Olympic Run

Lauren Garland writes:It was the end of another warm & humid day when we gathered at the Arch Gallery this evening. Today’s plan was to run down to St Katherine’s Docks to help a gardening group tidy up the grounds of their estate. We were joined by a team from Radio Scotland who were recording a series about events going on around the Olympics. It was slightly less surreal than the Japanese camera crew that joined us previously, but only just.After a quick warm up, 64 seconds to be precise, we set off on the 7k run at a good pace. We wound through the back streets of Whitechapel & Shadwell and along the canal to St Katherine’s Docks. It was one of those runs that pieces together bits of London that you vaguely know, but don’t quite realise how they’re linked to each other.When we arrived we were met by the Gardening Group who split us up to cover the tasks they had arranged for us. The tall runners went off to help strip ivy off a wall. The strong runners had to dig up the roots of some trees that had been cut down. And the rest of us (sadly I am neither tall nor strong) were tidying up an area of the garden that suffers from vandalism.The garden has a big problem with dogs attacking the trees and bushes, so there were lots of branches that needed cutting down and they all needed a good pruning. It was slow progress as some of the branches were very spiky but we cleared a lot of the dead wood and escaped with only minor thorn-based injuries.After half an hour’s hacking & digging we gathered once again for the return journey. We all stayed together for the run back but took a bit of a detour down to the Thames. The view of the setting sun behind Tower Bridge, with its Olympic Rings proudly displayed was a beautiful sight. It quite literally stopped us in our tracks.We all made it back to the Arch Gallery in one piece to discover that not only was it one of the fastest GoodGym runs from the last year, but it was also rather longer than advertised. We’d run 9k in total, which was a great achievement as everyone covered the distance quite comfortably, but I’m anticipating some aches and pains tomorrow!More photos are on the GoodGym Facebook page.