The Great British Rake Off

You can tell when autumn arrives. Is it due to the falling leaves, all shades of orange and brown? Is it due to the conkers on the floor, escaping from their spiky cases? Or is it due to the evenings drawing in earlier and the comeback of the goodgym classic: the headtorch?

Eight hardly GoodGymmers from the exotic likes of Hammersmith, Richmond and Ealing gathered at Turnham Green for a Wednesday classic Hounslow group run. Eight head torches, twelve running legs and two bikes headed down to Cavendish school with the task of helping clear the overgrown garden to create an outdoor classroom for the kiddies.

Ana set up her spotlight onto her workers, as the gang got down and dirty. Jon and Divya did a re-dark-able job of raking and clearing the grounds; Kaz and Emily cleared brambles and got handy with choppers and cutters or various sizes; Luis and Michelle were using some funky tools to dig up roots and Lucy went more old school with the use of two hands to pull them out.

It wasn’t all hard work, as we did a bit of nature watch as well. Ana was very excited to find a teeny tiny newt in the area she was working on, and Kaz made friends with some slugs. Before we knew it, Ana gave us our five minute warning, and we finished what we were working on and admired the three big piles we’d cleared of branches, roots and leaves.

A quick group shot with our best ‘newt poses’ (we won’t ask), the team headed back to Turnham Green on two feet and on two wheels, as there was a special fitness session we needed to fit in…

In the standard creative Ana style, we had a ‘fun fitness game’. Usually this would involve some sort of burpees or completing as many frog jumps in a minute as you can. Today, however was an actual game, putting our grey matter to work as well as getting the glutes burning. The aim of the game was for one member of the group to think of something in a category decided by Ana. Whilst the rest of us had to think of ten questions to try and work out said answer. Obviously there was some sort of exercise involved, and this was a single leg squat for the person in the know and the option of squats or a squat hold for the guessers. If the thing in the category was guessed, the person would have to do a sprint up the green; if it wasn’t guessed, then the group had to do it.

I don’t want to say we are a predictable lot, but Jon had to think of a place and the gang worked out Leicester pretty quickly. In fact we didn’t even need to ask a question to guess who the famous person Emily was thinking off (Beyoncé, of course). Squats completed, we stretched off before heading home… or to the pub.