At the start of Volunteer Week, a fabulous thirty runners took to the streets of Lewisham to cover 7km and help out at the Wildcat Wilderness.

Yes thirty! Blimey! Very many old-timers, some returners and three brand-new-to-Lewisham newcomers. All our Lewisham Love this week goes to Rianna, Jonathan and Kris, welcome to the family :)

We've had yet another amazing weekend of volunteering and racing (it doesn't stop on a Monday evening!). It was lovely to welcome Malcolm back, after his fantastic first ever marathon up in Edinburgh last weekend (and he's not ruling out doing another in the future!). Well done also to Nykolette, who motivated herself to join us having run what looked like an incredibly challenging half-marathon with the GoodGym Race Team, up at the Lakeland Trails event. A belated congratulations to all of our runners who took part in the Vitality 10k last Monday (which was SUPER hot), but were unable to join us post-race, hi-fives to Clare and Chris. We also had runners out in force at Hilly Fields parkrun on Saturday, running, volunteering and pacing, (REPRESENTING!) great work everyone.

As I mentioned, it's Volunteer Week this week and time for our annual HUGE run from City Hall. Some of tonight's runners had already been out doing good as part of this event, so rolled up full of tales of building boxes for the Poppy Appeal, labelling bags for a project that works with education around drug use/misuse and some were even chasing pigs down on the farm (all in a day's volunteering for our wonderful members)! Well done everyone.

Over to Catford

Tonight's task was to one of our favourite local organisations, Wildcat Wilderness. We do enjoy visiting Maria, who always has an array of tasks for us to get our teeth into. This week was no different, with our work being focussed mainly on the garden area, with an additional crack team of weed-bashers making sure the path remains accessible, as everything comes into full bloom and threatens to take over. Over in the garden Maria showed us two massive pieces of tarpaulin, which had been sitting on the ground for quite some time. To move something as big and heavy as this takes a large group of people, full of energy and strength and with an enthusiasm to get things done...let me think...

With a lot of 'to me, to you' going on and a few shouts of 'Everyone grab an edge/corner!', there was a shuffle here, a shuffle there and a great big heave-ho before the wet, muddy and frankly whiffy sheet was lifted, shifted and folded enough to transport into the polytunnel. Here the task was to lay it out, covering the weeds, to suppress their growth. You can see from the photos that great care was taken to get this right, with not a weed left exposed. Taking a second to breathe, it was back outside to repeat this exercise, but this time to cover the area next to the tunnel. As Maria said, it wasn't the most glamorous task but, even when splattered with mud, our runners still manage to smile and make it look fun.

Weed better get on with it

While all this was going on, we had another team cracking on with the clearing, weeding and watering, with bindweed being unwound, brambles being tugged and all manner of rogue greenery being shifted from around the plants. In the cabin (it's far too nice to call it a shed), Conroy, Amber, Bradley and Kim were busy making clipboards, which were of course being recycled out of some old roofing material, ready for the forest school groups to use during their bug hunts. Just look at the variety of jobs we do on our group runs!

Before we packed up and left, some of our group ran over to check out the new outdoor kitchen, that we prepared the ground for over a few sessions; it's looking amazing. As we said our goodbyes, Maria reminded us all about our Summer Social coming up on Thursday June 21st. This will be an informal gathering at the Wilderness (thank you Maria!), where we will each bring food to share (and any drinks you might like). We won't be running or carrying out a task, just getting together for a chat over food around a campfire. Sign up here and join us.

Planktastic!

Running back through Ladywell Fields, we reached our start point feeling well worked out, but I really wanted to squeeze in a fun game (well, my idea of fun anyway). In a line, everyone got into a plank position and ran relays along the row. Marta asked if I had been talking to Sarah, the trainer for Greenwich, who apparently had them doing the same thing there! Nope, we must just think along the same (evil) lines :) Well done everyone, it was particularly tough with such a big group!

As we stretched, we talked about next week's task over at Seniors, another longer run (with epic views), sign up here and join us. We wish strong legs, hearts, arms and grit to all of our runners heading off to Endure 24 at the weekend, eat up all your carrots kids, you'll need them for those night-time runs!

See you soon x