It was the end of an incredible year for Wandsworth GoodGym last night, as we met for our last group run of 2016. It’s been a year that has seen us run almost five whole marathons together in total, and help out at hospices, schools, cancer support centres, community gardens, youth clubs and charities. We’ve done countless hill sprints, innumerable lunges, planked until we could plank no more and given several thousand high fives. We’ve made a big difference in Wandsworth, and we’ve also made incredible friendships.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we have made some terrible puns. And in that (festive) spirit, here goes…

Queen(speech)town Rd

We kicked off the night welcoming a lovely new face, Luke, who we quite literally ran into last week in Clapham Common on the way to a task. Welcome, Luke! We also said a huge well done to those brave GGers who made it out of bed on a cold post-Christmas party Sunday morning to take part in the time trial in Battersea Park – way to go Jack, Matthew and Silvia. It was also welcome back (briefly) to Maddy who we’ve missed. Everybody give it up for Matthew, who heroically managed to attend every single Wandsworth group run ever. He puts the power into power ranger.

We also had a very well-timed and special cheer for Jack who managed to achieve his goal and get to 50 good deeds before Christmas. Congratulations, you’ve made Wandsworth 50 times better Jack!

Pud-ney

After a few dynamic warm ups, and with David and Will making up the backmarking dream team, we were off to Christchurch Primary School in Battersea. This school has an amazing secret garden where the children grow, then cook and sell their own vegetables and fruit. It’s a beautiful space which the children clearly love, and it was our job to shift bags of compost over there ready for spreading. There was some seriously heavy lifting from Will, Luke and the Davids. Different teams also set about ripping ivy off the wall, weeding (we are total pros at this now), filling empty bins, cleaning out the shed, sorting out the compost bins, and Jordan made a new friend, Scarecrow.

Chrimbledon

Job done, we downed tools and set off for our favourite fitness spot, Battersea Park, to finish off with a few hardcore running games. We started off with a new game for us – Clustering – which was been stolen from Lewisham, thank you Lewisham for the great idea! It went a little something like this. The group ran around in random directions until a number was shouted out. They then had to cluster in that number and the odd one(s) out had a forfeit decided by the group. There were some very magnanimous players – I’m looking at you Asifa and Vicki – who took ones for the team, and some fabulous heckling from Isobelle which made us all laugh.

There was also an increasingly manic game involving 26 pieces of wool pinned to our backs, the winner was the person who managed to get the most pieces of wool in a set time. Was Dave cheating? Who knows. There was one outright champion though – well done Silvia, you are hereby crowned the wooly winner. We weren’t quite muddy enough though, and it was almost home time, so it was a quick round of stuck in the mud, with some very dirty tactics from Will, Alicia and Ben whose job it was to freeze our runners, while everybody else scrambled through their legs to free them. There was some particularly generous freeing from Tom and Kylee who ended up with the muddy knees to prove it. Check out Jessie's knot of a run tracker screen grab which shows just how much running was done.

For the run home we divided ourselves into three teams, each trying to chase down the other. David led one group, Ben the next, and Vicki and Asifa the third. We all ended back up at our starting point to finish off with stretches, and to hear Sarah crack the last CoRUNdrum of the year. She cleverly knew that before we all stuffed ourselves with turkey for our Christmas lunch, it used to be traditional to eat pigs head and mustard. Yum.

There’s snow pace like Wandsworth

It wouldn’t have been a Wandsworth Christmas without a social at the bar, where we met our very own star baker, Sally, with an amazing cake to celebrate Tom’s 50th deed. It was sweet, stuffed with good things, and ultimately life-enhancing, much like GG itself. There was also an incredible speech from Jordan, when Ana found she had something stuck in her eye (weird), and some very special gifts including a whistle which is going to see a loooot of love in 2017. Thank you GG Wandsworth for being an incredible bunch of people that have done some brilliant running and made everybody’s lives a little bit better. Here’s to 2017.

You can sign up here for the first run of the year:

https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/run-to-take-down-christmas-decorations