It was going to be a sweet little task, running 6.6km all round, along a fast, straight road to the Thames path under Chiswick Bridge where we would be greeted by a forest of tree saplings ready and waiting for our weeding prowess.

But first, we treated the Wholefoods crowd to our regular warm up act, even trying out some new walking plank exercises that brought to mind an Olympic-worthy synchronised swimming routine. If only someone had brought along a drone to film us from the air… By the end of our show, our muscles were warm, our joints were mobilised, heck, even our necks were mobilised tonight.

Victoria, Guilia, Jenna and I were fresh from the glory of our Tug of War trials in Twickenham on Friday night (c’mon the girls!); Claire had returned to us (yay) after a short sojourn; and we had two fabulous newbies to welcome to the team – Rafael looking like he might outstride us all with his six foot something stature and Derya looking like she could definitely take on a weed or two. It was like Mark had assembled The Avengers. That’s how good this team looked.

So off we set, tag-teaming our bag of gardening gloves along the way. Then, as we dipped down below the dual carriageway, we found ourselves by the banks of the river Thames and enjoying a little bit of sunset tranquillity. Armed with pictures of our sapling targets and gloved-up for the task, we were eager as beavers to get stuck in. However. Some ten minutes later we were still to be found scrutinising, debating, and Googling in an effort to find the saplings we had been tasked to clear. We didn’t conclude on much, but we can confirm that if you type ‘weed sapling’ into Google, it doesn’t bring up the tree variety…

Well, in the spirit of what GoodGym does best, we did what we could. There might not have been many tree saplings in our pile of weeds at the end of the night, but there was still something to show for our efforts.

In other news, the 18th of July is the Richmond GoodGym team’s one year anniversary and we want to celebrate having achieved 12 months of good deeds and clocking up many kilometres along the way. Watch this space for an update on how we will mark the occasion and, in the meantime, let Mark or any of the taskforce know if you have any ideas about how we could make it a memorable event.

Last call to see if anyone would like to attend the annual GoodGym Shindig which will be held in the Peak District between 21st and 23rd July. GoodGym will pay for accommodation, you just need to get there, and back! Contact Mark if you are interested.

Mark here, just want to say congratulations to Elaine, Victoria and Jane on the Turks Head 10km yesterday; you well deserved that fizz!