With Christmas parties in full swing we had a smaller group this evening but as ever they were nothing less than fabulous. We started with the lovely news that Sarah and James K-B had finally had a healthy little boy - hooray!

We had two tasks to get done - the first was led by Victoria and Lucy to the nearby Moorlands Estate. Here's their report:

Five runners made their way to Moorlands, via a slight detour. Karen and her sister were very pleased to see us and shared many a tip about Merseyside/ Liverpool, (as that’s where they hail from). We sorted ourselves into teams of wheelbarrowing and spreading woodchip along the paths between the community allotments they have created. We made a big dent in the pile of woodchip they had had delivered and Karen was delighted with the result. Big shout out to new runners Simon and Beth who got stuck in straight away. Simon was keen to pose with a spade for the group photo, so is a perfect fit for GoodGym!

The rest of us headed back to firm fave Clapham Common to round off our very productive year there by spreading soil onto the humps created by all of the turf that we removed when we were digging the wildflower strips. After covering these with soil, they are being planted up for further flowers and to add another dimension to this space.

We could never have got so much done this year without you! Said David

We know! We have worked really hard at the common this year and one group even removed another load of turf to get even more wildflowers planted. Amazing!

The run back and stretches were followed by disappointment that there was no cake after our epic run of Bake Off goods finally came to an end last week. See you for the last run of the year next week Lambeth!

The BIG NEWS of the evening is that party poppers were popped for the brilliant Tim, who completed his 50th run last night. Give that man a cheer - he sure deserves it!

This evening we had two lovely runs - a small group led by Lucy and Nicky went 1km to Brixton Orchard - where a spare spot of land on Brixton Hill has been turned into a lovely, well, an orchard! There was a lot of woodchip mulch that needed spreading across the site and this crack team of 8 worked hard to get it all done.

I sure am going to miss Clapham Common! Especially the workout Katie makes us do on the benches! Said Issy.

The rest of us headed 2.5km back to Clapham Common for our final session of the year. The final strips have been dug and soil turned over - all ready for wildflowers to be planted. We can't wait to see what this looks like next summer. GoodGym have visited this site a number of times since March and have been a key part of the effort to create a tranquil, bee-friendly area on the Common. Hooray! After some lovely strength work, we all ran back to base for stretches.

What bakes! Said everyone.

On return to base we were treated to FOUR different bakes from Nicky, Issy, Sarah and a surprise chocolate fudge from GG Camden visitor Liz. YUM! After dining out on the sweet stuff, what more could we want than a social night at local pizza place 500 Degrees? Our backwards meal was highly recommended and people tucked into some delicious oven-fired delights. Some people had the classic Margarita. Freyja added olives to hers - an Olivita! George C had the terrible FUNGHI but he seemed to like it. Nelly had a vegan tomato and no cheese pizza. Elise accidentally ordered a white pizza so took some of Nelly's tomato base! Many of us enjoyed their home made ZINGY lemonade! It really kicked off. Thanks Steve for organising and thanks Lambeth for a great evening of tasking and feasting.

Hello Lambeth!

THIRTY THREE of you amazing people joined me in Lambeth last night as we helped two organisations, ran a combined 236km, gave out a shit prize and unfortunately failed again to produce cake!

In the news this week:

• A big Lambeth welcome to Hannah who joined us for her first GoodGym run.
• Hearty congratulations to artist extraordinaire Tim for winning shit prize of the month for his dedication in both running and drawing and for generally being an all round awesome bloke.
• Don’t forget the GoodGym-wide social is next Thursday in Angel and if you’re a Libra then this is the social for you!
• Fancy volunteering at a race – check out the Shoreditch 10k on the 14th October – perks included!

And finally a big thank you to the TaskForce and to everyone for helping me out and being such a great crowd to lead and run with! On to the night:

We had two tasks – revisiting the work at Clapham Common for Colour your Common and heading up to St Michael’s Fellowship to sort through some charitable donations.

Thank you to Tom, Nicky and Vix who were in charge of the St Michael's Fellowship group. Words from Tom:

We ran 4km up Streatham Hill to help St. Michael’s Fellowship. An amazing charity who work to break cycles of disadvantage so that children may lead more healthy and confident lives.

We were met by the lovely Hillary and team. Who informed us that our task was to sort donations of all shapes and sizes of baby clothes into seasonably appropriate packages for Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter wear.

This required a great deal of curation and attention to detail from the team. With lots of spirited debate over colour clashes, gendered onesies and whether it’s ever appropriate to wear socks with sandals.

With so many donations to sort through, the scale of the task was too much for one night’s work. But we hope to return soon in some form to help with the great work St. Michael’s are doing.

The rest of us headed up to Clapham Common, a shorter run but a much more physical task. Thanks to Frances, George, Jim and John for guidance and back-marking. Here’s our report:

Wanting to avoid the traffic of Clapham High Street we headed on a slightly different route but ably led by Frances, George and Jim we made our way to the common with no problems. There we were greeted with much darkness and also Adrian and David who were getting out various tools for the task. We split in to two groups, ‘Turfers’ and ‘Turners’. The Turfers worked on a specific area cutting the turf from the soil. A precise and tough job given the ground was still very firm. The Turners worked on an area that had previously been removed of turf and slowly but surely turned and broke up the soil working carefully to ensure that the ground they turned wasn’t trodden on or compacted. With various lights and headtorches being used it made for quite the eerie scene. After 25 minutes hard work it was time to go, I think packing up may have been the hardest part of the night particularly the travails of the wheelbarrow with a flat tyre! In any case all was put away and all that was left was for us to run back to Papa’s!

