Two task Tuesday to One task Tuesday for 21 runners in H&F who celebrated GoodGym's 10th birthday!

Another Tuesday evening spent with lots of lovely GoodGym’ers who join me week in week out to run and do good for their local community, whilst having lots of fun! It’s definitely my favourite evening of the week!

Big welcome along to Khadijah and Milla on their first group run, hope you had fun and will join us again soon!

With our normal warm-up spot still occupied by scaffolding we all congregated outside the BetterGym for this week's news round-up and a quick warm-up to get our heart rates raised.

This week's news:

1. GoodGym's 10th Birthday! 🔟🥳 - Last week a number of us went to the City Hall party which had a number of great speeches, including one from Ivo! I've included the 'GoodGym Experiences' that was read out by Slough runner, Sandy on the night - I think we can all relate to it! Amazingly there have been over 165,000 good deeds done in 10 years, with 2,800 of them done in H&F over 3 years!
2. H&F Instagram account 📸 - Lucy has set this up for us, go give it a follow! @goodgym_hf.
   

We also congratulated Catherine on her first half marathon at Harrow on the Hill which she completed in under 2 hours! 🙌🏼 Well done to Catriona, Bex and Will who also completed the half and set some blistering (quite literally) fast PBs! And to Khadija on her first Great North Half a few weeks ago! 🏃🏼‍♀️🏃🏻‍♂️🎉

Tonight we were going to be lending a hand at two Community Gardens: Loris and Josiah Braithwaite. Before we split into our two groups we decided to catch the last of the evening's light with the gigantic GoodGym flag down at Hammersmith Bridge. With a beautiful backdrop of the bridge and the sunset we got a stunning group photo that beautifully represented our area, achieving the flag photo brief 'to represent our area' for the 10th birthday celebrations nicely. Each area has been asked to take a photo with the GoodGym flag, check them out on Instagram and in other area run reports, hopefully ours is 'gram worthy?!

While we down at the Hammersmith Bridge we bumped into Wandsworth runner David out on his evening run - he spotted the red GG tees from a distance and thought he'd come and join us for the evening - another pair of helping hands, always very welcome!

We split into our two groups, with one group led by Jonny and Lucy up to Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden and the other group led by me to Loris Community Garden.

With only a short 1.5km run up to Loris Community Gardens it wasn’t long before my group arrived and were helping me to crack the padlock code so that we could get to the tools, bags and gloves that had kindly been left out for us.

With the padlock cracked everyone gloved up and grabbed a tool. Tonight we had been asked to focus on the patch between the main garden and playground area so that it looked more appealing for those walking through. Cooke got stuck into the sweeping with Jason lending a hand with the dustpan and brush whilst Sarah, Jonny, David, Khadijah, Steph and Katie tackled the small but tough weeds in-between the paving cracks.

Whilst my group were successfully weeding and sweeping away, Jonny and Lucy's group were unfortunately locked out. I made a quick call to the lovely Susannah who apologised profusely for having a 'senior moment' and then to Lucy to relay the bad news...one for the 'gram story!

Jonny and Lucy's group joined the rest of the group down at Loris Community Gardens where they helped for a few minutes with the finishing touches of sweeping and weeding, with Catherine needing all her strength to pull out a particuarly large weed! Jonny humorously declared that shoes should be removed when walking on the patio area as it was now so clean!

With the tools and bags tidied away we completed our fitness session on the now spick and span patio area. Today's fitness session was card based with exercises corresponding to the card suit, press-ups, squats, jumping jacks or lunges and the card number to the reps. The group split into two teams, Team Alice and Team Arba. Both teams began their short runs out to the circle of cards and by the end of the pack of cards everyone had completed a HUGE number of reps of each exercise; in a small 10th birthday twist the team that found the most 10's could nominate the other team to do 10 reps of their chosen exercise - Team Alice were victorious 3-1 so chose jumping squats for Team Arba. Although Andrew was keen for a far more brutal exercise which involved sets and reps...we decided to save that for another time!

Fitness session complete, we began our short run back to base for a stretch off. Talk turned to Belushi's and the deal of the year secured for us all by Sarah, but in the end it was decided that we'll save Belushi's for another evening!

Great work tonight team! And apologies to those who were locked out of the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden!

Next week we've got a Two Task Tuesday (fingers crossed!), we'll be heading back to Flora Gardens to apply to the 2nd coat of paint and will be flyering for Turning Point. For all the details and to sign up, click here. There's also a community mission to help out TRAID on Monday! So you've got a chance to get two deeds in early next week!

Have a great rest of your week and weekend. Hopefully see you next week!