After the downpour earlier in the day, the GoodGym Ealing Team were lucky to miss the rain at their group run. The usual runners: Sevan, Steph, Christos and Kash set off for a 3 km run from Bodyline in Ealing Broadway to South Acton. The gang might have dodged the rainfall but not the results of it. The conversation on the way to the task went like this:

"Look out for the puddle!"
"Puddle on the right."
"Puddle ahead!"
"Puddle! Puddle!"
"Oops! Sorry, did I splash on someone?"

Ok, we had more to chat about than bodies of water around Ealing Common. We overtook Madhan who led the solitary walk to Acton but we didn't manage to convince him to join the running group - maybe because we kept quite a good pace, so we had fewer seconds to explain how fabulous it is to run with us!

When we arrived at the school, we were surprised that it was full of children and parents!

"Is it okay to enter if there are kids still around?", pondered Kash.
"It's fine under supervision", said confidently Sevan.
"Not all of those children look like they're supervised."
"But WE are supervised by the task owner!"

The team then scrambled to find the task owner, Romina from Cultivate London who was hiding behind the shed, then appeared suddenly, sporting her stylish futuristic headlamp.

Romina showed us what was hiding behind moveable fencing at the schoolyard. A heap of bags with leaves... covered with more leaves!

"I'd like all those loose leaves to be in bags, and those bags on the top of the heap. How does that sound?" she asked.

It sounded like killing two birds 🐔🐔 with one stone: removing the loose leaves from the schoolyard, so the kids can safely use the space, plus preparing bags with leaf mulch to be used by Cultivate at their gardening sites. Oh, and the GoodGymers getting their workout! That's three birds then! 🐔🐔🐔

Steph and Sevan picked up rakes, buckets and bags. Shortly, they were joined by Madhan who just arrived after his long walk, and cyclist Divya, who returned after a deserved and much-needed break after smashing 200 good deeds. The team tried different approaches to bagging the leaves but the sweeping part was super smooooth from the start. They operated like a tennis court maintenance team!

"As promised, there's a task to smash things!" said Romina, "Do you remember those two cages we moved from across the road last summer?"

Yes, we did - and here is the report with photo evidence! Romina presented us with the well-known sledgehammer🔨 and asked who was this time closest to any milestone. As previously at Cultivate, Divya had the honour of wielding the sledgehammer, and last week Steph was the King of Spades ♠️, Kash suggested that Christos can have fun at tonight's task as he'd been super dedicated since he returned to GoodGym. Christos destroyed both containers and together with Kash, threw the debris into the skip, making sure the cages would rest in pieces!

Romina was impressed with clearing the area that had been full of leaves. She made sure that we left some heaps to collect by GoodGym Hounslow the next day.

The whole GoodGym gang headed to a chaii place 🫖 for hot beverages and chats about cooking rice techniques and the unexpected consequences of obtaining higher education qualifications. The night finished with the team getting back to Ealing Broadway and another obstacle run between the puddles.