Today’s Goodgym was the first of five Starter sessions in Croydon in September. They are being run as part of Croydon’s Natural Health Service pilot. The aim is to use the natural environment to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals, families and communities.

A big welcome to first timers Sally, Jonny, Swazi & Zoe & old hands Amatari& Dasha. Kudos to Zoe for completing a parkrun earlier in the morning!

Our first task was to help set up for the event to promote the launch of the Natural Health Service. This included displaying promotional flags and banners to let park users know we were there and generally helping set up. Good work from Jonny on improvising the tent pegs to hold the flags up!

Once this was done we moved onto the second part of the task which was to collect the bikes for Wheels of Wellbeing and transport them to the launch area. This is an award-winning charity supporting disabled people of all ages and abilities to enjoy the benefits of cycling. They had an amazing collection of vehicles including tricycles, tandems, hand cycles, recumbent cycles, side by side cycles etc. We rode the bikes & trikes over to the launch area which was loads of fun. We discovered that riding a trike is completely different from riding a bike and it was like learning to ride all over again!

Task complete we set off for a run round the park to look for a nice open bit of land to play some fitness games. Easier said than done! Norwood Park is gorgeous but on the wild side with not a suitable green to be found so we decided to head into the Arena for some games. After a few rounds of ‘knee fencing’ we played a highly competitive game of tic-tac-toe. Everybody played with enormous grit and determination, It really was nailbiting stuff as there was nothing to separate the two teams. At 2-2 it was down to the decider which was a close fought race eventually won by the green team (or was it the white team?!!)

After being informed we weren’t supposed to be in the Arena (oops!) we headed back to base and found an area for a circuit session. We had 3 stations of skipping, squats & tricep dips and we completed 2 circuits of 40 seconds per station. By the end of this everybody had had a good mix of running, fun and games and hard work so all that was left was a nice stretch.

Well done to you all, you were a fantastic fun bunch to work with and it was great to see you all putting in maximum effort.

The next starter session is on Saturday 16th September where we will be helping parkrun put on its weekly event in Norwood Park. This is a fantastic opportunity to see how both Goodgym and parkrun works so sign up here to get involved.