Lots of Bank Holiday goodness done and fitness gotten this eve.

Welcome

Welcome to Ruby who already volunteers for Age UK and Send a Cow but wanted to do even more, and welcome to Simon F on his first visit to Islington after visiting GG Hackney once before. We also said hi to Marco, the first ever member of GoodGym Islington, who hasn't been since our launch event back in January 2015!

Unobservant

Nobody noticed the "mention this line and get a prize" bit on the sign in sheet. What am I to do with these Curly Wurlys I got as prizes?

Anyway, we had two tasks this evening. Six were needed to go and tackle some elder roots over at Thornhill Square Gardens. Here's Aidan's account of the evening:

Thornhill

6 eager GoodGymers took on the challenge of the longer run this week...well a bit longer...nearly 2km. Dropping off the main group at Barnsbury we continued on to Thornhill.

The task at hand was removing the unwanted plants and roots from around the garden, plenty of challenges for us to get stuck in to. We definitely had the right equipment for the job with a variety of saws, shovels, forks, secateurs and an axe. We all got stuck in and showed those roots who was boss. Everyone had the satisfying feeling of triumphing over nature, with Steve commending newbie Ruby on her upper body strength for launching some roots out of the ground. We did have one casualty, sadly one root was too tough for the fork and we had to say goodbye to one of the tools, RIP fork you did some great work.

After a quick tidy up and photo we headed off ready for the hill training!

B. Square

The rest of us nipped over to Barnsubry Square to meet Lucy, Carmela and Wesley the dog. We had a few jobs to do: getting rid of weeds (so many weeds), doing a spot of watering, a little bit of mulching and a dash of pruning. Most of us had a biscuit. Graham didn't cos he was feeling ill and delivered the line of the evening: "Well, I bought some reduced pineapple juice from Lidl..."

Hills

There's a little hill by the pool. It's hardly even a hill, so we figured nobody would notice if we made them run "up" it. The prescription was simple: run up to that bin hard. When you get there turn around and jog back down and repeat for 7 minutes.

Heroes of the evening: Marco and Jill who were the only ones hard enough to chuck in an extra rep when the 20 seconds remaining call was put out. They won a Curly Wurly (Marco didn't even know what a Curly Wurly was until about 20 minutes prior to this)

Meta

We went meta with our debate this evening: "What should our debate be for next week?". Some awful suggestions and some good ones:

• "Would you rather have no legs or no arms"

• "Best time of the day to train?"

• "Cyclops or uni-boob?"

• "Blackpool or Brighton?"

• "Should headphones be allowed in races?"

• "If you wake up late - say at midday - then you eat, is that breakfast or lunch?"

Marco suggested "Who will win the Euros" and Ruby thought a discussion about The EU would be a good idea. Clearly they weren't aware of things we should never debate at GoodGym Islington

Anyway, the headphones one from Simon F got the most votes, so we'll be discussing that next week. Then we'll do all the others.

See you next week for a brand new task and the re-introduction of our monthly time trial. Oooh.

Simon