Following a chance tweet 3 GoodGym runners convened on Ham Parade. Our task today was to help The Ham and North Kingston (THANK) Community Investors take down and clear away stalls following their monthly community market.

We met a very grateful Lulu who was pleased to hear that her tweet had been so successful and she introduced us to Matt, one of the founding members involved in establishing the market over a year and a half ago. The market was set up following the closure of the local greengrocers and butchers with the aim of reinvigorating the local high street and providing a way of bringing the local community together again.

It was one of the smaller markets this month with only 29 stalls but with temperatures not rising above 3 degrees and stall holders frozen after a morning out in the cold the injection of GoodGym energy certainly helped to warm things up!

There were lots of surprised faces when 3 lovely ladies turned up to help as they had been expecting burly muscle men, but our enthusiasm bowled them over and we were quickly put to work stacking chairs and folding tables. We were then given a quick lesson in gazebo manual handling and we put our new skills to good practice taking down every gazebo in sight (even those that didn’t belong to the organisers!)

With high stretches to tackle unruly bunting and low squats to pick up gazebo weights, it turned out to be quite the full body workout! Kate even demonstrated great “weighting” skills as we queued to load equipment into the vans.

With chairs stacked, tables stowed and gazebos safely packed away we received plenty of THANKs from the organisers, who jokingly welcomed us back for the early morning set up shift next month! They were surprised when we all enthusiastically accepted their offer as a good pre ParkRun warm up!

Thank you Ham Parade for showing us what true community spirit is all about and we’re looking forward to seeing you all again next month!