Digging for treedom!

It was a beautiful night in Ealing - perfect conditions for a spot of running and digging in Walpole park!

We started the night with a few bits of news and heard about the great running you guys have been doing. To recap:

• Well done to Harvey who after travelling to cross off 'I' last weekend is tantilisingly close to ticking off that full parkrun alphabet - only two to go!

• If you fancy a free timed 10k from Chiswick Bridge, then check out this race which is held every last Sunday of the month. There are even spot prizes!

• Up for the Shindig this weekend? There are still a couple of places left due to last minute drop outs. Email ed@goodgym if you fancy a weekend full of GoodGym!

After a some dynamic warm ups which got our heart rates up, we did a quick survey on London's best parks and it turns out you guys are mostly loyal to West London with answers like Gunnersbury, Richmond and Walpole - the location of our task for the evening!

It was a very short run, so after we got to the park we finished off the run with a bit of single file formation running to clock up the kms slightly. We arrived to find no lock - hurrah - and stuck straight into divvying up the tools and gloves for our task.

The job tonight was to prepare the bases of the beautiful avenue of trees - some of which are over 100 years old - to be spread with mulch. We measured out the area, and started to dig....or at least 'disturb' the ground as per instructions. Turns out disturbing the soil is quite tough going after it has been baked by the summer sun, but it sure was a great upper body work out. There were some interesting and widely varying techniques to be spotted, from the spade shuffle to the fork flip, but after some 40 minutes of going at it, the ground was looking much readier for the next step.

We returned our tools, and attempted to create a checkerboard effect group photo with our red and black tshirts (with success? I think so - check out the photo and decide!). We then jogged over to a nice corner of the park to do some pyramid running - alternating paces in incrementally longer phases up to a hard minute's worth of running. Tough going but you smashed it!

We finished off the night with another minute of planking and a run back to base. Next week you have Olivia back to lead a slightly longer run - enjoy everyone. Thanks for having me Ealing, it was lovely to see you - have a week of happy running!