18 GoodGymers ran 6km and helped Mabley Green clear up!

Thanks for coming along guys, it appeared like Joel was on a rare holiday but he was actually leading a special GGxLondon Marathon Run. It was lovely to lead you guys, plus run and do good in Hackney!

Welcome along to Justyna, Chris, Karina and Nom whose first time it was last night - lovely to have you along :)

In the news this week:

1. To celebrate GG Hackney's 5th birthday, there'll be social next Tuesday after the group run - come along!
2. This Sunday is the London Marathon and GoodGym has various cheering squads out and about - have a look here. Joel, myself and 20+ of GoodGymers are running - come along and cheer us on

After a quick intro we did some dynamic warm up exercises before heading east to Mabley Green. For those who are doing Hackney Half Marathon in May we covered some of the route you'll be taking, including passing Mabley Greeen itself.

Once we'd ran 2.5km to the task we met Bruce, Hackney Council's Parks Development Officer, at the back end of Mabley Green where there is lots of work to do! The tasks were to continue to remove the grass and soil which is on top of the hard standing area, tackling both sides of the underpass. There was also a bit of litter picking and raking up tons of leaves.

Not every GoodGym run you find a toilet!

Hackney wants to put Mabley Green forward for the Green Flag Award so all the work we can do to help them is massively valuable. We got into teams and over 30 minutes collected up 15 bags of debris and leaves, removed rolls & rolls of grass and bagged up lots of litter.

On the way home we played the meet and retreat game twice - lots of fun sprinting around the football field in the sunset.

Sign up for next week here, you are going back to Mabley Green and Joel is back!

PB out.

24 speedy GoodGymers ran 3k to Gascoyne Estate community garden and shovelled a cubic tonne of soil!!

Some new faces to Hackney this week, giving our GoodGym and Hackney first timers a warm welcome! Our returning Big Half Heroes we’re out in force after their magnificent efforts of Sunday morning, legs a bit tired but huge smiles from a massive achievement!!

With a little condensed time time to play with as the Bakehouse was closing up slightly early so we set off at pace to Gascoyne Estate, 10 minutes and we were in! Meeting up with Derek from the garden we set to work trying to make a dent in the monstrous pile of soil that the council had given them on Friday.

Thanks to Peter for bringing along extra wheelbarrows and shovels to allow us all to be as productive as possible!

Our help allowed the community garden to accept the 3 tonne soil delivery from the Council which allows not only community gardens to prosper but also residential Gardens to thrive with a little extra growing magic soil. Without the soil being moved away from pavements and parking bays it would be impossible for the soil donation to be accepted. Paying for the amount of soil to keep a community garden blooming is not viable.

We got stuck right in ferrying the soil to all corners of the community garden, using wheelbarrows, bins, big pots and anything else we could lay our hands on! Speedy shovelling and precision tipping made light work of this heavy duty task!

Making use of every available second we managed to squeeze in 55 minutes of soil shifting action before we took advantage of the local hospitality comprising of fruit and water then zipping back to base to grab our bags before they were locked in!

Great to see a big contingent head off for the monthly social to celebrate our Half marathon success as well as Mireille’s 50th Good Deed!!

Next week we will be heading off to Abney Park look forward to seeing you then!!

Smooth Running

Joel

Big shout out to GG First timer Ali for the epic pun!!