On a pleasant Summer evening, 11 of Goodgym's finest runners met at the New Balance Store on Oxford Street to help make sandwiches and ran 10km in the process. Great work!

With regular Trainer, Joel, currently on leave recovering from a knee operation, the session was led by Redbridge Trainer, James. Joining him were a mix of Westminster regulars and even three new runners - Katie, Veronica and Hannah.

With the usual 'housekeeping' done and the new runners welcomed, the group wasted no time dodging tourists and shoppers on Bond Street and headed south towards One Big Family, a homeless charity in Victoria. With Rhys leading the way and James backmarking the group were soon away from the chaos of Oxford Street and enjoying the quieter streets of central London.

Four kilometres later the team arrived at One Big Family to meet task owner, Mike. The evening's good deed was to make sandwiches and bag pastries to be delivered to the homeless by bike later that evening. With the team split into two groups - one putting a huge sack of pastries into smaller bags, the other working as a sandwich production line - the task was done in no time. Hundreds of jam, cheese and ham (not in the same sandwich) and pastries were prepared in less than 20 minutes. Awesome work team.

With the team working so fast, this left a little time for a fitness session in Green Park. Splitting into pairs, the Goodgymers took part in a 10 minutes fartlek session, alternating between hard and easy running. A great session to work on developing pacing and give run training a kick in the pants.

All that left was a short run back to the New Balance store and some easy stretching to prevent delayed onset muscle soreness! Fancy getting involved next week? Check out the events tab for details of next week's run and task!

14 Westminster GoodGymes ran 5k to help St Andrews Youth Club.

Just to follow up on a couple of things I talked about at the start!

If watching or hearing about running London Marathon inspired you to run the ballot opens on the 30th of April for 5 days only! You have to be in it to win it so think why not enter! Click here for all the information on how to enter via Ballot, charity place or time qualification.

We need to get active organising ourselves for the GoodGym Olympics!! all the information on what it’s about and all things we need to prepare are here. Be amazing if we could get a team together! Sign up and let’s have a chat in the coming weeks about we can represent well!

Next week post Wednesday Group Run I thought I would be fun for anyone who fancied it if we went for a little social to refuel after the session!

So 2.5k through the heart of London Town to St Andrews Youth Club where we met Adrian the Youth Club manager. Splitting into groups we first had a little dirt out of the boxing kit store room while the second group cleaned the gym kit down stairs. Before we returned to the ground floor to find a revitalised garage store following on from our hard work on our last visit! We persuaded Adrian to finally get rid of the last remaining relics so the amazing and usable kit can be accessed for the brilliant activities.

We were even able to recycle some let’s say mature cricket and softball kit for our own summer sporting endeavours.

With a little time to spare we ran up to Green Park for a sharpe circuits blast focusing on our core and upper body conditioning!!

All back done and dusted at New Balance by 8!

Next week we are helping Open Age who are a charity who provide support and activities for Westminsters older and often isolated community. We will be distributing flyers about the lates courses to the most difficult to reach residents.

Smooth Running

Joel

12 GoodGymers ran 7k to prepare the food for One Big Family homeless charities weekly food run.

A mild but dark evening awaited us this week as we met in the New Balance store and plotted our way to victory.

Heading off through the Central London buzz ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving out way South. Great to have everyone running well as we gathered pace going towards the river. 3.5k of strong Running brought us the the Ebury estate to meet Mike where we grabbed the food ingredients for the evening from the hut and delved deep into the basement of the Youth Club.

Splitting into two groups we had the cling filmers wrapping and stacking 300 pastries in the kitchen. While the sandwich production line was in full flow spreading, filling and bagging close to 100 sandwiches of 3 different varieties in 30 efficient minutes.

Making the ingredients stretch to the absolute max so that as many mouths could be fed as possible.

Was really thought provoking to think that all that food was produced for £10 plus the donations of the pastries and our volunteering. The combined efforts will have a huge impact for Westminsters homeless community tonight!!

A faster run back with some speedy running through Victoria and a huge effort by all up the Green Park Drag finished off a super satisfying evening!!

Thank you all for coming along, see you next week for some more epic GG action!!

Smooth Running

Joel