12 GoodGym'ers ran 3km back to school to help empty a sand pit and remove dead box hedges

What a scorcher tonight, the mercury just keeps on rising! With the Sahara air bringing in temperatures of 30 degrees tonight the forecast was very much for a very hot and sweaty run 🥵. However, this didn’t stop 11 wonderful and dedicated GoodGym’ers joining me to run and do good (and none of us even contemplated the idea of sacking off the run in favour of a pub garden, definitely none! 😉...).

The weekly news 📰...what's hot to like?

1. Morden Hall 10K - Sunday 28th July at 8.30am - the monthly FREE 10km trail run. Click here for all the details.
2. London City Relay - Sunday 28th July at 4.15pm - the finale party, a 5km run to conclude the epic 3,837 mile journey for The Running Charity. To join in, click here.

Pit the ground running

Since we were all rather warm we open for a very quick warm-up which involved two coloured tennis balls 🎾🎾 - blue = 5 star jumps and yellow = 5 squats being passed round the circle. Everyone executed the exercises well and were primed ready to run! With the name and number count complete we set off on our run down to Strand-on-the-Green Junior School - ensuring we took the quickest route possible!

Très school

We had two jobs to do at the school tonight:

1. Continue emptying the sand pit into bags.
2. Remove the dead box hedges at the front of the school and place them into the skip.

Bring pit on

After keying in the gate code we all entered the school and started surveying the area, looking out for the tools, skip, and most importantly the sand pit/1

No one-pit wonder!

With the sand pit located many took the opportunity to unleash the inner child and jumped in feet first! As it turned out ‘this sandpit ain’t big enough for us all’ so a smaller sub-team grabbed the saws and headed outside to tackle the stubborn dead box hedges - not to be confused with hedgehogs, hey Dave! 😬

Sand and deliver

As the sand pit team shovelled bag after bag of sand into bags, as they dug deeper into the pit they uncovered many children’s toys which had been well and truly buried, such as dinosaurs, spades, and buckets; however, there was also the slightly weird and wonderful items which included the number 17 and a truck with creepy faces on (no, despite the rumours this was not BoJo’s or Trump’s). Sand and pit based puns were also flying about at a rate of knots, oh stop pit!

As she was shovelling away, Michelle spotted a gold and shiny school bell and couldn’t resist giving it a ring, class (not quite) dismissed!

(H)edge away

As the sand pit team dug and shovelled, the box hedge team tugged and sawed their way through what felt like never ending dead box hedges! Despite the hard-ground and stubbornness of the box hedges they did a sterling job removing two wheelbarrows full of them.

After 40 minutes of hard and sweaty graft, with lots of shovelling in the sand pit and sawing of the box hedges - which doubled-up as a superb upper-body workout 💪🏼 - we called it a night.

Luis is a sand up guy!

Despite Luis being unanimously voted to be the one lying in the sand for the team photo he politely declined and attention instead shifted to Andy, not for rhyming purposes at all...SANDY ANDY! After a slightly more unanimous decision we decided to forgo the fitness session tonight and begin our run back to the Town Hall - don’t worry, I’ll save that for you next week 😊.

Back at the Town Hall we had a thorough stretch off and headed to the pub for some lovely cooling pints of water and soft drinks which have never tasted so good, nor been drunk so quickly! Thanks for all your efforts tonight team, great work! 🙌🏼

Gunner(s)'be a good one next week...

I have the pleasure of leading you all again next week and we’ve got a brand new task! We’ll be heading up to Gunnersbury Park to lend a hand with some gardening work. Sign up here. Have a lovely rest of your week and weekend - remember to stay hydrated out on your runs (and in general!). See you next week!