Thank you to Frances who led the stretch at the end of the evening and thanks again to everyone for a wonderful night in Lambeth - I’ll be sure to come back if I get the chance! Katie is back next week so do sign up here!

Cheers,
Pritesh

September has come round and the nights start to draw in again. The hot summer has started to leave us but that was lucky for this evening as we were back to Clapham Common to take off some more top soil as we finish off the wildflower meadow. As the summer was hot and dry, the ground was still pretty hard and everyone had a tough session trying to get their spades through the roots!

It's hard to get through these roots! Said everyone

After running 2.5km there, we split into two groups. One went off to do some fitness with Katie and a lovely yoga for runners session from newly returned Sarah, whilst the other half got digging. After swapping, we then ran back in three groups at different paces. On return we all enjoyed WEEK ONE of our Bake Off Sweetstake - Vix and John H brought us some sweet and savoury biscuit joy. Wahey!

After weeks and weeks of scorchio last night saw the weather break and a bit of rain happened. This was somewhat ironic as one of our tasks was helping our pals on Clapham Common to water the wildflower meadow that we planted in the spring. After a serious amount of back and forth with watering cans, the heavens opened last night and the lovely pitter patter of refreshing H20 could be heard falling from the sky. OH WELL.

Before all that though, we welcomed back Vicki - HI VICKI - who is visiting from Oz for a bit and it was lovely to have her back. We also celebrated the brilliant Emma and Jim, who earned their 50 and 100 t-shirts respectively. WELL DONE GUYS!

After a quick warm up we split into two groups. Jim and Beth led one group about 1.5km to Larkhall park:

11 of us took a leisurely jog over to Larkhall Park to meet Carl. He had a lot of weeds that needed pulling up and was grateful that we would have them out before the rain came and they would be reinvigorated and take over even more. We split into two groups - Team Weed and Team Thistle. There were noticeably different approaches in the two groups, Team Weed went with a ‘bend at the hip, bums in the air’ vibe while Team Thistle crouched down and really got on the same level as their targets. After half an hour or so the area was looking much better and we set off on an even more leisurely jog back to Papa’s.

The rest of us headed to the aforementioned Clapham Common to do some solid watering. The plants were so dry that we certainly did some good and the rain that came later can only help the lovely plants on their way to perennial glory.

Nice work GoodGym!

Sometimes the tasks we have at GoodGym, while always helpful to local community organisations, are less strenuous, and sometimes we get tasks which get our heart rates up and working those muscles. Last night was definitely the latter, with not one but two different jobs that required some serious GoodGym power.

But first we welcomed some lovely new runners to the group - everybody please give a big cheer for Holly and Polly who joined us for their very first group run last night!

After a few quick hellos it was off to the basketball court to do our warm up, which featured some manic whistleblowing, side steps, heel flicks and power skipping. With our heart rate up, there was just time for a headcount and a roundup of all the nice things that had happened to us in the last week. There had been some international travel, some personal milestones and more than one good ice cream eaten - what a happy few days!

With Katie feeling poorly (get well soon Katie!) it was George leading the group on a longer run to Clapham Common. This lovely 2.5k run each way has been a regular feature of Lambeth's group runs this summer, and what a brilliant job you've been doing helping to create a wildflower meadow in this lovely space. Last night was no exception, with the crew giving the place a good water and digging over, and also getting a massively good work out at the same time thanks to some hard ground! Sadly this was our final run to the common for this job, but the task owners said that the work you guys have been doing was 'instrumental' in the project.

"They did a little thank you speech for us at the end because we've been involved throughout and provided so much man power" said Alice

Nice work team!

Meanwhile, the second group had set off on a shorter run to the Grove Adventure Playground near Loughborough Junction for a number of jobs at this epically fun spot - which much to our delight featured a climbing wall and adventure playground. Sadly, this space is threatened with closure by the council, but a group of volunteers have taken on the task of tidying up the place so it can be used again for supervised play by kids who don't have access to safe outside space. What a brilliant initiative.

With Freya tackling the huuuge mowing job, there were also a massive pile of branches to saw up, and an even more massive pile of wood chip to spread at the base of the slide. It was action stations almost immediately and half an hour later the place was looking a lot more friendly. Check out the before and after shots! There was even a few minutes left for a little go on the colourful climbing wall.

After a speedy run back with only a tiny diversion (whoops) we got back to the basketball court and the two groups were reunited (...and it felt so good). We just had time to squeeze in a little tabata (TAbata? TaBATa? who knows) before calling it a night. The idea of this session is that you raise your heart rate high enough that you continue to burn calories after you've stopped exercising, while increasing your aerobic endurance levels at the same time. Suffice to say it's a tough work out, but innumerable frog jumps, power squats, plank jumps, burpees and high knees later, we were done. Well done gang.

Next week the lovely John Hunter will be leading you on what promises to be an ace group run to help out the bees before lovely Katie is back from her travels the week after. Thanks for having me Lambeth, it was great to see you!