What a night! By far the wettest and chilliest night of 2018, yet 20 heroes turned up to run to two tasks that needed our support.

Lucy and Tom B led the walking contingent, whilst Beth led the runners, to Grove Adventure Playground. Here's what Beth said about it:

Our fabulous five ran and walked over to Grove Adventure playground and were met by a very grateful Anthea who had the heating on ready to warm us up. We started off by sweeping the floor before Tom and Lucy gave it a good mop and Paul did a great job of cleaning the toilets. After that three of us moved on to the job of paint scraping. Thanks to some over eager corporate volunteers some of the paint from the door frame had got on to the windows so we scraped it off and gave them a brush. Before we set off Anthea took a group photo which made Lucy a bit anxious that we would ruin her clean floor by standing on it. On the run back any drying out that had happened was undone by a car driving past a huge puddle and splashing us but we carried on knowing we could make a start on tasting the week’s baked goods before the other group got back.

The rest of us headed to the Crisis charity shop near Elephant and Castle. Katie's glasses immediately steamed up, rendering her a fairly useful navigator and Tom H's phone was playing silly buggers. This meant we went a slightly meandering route that was thwarted by some locked park gates. On arriving a little late to this brilliant shop, we got stuck in with steaming, labelling, hoovering and neatening up the clothes on the shop floor. The staff were delighted that we had saved them some morning jobs.

We ran back in two groups on a much simpler route and enjoyed some of Beth and Paul's delicious bakes before heading home to warm up. Well done Lambeth!

Lambeth News

• Saturday is the first Cross Country fixture of the year! Mud, fun running and beer (afterwards). What's not to like! If you're part of the GoodGym RaceTeam we need you at Claybury. Sign up here.

• The October long run will be 19.3km along the Capital ring - East Finchley to Hackney Wick. Get some kms in with goodgym cheer and food after! Sign up here.

• Hello and welcome to Lisa and Jessica who joined us for the first time last night!

• Next week Katie is back and there'll be two tasks again - one to spread woodchip at Brixton Orchard and one to finish off digging at Clapham Common. Sign up here.

That's enough of the business

Two tasks go to war

Last night we split into two, one group headed the 1km to Wyck Gardens, one headed the longer 4km to Crisis in Elephant and Castle.

Here's what happened at Wyck Gardens, in the words of Beth Hoskins:

We planted about 10 plants which was a multi-step process: Dig a hole, put some compost in the hole, put the plant in, more compost, water, put cardboard on top (to stop the weeds), cover with woodchip, water some more. Done.

A tidy job!

Group number two had various jobs to do at Crisis - sorting DVDs, organising bookshelves, tagging and hanging donations, steaming new donations, hoovering, mopping, dusting and cleaning. Blimey! We swarmed in full of enthusiasm and Jordon got us to work. We very nearly finished tagging a huge pile of donations, got over halfway through the DVD box (there are some corkers in there, I highly recommend a visit!) and had the floors squeaky clean (although some of us accidentally walked over the freshly mopped floors on our way out...woops!). One group was sent back at 20.00 at a more leisurely pace and five(ish) minutes later the rest of the group set off at a speedy pace. We finished the run with a game of chase the hare. George was our hare and didn't get caught! Next time I won't give you so much of a head start...!

After a stretch we all indulged in this week's baked goods - biscuits and welsh snails (don't ask).

Thank you for having me Lambeth it was a blast!

Lucy J