Last night featured a collab with This Girl Can to highlight the #Lift the Curfew campaign, a mega skip challenge, and GG Hounslow becoming a media sensation - all in one evening! You can't say we don't pack it in at GoodGym sessions.

Our task was at Strand on the Green school, where the plan is to create a safe pathway from the tarmac to the field for the children. To do this the caretaker needed to clear a lot of unwanted items into a hired skip. This is where we came in!

First, we met at the gates of the school with Jasmira, from Sport England. She gave us an introduction to the Lift the Curfew initiative, which aims to raise awareness about the safety issues women face when getting active in darker months and to help reduce the barriers to exercising. This is something that we definitely support, as

Everybody has the right to run

Jasmira was there to take some footage of us hard at work - so we got to work! There was loads to shift, from heavy wooden structures, to plastic fencing, weird massive hanging baskets and even a traffic cone (a nice reminder of our student days. You can see it perched atop the skip in the photos!)

It was quite the workout, but when the skip was eventually filled we still had just a little bit more energy left for our fitness session. This week it was Halloween themed, packed with silly spooky moves but still guaranteed to work all the major muscle groups!

Shout out to Luis, Emily and Lucy who put in star turns in front of the camera. Can't wait to hear your wise words go viral.

We've got a couple of lovely missions coming up - can you help?

• On Saturday 15th November we're off to do a massive bulb planting challenge at Chiswick House

• On Saturday 22nd November we have the opportunity to help out at the field where Bend it like Beckham was filmed with an exciting task trimming and maintaining a 100 metre hedge!

What a lot to cheer about in Hounslow at the moment! We had some great racing, with Michelle, Beth and Jon all doing the Cabbage Patch 10 on Sunday, we got to welcome Breda who joined us for her very first session (great to meet you Breda!) and we have our upcoming 9th birthday celebrations in a couple of week - let me know if you've got any ideas about how you'd like to mark the occasion. What a lot of good stuff!

Our task for the evening was at Chiswick House, and so we met gardeners Chris and Kate at the gate and followed them into the very dark, very atmospheric grounds. We were led to two giant piles of woodchip, and our task was to shift it under the 300 year old cedar trees and their swooping branches.

With Halloween round the corner it was a very appropriate task - passers by must have wondered who the shadowy figures were dancing around the gently smoking heaps in the night!

The mulch has several positive effects - moisture control and keeping weeds down - plus is a great way to repurpose byproducts. It was also a fantastic workout. All that shoveling, shifting and raking proved to be quite the challenge.

Job done, it was time to learn yet another GoodGym specific new skill - the wheelbarrow pivot. What to do when you have a larger wheelbarrow to person ratio? Check out the photos to see our newly acquired knowledge and an impressive balancing act!

Next week we have potentially two tasks, both at local schools. If you could sign up here so we can take into account numbers and decide if we could manage both, that would be great!

If you're about this weekend and fancy a nice little mission on Chiswick eyot, I have just the thing!

Last night we were back at Strand on the Green school to help out with a huge wood staining job. There were huts to treat, there were sheds, there were tables and chairs - who wooden want to help out?

Headtorches on, we divided up into a leaf clearing and wood staining teams and got straight to work. With so many hands making light work, it didn't take too long to get all the structures done. So while the sweeping team carried on scooping up every last leaf, the staining teams moved over to the sensory garden to work on the weeds.

Thistles, bind weed and dandelions dispatched, the end of the session was signalled by....was that a donkey? Not a sound we expected to hear in the middle of Chiswick, but given our recent animal sightings nothing surprises us anymore.

We downed tools and went round the corner for our fitness session which last night was speed based. Learning what it feels like to run at different paces between 60 and 100 % effort helps us control our running, maximise efficiency and stamina and helps us understand just how much we have left to give at the end of a run, race or parkrun! We started off at 50% effort and slowly built up, trying to increase our speed by 10% each time. There was some impressively controlled running from the team last night, and some even more impressive turns of speed. Great work everybody!

Next week we're back at Chiswick House - hope to see you then!

At GoodGym Hounslow we're very much in touch with our wild side! Last week we had a brush with a hedgehog, and this week our star turn was a very friendly cat who was keen to become our latest member...

We turned up to Harvard Hill to help the Friends organisation there with several gardening jobs. We were greeted by Marie-Claire who had invested in some shiny new tools. We were given instructions on the tasks to be done - mostly weeding and some work on the raised beds. Unfortunately it was about then that the cat made an appearance and we got somewhat distracted!

After a bit of kitten around, we got down to some serious work. While the weeding was being done, and the fox poo mostly avoided, Steph and Michelle shifted the mulch to the raised beds. In a lovely full circle mulch moment, we discovered that the nutrient-dense bags of it we were spreading were actually from Cultivate, a regularly task for us. They were full of the very same mulch we has ourselves packed up over the past two years at Acton School! It was very satisfying to put the end product to good use.

By now we were feline pretty fine with all the work we had got done, so it was time for a fitness session. Meow you're talking! It was all about the glutes last night, and we had several butt-tastic exercises designed to fire up this major muscle group. There was plenty of singing to go along with each move, with the themes from Rocky and Flashdance featuring at full volume.

Don't fur-get to sign up for next week's run to help out at Strand on the green - who knows what our next animal sighting will be!

ps apologies no photos as yet as the website is not letting me upload them - please chack back later!

Racing celebrations, a huge task under the light of a beautiful moon, and a star turn from a rarely spotted inhabitant of Chiswick House made for a great Wednesday night at GoodGym Hounslow!

Thanks to Michelle for leading the warm up, before we kicked off the evening with a short run to our regular task. We were fresh off the back of some great races at the weekend - a huge well done to Chris, Tish, Matt, Eloise and Steph for a fantastic run at the Vitality 10km, and to Alan and Florian for smashing the Ealing Half!

We arrived at a secret door to meet Chiswick House gardener Chris, who took us to a new spot or the group - the bee hives. The bees produce honey which is sold in the shop to raise money for the charity, and they want to make the area more accessible for school kids. Enter GoodGym!

The aim of the game was to remove all the undergrowth and anything else that was getting in the way. Everything had to go to create a new pathway, and with the green flag from Chris to adopt a scorched earth policy, we got to work!

We pulled, lopped and cleared, slowly but surely revealing a large area of land. Half way through the task, our mystery guest made an appearance - well done to Ariane for safely uncovering and rehoming a gorgeous hedgehog! He was in very safe hands, and was soon happily snuffling his way back to the woods.

By the end the task the area was truly transformed, great work everybody. We ran and walked back to base, where there was the option of a static core workout using the benches by the rockery. We worked our obliques, lower back and abs with a series of (slightly damp) exercises.

Next week we're off to Harvard Hill for some more gardening - please bring headtorches if you have them as this is a dark task.