Doing good, running hard is undoubtedly the best cure for any hump day blues and last night GoodGym Westminster made sure we turned Wednesday red!

After assembling at the New Balance flagship store, we welcomed Alice & Steve to the GG Westminster family, go ahead and give them a cheer

NEWS

• GoodGym is about to celebrate its 10th birthday and to mark the occasion a book is being produced with the theme of 'What GoodGym means to me’ It would be great to have your contribution to this. Let everyone know what GoodGym means to you here

• Have you heard the latest ‘Reasons to be cheerful’ podcast? It has no other than GoodGym's very own Ivo Gormley as a guest and is definitely worth a listen, head here to listen now

TRAINING NEWS

• Anyone looking for a longer group run, The next monthly long run is going to be a tour of the Dockland area, which takes place on the 25th August. There are 3 distance options, 26km, 16km, 10km, details and sign up here

RACE TEAM NEWS

• GoodGym has some £10 community entry places for the Big Half taking place on Sunday 1st March 2020. To enter the ballot for a place please email bighalf@goodgym.org by Friday 23rd August. Successful applicants will be informed the following week.

DO GOOD & GET FIT

This weeks tasks was helping out at One Big Family in Victoria. One Big Family is a charity that supports homeless people in the Westminster community by providing a weekly outdoor soup kitchen offering hot food, clothing, toiletries, essentials, food parcels and advice. Our task this week was sorting through some storage sheds that are unfortunately being repossessed

Rain was pouring as we left the New Balance store but that wasn’t enough to put us off from the task ahead. We avoided busy Oxford Street and took to a nearby side street to work through a series of low impact warm up drills, which was wrapped up with a quick poll on everyone’s favourite thing to do on a rainy day

We set off weaving in and out of pedestrians, tourists and bikes and before long we were racing our way through Green Park and taking in the sights of Buckingham Palace. With swift progress, we took the final stretch through Victoria and with 3.4km on the clock and arriving at our destination raring to go

On arrival we were greeted by Mike and his team and after a short brief we quickly got to work. Mike tasked us with separating all the clothing, bedding and food from the brick-a-brac that was in the storage unit and to then relocating the clothing, bedding and food to the nearby cabin. When the storage unit was opened, we realised the enormous task that was ahead of us. Completely unfazed and in true GG fashion we rolled up our sleeves and 30 mins later the storage unit was transformed, with all the clothing, bedding and food removed and relocated. Well done team, awesome work!

All that was left was the remaining 3.4km back to base, which we dispatched in no time at all.

Once back in the warm and dry New Balance store we went through some stretches and reflected on our achievements for the night

So, we braved the rain, smashed our task and ran a total distance of 6.8km. Amazing work all round team Westminster!!

COMING UP

Joel returns next week to lead us to Little Venice for a canal clear up, sign up here

Thank you for having me it was an absolute pleasure taking in the sites and landmarks of Westminster with you all, until next time...

Happy running