There was a nervous atmosphere as we assembled for our weekly group run. England’s match had clashed with our group run time slot. To keep the football lovers informed, Tom had the highlights showing on his phone through the see-through window in his arm band and Bex had notifications on her phone.

After that hubbub was calmed, we celebrated the highlights of H&F’s achievements at the Goodgym Olympics. Firstly, H&F came 3rd overall out of 18 in our category (Hunter-Sidhu Shield). Which is an amazing achievement as we only had 7 people entered.

• Catriona came 2nd in the 100m Women's race - 14:09 secs
• Andrew and Alice came 2nd in the three-legged race
• We won the 4x100m relay and Goodgym Relay!

What a result!

The other bit of news was we’re going for dinner at Wagamama after my last run next week. If you fancy joining us for some grub, RSVP here.

So our task for the evening was to put up posters in shops near Hammersmith tube. This was to promote Fulham Good Neighbours’s Parson’s Green Fair on 7th July. We also, used the opportunity to hand out flyers about Acknowledging Youths - a social enterprise recruitment agency for disadvantaged youths and adults.

Tom lead the poster team down Hammersmith high street and managed to have better success that last week. Justine and Catriona each lead a group handing out flyers at Hammersmith shopping centre. I think it was a relief to the flyering teams when 7.35pm came around as they’d found it pretty hard work trying to give away the flyers.

By 7.40pm all the teams gathered at St Peter’s Church to warm up and go for a nice run. From here we came out passed the Apollo and down to Hammersmith Bridge. From the bridge we turned left down the towpath. After 1.5km we stopped for an out and back exercise.

Splitting the group into two, both groups had to run our and back for a set amount of time. The time went down and up. We did this as a pyramid:

• 30 seconds in 3rd gear (brisk jogging out) and then 30 secs in 4th gear (running now, hard to talk) back.
• 20 seconds - out in 4th gear, back in 5th (sprinting)
• 10 seconds - Same
• 20 second - same
• 30 seconds - out in 3rd, back in 4th

Once everyone had got their breath back after this exercise, we stopped a passer by to take a nice group photo by the river. It was from here that the football manic kicked back in as we ran back to base. We could hear the cheers from people in pubs over the river - cue frantically looking at phones. England had scored. Then again on the bridge cheers erupted once again and vans were honking.

After we arrived back at the gym we went through a cool down stretches and then the runners scattered to watch the last of the match. It’s clear from our WhatsApp group we had a lots of our runners watching the match.

Until next week, happy running.

This week 19 runners ran much further than 1km and all deserve a medal.

With the eagerly anticipated Goodgym Olympics only 3.5 days away, it dominated the weekly news briefing and some of the night’s agenda. 7 runners from H&F are signed up for represent our area at the weekend. And on this group run we were all going to give the Goodgym 1km Time Trial a go (more on that later).

After the news and task briefing, we headed off on the 3km run towards Fulham Broadway Tube station. Here we met with Chris from Fulham Good Neighbours, who’d asked us to hand out leaflets and pin up posters in shops nearby to promote Parson’s Green Fair on 7th July. We we’re also handing out leaflets at the same time for Acknowledging Youths - a recruitment organisation for disadvantaged youths and adults.

This task took some bravery from the Goodgymers, getting them to hand out leaflets to passersby and chat to the public about the two organisations and others asking shops to have the poster up in the shop. With a good chunk of leaflets handed out and posters put up, we grabbed a school photo outside the tube station and then headed off to Lille Rec.

Once at Lillie Rec we got ready to do the Goodgym 1km Time trial. This is an element of the Olympics open to all Goodgymers and could win you a medal. All the runners had to do was run 1km and upload the run to Strava with the hashtag #GGOlympics2018. Two laps around the park took us to 1.09km so the results below would be a bit faster for the actually 1km. The results I have are below:

Sarah W - 4.58 Catriona - 4.33 Tom C - 4.50 Chi - 4.11 Ellie - 5.40 Polly - 4.29 Meteki - 4.28 Johnny - 4.54 Catherine - 5.18 Helena - 5.38 Luis 4.00

Well done everybody!