and they talked through what jobs were in hand for us to do. the group split up so some were weeding the stoned path area, some were weeding general flower beds and the others weeding the camomile bed.

Now to a lot of people's amusement (and bearing in mind my herb knowledge isn't the best) my ability to try and pronounce 'camomile' wasn't the greatest. Attempt 1 = Calamari, Attempt = Cannelloni. If the pronunciation wasn't difficult enough, there's even 2 ways of spelling it! The Americans spell it Chamomile.

Apologies for any funny pictures - I was in a bit of a selfie mood this week!

After 30 minutes of hard and impressive work, we got together all the weeds etc. we managed to collect and there was a lot there! the team got treated - I supplied cookies while they were working and then the garden volunteers provided everyone with some juice before we left for the long journey back.

We all headed back and the run started with a lovely uphill section to get the legs going! Once we got to Earlham Road I let everyone push on for the stretch of road leading up to the bridge, where we all regrouped before the last part to The Forum.

I know next week is Bank Holiday but it'd be great to see some more of you make it to next week's run.

32 runners ran 3k, did a hill session , and cleared a meadow of rubbish.

If anyone would have told me we'd have 32 runners at GoodGym Norwich by the 7th week I'd probably have laughed in your face hahaha... well tonight it just happened!

We had a nice 1.6km route each-way as we were heading to a meadow near Cow Tower, which belongs to the Great Hospital... a building that has been around for over 700 years (that's probably the only bit of history my brain knows).

Again, we had several new runners - 11 in fact so too many to name but our members gave them a warm welcome and made them feel at home straight away.

We congratulated everyone who took part in Run Norwich 10k on Sunday.

Colin got his docs checked to he can now be DBS checked so he can go on our Coach & Mission runs... you can do the same by bringing your ID docs to me before or after any Monday evening run.

A thank you to Carl & Laura for being back runners.

As tonight's run was a shorter run I had some spicy workouts planned for the group... keep reading to see what they were.

After the warm up and a very long head count, we headed to our destination, which took us through the beautiful grounds of the Norwich Cathedral - it did give me flash backs of the Run Norwich 10k from the day before but luckily this time we were running downhill.

We were greeted by Neil and he explained the area that we could do a litter/rubbish collection on so the group got into pairs, got themselves some gloves and bin liners and off they went... just like The Wobbles.

After 30 minutes I got everyone to collect in all the rubbish they had collated and I was quite astonished with how well they'd all done - there was bike wheels, a sign from 2013, a bed, a mattress etc. There was technically around 15 hours put into that by our awesome volunteers, which I'm very proud of them for doing.

So after the task there had been rumours that something may occur by the very steep and nearby Gas Hill... and these rumours were true! We did a 8-minute Kenyan Hills routine, which is a continuous loop so you take the ascend very steady and focus on moving your arms but then you take the descent quicker and don't treat it as a recovery. After 8 gruelling minutes (and many death stares) we had a couple of minutes recovery before heading back towards The Forum.

The only problem was I wasn't finished yet... we still had 10 minutes to kill :-) so coincidentally there was a nice rectangle shaped grass area within the Cathedral grounds so we stopped for a 10-minute AMRAP (as many rounds as possible). This consisted of 5 burpees, running, 10 push-ups, animal walk/crawl/jump, 5 v-sits, running, 10 squats and another animal walk/crawl/jump - all exercises that will assist with running performance.

After the 10 minutes I did a quick head count to see if I was still anyones friends hahaha and we headed back to The Forum for a stretch and finished the evening with a trip to the pub, which over half of us were able to attend, which is a fantastic turnout.

Next week we have a similar task and distance run on the Marriott's Way. Sign up here.