West Ham to East Ham

Meeting as usual at the glamorous changing rooms on memorial recreation ground, a team of GoodGym runners studied the map so everyone knew the route we'd be taking.  The group set off directly south through the park to get into the back streets.  Following a quick warm up, we left the park and turned east towards Barking Road.  As we crossed the Greenway we were excited to find it still open so we trotted happily towards the gate.  A parks van pulled up just in time to catch us and warn us that the rest of the Greenway was already locked and if we went in we'd be adding hurdles or high jump to our work out.A run through the eerily quite back streets of Newham got us to our destination in good time.  A piece of derelict land is being converted by Ola and her team into a community growing space for local residents and kids to make veg. Ola showed us around and taking a bit of time to find our rhythm we built up quite a pace shifting barrow after barrow of extremely thick and heavy mud onto plastic sheeting designed to suppress weed growth. The sheeting had been laid out and weighed down with stones but strong winds had still shifted it. We relaid and reweighed two lengthy sections with about 30 wheelbarrowfulls of earth.After some team photos we said goodbye and got back on the road before our muscles had cooled down.  The run back was pleasantly paced and we chatted about free-radicals, permaculture and the decline of pubs until reaching our base at memorial rec and stretching off.  A total of just over 9k and some serious weight lifting. No high jump though.