After a mad rush to secure a venue for our return to central London we happened upon the Marquis of Cornwallis which rather aptly sits in Camden. Apt because it was the week of GG Camden's 4th birthday and due to some shenanigans the night before the Camden Birthday quiz had rolled over to social night!

An incredible FORTY of you came to hear our guest speakers, not really hear me doing the heroes speech and to take part in the GG Camden Birthday Quiz! Thank you so much and especially pertinent this month as there was so much noise here's the speech contents including all the stuff I cut...

The Tables

Distance:

• Ben Parkes - 617.2km
• Paul Bown - 416.1km
• James Holt - 358.7km
• Joel Wiles - 351.1km
• Alison Davidson - 345.4km

Cheers Given:

• Egg Cameron - 1637
• Chan Nandhray - 695
• Adele Prince - 635
• Paul Becker - 435
• Melissa Cochran - 422

Cheers Received:

• Egg Cameron - 532
• Adele Prince - 309
• Conroy Barnett - 297

Good Deeds:

• Egg Cameron - 18
• Beth Hoskins - 15
• Joel Wiles - 15
• Leanne Allsopp - 14
• Becky Greenwood - 14

• Tom Benson - 13

• Please note the the trainers (in italics) don't count in these tables but are shown for reference

50s & 100s

Achieving these milestones is an incredible feat - do go and give these GG-ers a cheer!

• 50s - Aisling Kelly, Charlotte de Wilde, Neil Macey, Steven Lee!

• 100s - Caroline Townsend, Julika Niehaus, Ollie Levy, Vicki McLellan!

• To conclude the Heroes we have the most new runners in your area last month award...rather fittingly given the birthday and the location, in a close fought race it was Camden with 28 new runners beating Wandsworth who had 27. Fantastic result for those guys and we're making sure we don't mention that Paul their trainer was away for three weeks in March...oh.

News

• Bloody London, it gets everything... Not anymore!

In March the wonderful GG Worthing and GG Bromley opened! And coming soon we have Brighton (finally!), Cardiff (we're going international!), Leicester and Norwich!

• Ok, back to London... #LDNMovesMe

So as some of you may have seen the lovely people at London Sport have launched a new campaign as part of their overall remit to get 1,000,000 Londoners active by 2020. GG Central’s Alex Kenmure was there and so was Khara Mills who is an ambassador for the project as well as being a GG Hackney runner. Take a look at their site here and make sure you tag your runs and social media with #LDNMovesMe to get featured in their campaign

GG Race Team and Upcoming Events

I mean, really! If you don’t know about Race Team where have you been? I shan’t bore you with all the info but if you are interested in joining the racing arm of GoodGym then check out the info here.

REMEMBER, though, you DO NOT have to be part of Race Team to join in with any events or races so do keep an eye out on the Events page for news of races, training runs and other events!

I want to keep forward looking in this report but a shout out to all that came to the Larmer Tree Races in March – this was the first of the ‘Big Six’ races GG are doing this year. Huge thanks to Tom and Danica for organising and check out the race report and pics here. And we couldn’t mention Larmer without giving a huge hand to:

• Helena Eames of GG Southwark who was the third lady to finish in the 20 miler
• George Bright of GG Lambeth who was the third gentleman to finish in the half marathon (and it was his first ever half!)

Now on to some upcoming events:

• Northala Fields parkrun pacing GoodGym + parkrun = general awesomeness! We know this, you know this but not everyone out in the wide world knows this so we like to promote it with a helping hand to all those Saturday morning runners by providing pacers. This event this weekend 22nd April will have pacers provided by GoodGym so get along if you can and offer a hand pacing if you feel like it too. All the info here.

• London Marathon Not sure everyone will have heard of this one but it’s a little old race in that there London Town. We have a lot of runners in this one so we want to get as many of you out cheering as possible! Not only is it a fantastic day out, (I promise you, if you want your faith in humanity restored go to this) but you will get to cheer on a wonderful bunch of GoodGym runners as well as everyone else running too. The details are being confirmed as we speak but we’ll have cheering points outside Somerset House (on embankment) and Canary Wharf. Details here and will keep being updated so do check back.

