A small but mighty team formed GoodGym Ealing last night with 7 runners heading down to Cultivate London to complete a few construction tasks for this great West London social enterprise.

• We had one new runner with us, so all our Ealing love this week goes to Daniela who threw herself straight into the run and task last night.

We started our evening by doing a brief warm up while talking about goals and sharing our words of wisdom with the rest of the group. We all agreed that it’s great to set yourself a challenge but to also be realistic about what you want to achieve. Michael’s two cents was that if you set your standards really low, you’ll be delighted when you actually achieve something… ever the optimist but in a roundabout way I can see his point but you still need something to aim for! As a middle ground I’d say shoot for the moon but if you reach the stars then that’s just an added win!

Shoot for the moon!

With that we headed off east towards Acton, our usual Cultivate spot is in Hanwell but they have a few sites they work across in West London and this week they needed some help at their main site with, breaking down, de-nailing and sanding pallet crates to use across their other projects.

As an organisation Cultivate London aims to provide training opportunities in practical horticulture for disadvantaged people and the greater community. And to work with the local community to improve the physical environment and social cohesion through the creation of food growing and/or biodiverse green space.

We are delighted to be able to regularly help this fantastic initiative

We arrived onsite to meet Rosie, the community projects manager, who had everything ready for us to get stuck straight in.

We had three areas, one for breaking down the pallets, one for de-nailing and one for sanding. Lionel put in a lot of hard graft and took to hammering and cracking the crates apart. Marline, Michael and Daniela found a great stress relieving exercise in hammering out all the nails and myself, Shan and Jenni were there to smarten up the final product and sand down all the bits of wood from the rest of the group.

40 minutes of fantastic effort from everyone involved saw a huge pile of finished wood ready to go off and be used in other Cultivate projects!

Just a short jog back, a cheeky minute wall sit and a little stretch saw us finish up for the night, all feeling that little but better for lacing up our shoes and getting out there to help in the local community!

See you next time!