25 GGers ran between 3-10km across the borough collecting 27 Christmas Trees for recycling!

Happy New Year and welcome back - new year, new hat (for me) but same old amazing GG Camden! Welcome along to the newbies - Alexandra, Jessica, Chris, Katie and David - lovely to have you along :)

We learnt all about GoodGym, for some more information see the About Page here BUT I forgot to tell you all about the news:

1. This Saturday we are doing a Camden Starter Session in Hampstead helping Antrim Allotments, plus we are going to do Hampstead Heath Parkrun before if you'd like to join.
2. Also in May GoodGym are going to Bucharest Running Festival to race, party and have our annual GGxEuro fun - come along!

Right onto last night our task for the evening was to find, collect and deposit Christmas Trees at four recycling centres throughout Camden. We split into four groups covering Somers Town, Kentish Town, Camden Town and Hampstead - with distances covered ranging from 3.7km to 10.6km.

Each year GoodGym areas all over the UK take up this task to help the local council properly recycle trees. The thing is lots of people leave them out on the street and expect them to be collected but in Camden it's unlikely they will be as the services are stretched. Here is what Camden Council say on there website:

If you have a ‘real’ Christmas tree, please recycle by taking it to one of our recycling points and we’ll compost it so it can be used to grow new ones. Please remember to remove any decorations.

Following the instructions given this is where we come in. Using four different recycling points and collecting an amazing 27 trees between us, that's 1.125 per runner - nice!

Competition Time

Staying in pairs at all time and bouncing around Camden looking lost we did great work doing such GOOD for our community. Importantly though this was a competition to find the most trees with results being:

• 1st Team PB - Kentish Town - 13 Trees (7.5km covered)
• 2nd Team Chris - Camden Town - 8 Trees (7.3km covered)
• 3rd Team Katherine & Rosie - Hampstead (10.5km covered)
• 3rd Team Frances - Somers Town (3.8km covered)

What a display of skill, awareness and the ability to find trees in the dark - very unique set of skills. You should all be proud!

Well done all, see you next week for Cecil Sharp House gardening, Veg Box Leafleting and more Tree Collecting - sign up here

PB out