• Hackney Half Marathon This one has crept up on us and I know that there was a bit of uproar when Virgin Sports took over and tried to turn the run in to a ‘festival’ and decided that a festival would cost us squillions but we have a number of runners out in force on the 30th April and we’d love to see you out cheering too. We should get a pub booked up too for afters so come along and have a celebratory pint too. Not too many details at the moment but all the info will be updated here

• Night of the 10,000m PBs, May 20th - this event is a fantastic exhibition of all that is great about our sport. The drive to finish as well as you can, the camaraderie and community of the runner and running clubs and the willingness of our lot to give up their time and energy to make something special happen. It's 25 laps of the track and you can get as close to the action as is possible with the Lane 3 crowd, the beer tent and the cheer tunnel! It's at the Parliament Hill track on Hampstead Heath and we're looking to have as big as impact as ever after the success of GoodGym being part of the event last year. Find more details here, find the GoodGym details here and get involved however you can - be it racing (if you're lucky enough), signing up to volunteer or just coming along and being part of the brilliant crowd that makes it such an amazing night!

• GoodGym Olympics Now hopefully you all come along on the 20th May for Night of the 10k PBs which will give you a taster for Parliament Hill Track because that will be the venue for the inaugural GoodGym Olympics on the 10th June! You can’t keep a good man down and Tom Benson is one of the good-est men we know. He, together with TaskForces and trainers will be doling out loads of information about this as the weeks go by. Check out the current info here and you can sign up for events here. Plenty of info to come but it sounds like it will be a huge and wonderful event and I’ll be hosting the June monthly social straight afterwards too for the first ever GG Social on a Saturday!

GoodGym

Ok so GoodGym – you know what we do but it never hurts to hammer it home: group runs, coach runs or the missions - there is generally something for everyone!

We’re focussing on missions at the moment as it’s a really good way for people to see what a difference we can make and there are plenty of them Do please let others know about them and have a look at the missions list to see what’s coming up! Thanks all!

Guest Speakers

Right before the big news that is the pun of the month please let me say a big thank you to GoodGym’s answer to Ant & Dec (maybe), the wonderful Paul and Axel for telling us their stories from their trip to the High Altitude Training Centre in Iten, Kenya. I know the sound was terrible so if you do wanna re-cap and hear more check out Paul’s blog from the trip here.

International Pun of the Month

So…finally… we have the all important International Pun of the Month.

The typed up lists are going down a storm and they shall continue, those asking for summaries, if you fund a secretary for me they shall be yours! So with 18 of a total 38 votes the winner by a long long way, the wonderful…

"Adjustin’ Timber-ache" for the second month in a row it’s the mighty GoodGym Bristol

Huge congratulations to you, apologies to the many who didn’t like this month’s selection (I think the problem was they were actual puns) and we’ll see what we get next month!

Please do contact me with any feedback or ideas for the night, this is your social! Outlying boroughs, I've not heard much from you yet so get in touch if you wanna host – the next slot is July!

Next month we go back on tour and it’s a good ‘un as we have a 1st birthday too! Thanks to the team at GG Croydon for suggesting and sorting the next social on the FOURTH OF MAY in CROYDON!!! Expect birthday, starwars (may the fourth be with you) and marathon shenanigans aplomb! All the details here!

Pritesh

p.s. As some of you know there is an unofficial GG facebook group, set up by GG Camden trainer Paul Bown and administered by us both , click here if you want to join - it's a great place to hear about races, socials, training runs and other things that come out of a community having a chatter!

p.p.s Thank you to Chris and John for the photos from the night!

p.p.p.s For those that stayed for the quiz, thank you and well done for putting up with the noise and that question. The winners were 'Emergency Exit Only' by three points, and they're pictured with their prize egg!