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Rake Expectations

7 Goodgymers helped their local community in Waltham Forest

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Waltham Forest

Wednesday 6th October 2021

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Redbridge runner

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Waltham Forest runner

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We had a weedy good time!

A lovely crisp evening to go for a run and do a good deed in Waltham Forest! We are very lucky (and grateful) that Greenleaf Road church provides us with a wonderful base for Wednesday evenings - we all met in the warmth of the church whilst waiting for everyone to arrive.

After a quick introduction and warm-up (where we 'opened and closed the gate' and 'shooed the chickens' - technical exercise names...) we all started to jog nice and slow towards St Peter in the Forest led by Ramon.

Welcome to Matthew! This was a first session in Waltham Forest for Matthew, who moved to the area from Lewisham just before lockdown. Welcome!

Task in St Peter in the Forest - laying down the paths in the Remembrance Garden

Chatting and catching-up on the way to the task, we arrived in no time, having covered 2.5km. We were all warmed up and ready to go!

Amarjit joined us soon afterwards and grabbed a rake, together with Ramon to start clearing out the weeds to prepare paths for weed suppressant material.
Tony and Matthew were in charge of bringing over the tools and heavy bags of gravel, joining in with the raking later as well.
Nerys and Natasha were in charge of measuring and cutting weed suppressant material and then putting it pegs in to keep it all in place on the ground.
Julia was in charge of 'supervising' and photographing whilst also putting on some tunes for some energetic raking:)

In no time, we've cleared the path and finished the task - we will need one more session to finish the task fully (and we will need more gravel and material for it)! Once everything was put away and tidied up, on we went running back.

Run back and chocolates

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We decided not to look at maps and just intuitively made our way back, which of course resulted in us finding ourselves near the Lloyd Park - just 0.5km away from where we thought we were, but that's OK because we enjoyed running up that one last hill;)

After a nice cool down and stretch out, we finished the session with some Ferrero Rocher chocolates!

Freeze! :)

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This task supported

St Peter-in-the-Forest Community Centre & Church

A place to bring local communities together and improve natural environment for wildlife

Since November 2019, we have been in rebuild mode. We were blessed to receive a large grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund of money raised from National Lottery players right across the country. This will help renovate and reorder our church building as part of our major five-year activity plan. When the dust settles we are not going to slow down: our church will become a busy centre for community arts, community gardening, community cooking, and community history. Whoever you are and whatever your story is, you will find a place with us in our corner of Epping Forest.