An amazing 21 GoodGymers met on a chilly evening to shovel dirt, paint Camden red and run 5km!

Welcome to Jess and Lauren whose first GG Camden it was this week. Cheers to all the regulars and new comers who are staying committed too!

In the news this week:

• Well done to everyone who's doing Autumn races, including all the amazing GG Cardiff runners!
• GG monthly drinks are today in Islington Townhouse in Angel, also it's Pritesh's birthday, gonna be great - sign up here.
• Importantly Axel and I are organising Riga Running Festival for May (13-17) 2017, there are distance options of 6km, 10km, half marathon and marathon. It's gonna be amazing!

Okay onto the tasks at hand:

After a chilly speech but an active warm up the group split into two with Pritesh leading a group to Skip Garden and myself leading a group to St Mary's Flats.

PB painting report:

After a short dash to St Mary's flats we were met by the lovely Lorraine and a pile of painting equipment. Isabelle took charge from the go; establishing roles, directing newbie painters and generally being very good at coordinating.

Isabelle + Project Managing = Happy PB

After a few minutes of semi-supervising I decided the best thing to do was join in painting. Everyone worked well and quickly painting new walls and putting a second layer over last weeks work. Nice work everyone!

Once again it's amazing what a group of people can get done in 30 minutes - amazing stuff!

Pritesh's Skip Garden report:

Winter, despite all that sun, is definitely here. On a chilly October night eight hardy GoodGym-ers went to Skip Garden in Kings Cross to do some shovelling, sieving and stirring!

Shovel yo!

We were keen to keep it moving tonight with the chill having set in and so after the short jog to the Skip Garden we got our instructions from Gwen and got to task straight away! Tonight we were shovelling soil from a huge delivery bag to more manageable sacks and then stowing these away for future use. We got into pairs and got on with it! We were soon rocking and rolling while we shovelled as a couple of likely lads outside the Skip Garden were playing some dodgy soul tunes on their boom-box!

Will and Jackie had joined us at Skip Garden and once everyone was shovelling away they took on the task of sieving the deposits from the composter. The fine rich compost was kept to be used and any remaining materials were put back for another run in the composter. Once we had filled all the smaller sacks we gave the composter a few turns to stir up all that composting goodness and then we were ready to re-join the other group.

Lovely composter smells!

We said our good byes to the Skip Garden staff before heading off to get even warmer with some focussed glute exercises and some progression running.

Fitness session report:

With both tasks complete we met and decided fitness was the way forward - you know it makes sense. This week we were focusing on strengthening exercises, particularly the glutes, and progression running.

It went something like this:

• Bench step ups
• Triceps dips
• Progression run around Granary Square - faster on every corner!
• New glutes balancing drill
• High knees game
• Progression run again but this time half steady and half fast
• One leg squats-foot on bench (x10 on each side)
• Press ups

With everyone feeling a bit fitter we headed back to base for some stretching, chatting and a visit to the local watering hole.

Sign up for next weeks #RunAndTalk group run here.

Thanks as always.

PB out.