Last night we were at the Whitton Youth Zone to help out in their garden with a variety of gardening jobs.

Eleven GoodGymmers came along - we had some on two wheels (Suze on her snazzy new bike) and some on two feet (Maena and Monika walked up from Richmond, Beth, and Chris and Adam who jogged along from their homes). There was a also a gang of us who met at the Tap for a group run along the scenic route that is the A316, made up of Liz, Jack, Sam, Pippa and Lucy.

As we arrived in our own ways, we got to work on the gardening tasks. Beth did a fantastic job cutting down an overgrown tree, and Chris found a new favourite thing to do, having hours (or at least 45 minutes) or fun with the ‘cool weeding tool’.

I have since done some research and in fact the ‘cool weeding tool’ doesn’t have an official name (variants include ‘weeding patio tool’, ‘garden scraper’, ‘weed removal tool’ and ‘patio knife’). I think Chris’s name is the best, though.

Whilst we were outside in the cold, the current users of the Youth Centre were having a karate class. They were inside practising martial arts, and we were outside doing a different kind of chop… Shout out to Suze for doing a great job cutting down big branches to be bagged up.

Shortly after 8, we swept up the final weeds and tied up the last bag before getting ready for our journeys home. There was a karate party in full swing now, with the black belts swapped for singing out belters. We couldn’t help but join in with some Erasure and a cheeky bit of Steps… and on that high note, we started the first steps for our runs, walks and rides home.