On the week of Valentines Day Ealing was filled with love as 11 of us ran to help do some tidying at The Log Cabin children’s charity!

One of our favourite places to visit on our group runs, The Log Cabin provides a setting where children and young people with additional needs or disabilities can socialise, grow and have fun alongside their mainstream.

A cheesy start to proceedings

After meeting at base we started with a few hip opening exercises whilst discussing our favourite type of cheese. Laurianne and I pondered on our pre vegan life filled with Morbier and Brie whilst others talked of their love of all things cheesy. A brief talk about the latest GoodGym happenings, which are all listed up on the website and we were off on our run down to Northfields.

Barking mad

This week’s task was to rearrange some potentially hazardous and climbable logs, sweep the playground and rake over the sand pit and bark. Everyone distributed themselves across the site and got stuck straight in with the mix of tasks!

The logs were quickly tackled to make more even and less appealing the clamber over whilst others were a sweeping success over the playground. The bark however left us potentially well... barking up the wrong tree! In the dark we struggled to differentiate between the leaves and the wood chips but we did our best to even it all out and remove a large amount of the fallen leaves in the process!

Chair force one!

We finished up with a quick strength circuit involving lots of single leg exercises (which on first glance looked quite appealing as it partly involves sitting on a chair), however this sit down is not relaxing! We did lots of single leg chair sits and leg extensions as well as a mix of lunges and jump squats. After working our way through the 4 stations I think we’d all identified a few balance issues to need to work on! Luckily all those exercises are really easy to do at home without any equipment, well maybe a chair...

After all that hard work, a jog back and a quick stretch I think we all deserved more than a sit down, time for a lie down!