4 volunteers helped at Slough Outreach Charity Shop.

Mary our task Owner got us to put all clothing in size order and baggged / labelled then shelved! Lots of donations sorted around 12 bags and 5 boxes. Mary and Shin are very greatful for todays help and happy for anyone to pop down if they like to help.

Look out for the next session soon.

This morning Nisha, Pam and I spent an hour helping Slough Outreach with donated Asian wear fashion items! commonly referred to as 'suits'...

When Shin told me about the task I knew I had the right person signed up! What doesn't Nisha know about Asian fashion??? She's our glam Bollywood Queen!

So the task was to sort through all the donated lenga's; salwar kameez; dress suits; suits; sari's and general party sharty items into 3 piles...

• Hang with pride and sell for a fiver;

• Bargain bucket good to go but missing an item for 3 quid;

• Long lost love not worth keeping so lets give to rag.

In our best 'market trader' accents we got to work...

Classy is not what you wear... It's how you carry yourself

Some of the donated items were of immaculate condition and a real bargain at a fiver... we hope some lucky locals pick these items up!

Within one hour we had sifted through 2 big boxes of clothes and labelled them accordingly!

So from drab to fab we did our job!

Tonight we helped Slough Outreach with a sorting task of the items that they would distribute to their homeless community. The Hub was looking amazing now with tables for sorting items and a full shelfing system.

We met at the task location and three of us headed out for a walk around the block before heading back to the Slough Outreach Hub to start the task. It was great to have Jenni join us for a task.

Shin wanted some big bags unpacked, sorted into items (such as gloves, snoods, socks etc ) and re packed into crates so that when he wanted to take them out on his outreach visits it would be easier for him to find the items.

So that's what we did...and I think Shin was crateful for the sorting!

Peter had a special task. One of putting an MDF table together...and we knew if antone can he can!

It was a short but swift task tonight but we are back there on Friday morning to sort through the donated Indian clothes.

What a busy month we have had. Tonight's session was the last of our Monday group sessions in the January Challenge...the challenge where we set ourselves a target number of good deeds to achieve and a target number of km's to run/walk. The only clause - you have to do a good deed in January for your good deeds to count and have your Strava connected to GoodGym for your km's to count - got it?

Sadly I couldn't make tonight's session at Slough Outreach Hub as I was feeling poorly but I knew I had a strong team on who would welcome our fairly new members Adam and Vineet and take plenty of photos for the report (they didn't disappoint).

The task tonight was to shift the toys and clothes around to create more usable space and unpack more donated bags into piles. Thank you to Ruth ,Sutyee, Jen, Sandy, Vineet and Adam for getting stuck in on this task.

So I mentioned our targets...let's see what we were supposed to achieve by end January

55 Good Deeds and 750km's distance covered

Now lets see how our January actually went:-

Reed all about it

We had Jen over at BBWOT on Sunday channelling her inner efforts to create a water way, raking and removing old reeds

Keeping it clean at Salt hill park, we had a litter pick session booked in for every Sunday to help keep our 'adopt a place' clean and tidy. With all our environmental cleans this month at Salt Hill and Black Park we tallied a total of 24 bags of rubbish! Not bad, just sad that each Sunday we kept finding more and more rubbish in the car park!

We had some guaRUNteed fun every Sunday too with the team from Salt Hill junior parkrun as we helped them throughout January with cheerleading, safeguarding, timekeeping, scanning and lets not forget Ricky's most epic Funnel Manager duties. In all my time in supporting parkrun I've never seen anything like it!

We were blinded by colours at Thames Hospice as we helped sort through colour trends...who'd have thought it would be so hard deciding if something is grey, blue or purple!

We had bags of fun as we've helped Slough Outreach on quite a few occasions this month. They have recently set up their new Hub in Cippenham and as much as Shin has been grateful of our help, we have been even more grateful for an indoor task (especially during the stormy cold days).

When a task owners asks for 'lots of volunteers' we do not disappoint! Our biggest turnout this month was at a session helping Not Just A Store with a pet shop area set up and sweep n' mop of the upstairs space. A team of 15 can really get a job done very quickly!

So that's all our tasks this month - we'd like to thank Shin, Alice and Kate, May, Salt Hill Run Directors Team, BBOWT team and our council/grounds teams for all our tasks this month. You've helped us in our challenge more than you know!

How many km's is a MILE-stone?

At the beginning of the month I shared the GoodGym Heroes leaderboard with the team..I think it helped gee everyone on in order to achieve their next half century or century milestone. This is how it went

• Pam reached 350.....soon followed by;

• Sara with 250....next up was;

• Manjit with 750... and last but not least;

• Ricky hit 100!

We are close to a few more big ones! Let's give Jen and Sut Yee a cheer and motivate them to get to their 400th's and Agnia get her 50th!

The Empire Strides Back

So let's talk Strava.. you get people like Ricky, me, Pam, Helen, Jen, Sara and me again who literally log all our runs/walks on Strava (as the saying goes, 'if it's not on Strava then it didn't happen')....then you get people like Nisha, Sandy, Ruth and Sut who always make such an effort over the January Challenge to log all their activities so that their km's count towards our total.

Kudos, Kudos, Kudos

There is no way we can talk about January without giving some shout outs..

Firstly, to Sandy and Ruth - who have literally attended every session listed (that they could physically attend!). Sandy, by the end of the month will have attended 14 sessions and Ruth 12... A round of applause please

Secondly, to our task force team of Jen, Sara and Helen who have not only logged or led sessions but also attended sessions in Windsor and Maidenhead (Jen and Sara)

Thirdly, to all of our new attendees this month (I've never heard my emails ping so much with another notification of new members!, but a special shout out to those who attended a session - Adam, Ryan, Vineet, Theresa and Sheena

Fourthly, to our neighbours (everybody needs good neighbours) Windsor and Maidenhead team for attending sessions in Slough...Juli, Nick, Sheila, Claire and Georgetta

And FINALLY... to each regular member who helped us achieve a certain number of good deeds in January... A huge round of applause to - Mehdi, Nisha, Hamid, Jean, Peter, Maya, Gauri, Pam, Sara, Agnija, Clare, Sara, Sandy, Ruth, Devajani, Ricky, Sut Yee, Harsha, Ciaran, Helen, Jen, Abdulaziz, Ali and of course me!!

Drum Roll Please

At the beginning of this report (hope you are still with me!) I said we had a target of 55 good deeds and 750km's to achieve....well I can now reveal that our current tally as of Monday 29th Jan is

126 Good Deeds and 871 KM's covered

And we still have 2 more days to go!

How absolutely awesome is that?? Doesn't mean we can hibernate now for February...let's keep the momentum going

My absolute thanks to you all. Humbled to have such a great team.

Well we weren't quite trolley dollies more like well oiled machine of super efficient ladies on a mission to get the job done!

Shin asked us to sort the back wall area that was full of toys, household items, books, dvd's and odds n' sods

We quickly got into action with crates for items then bag by bag we unpacked them all and sorted them into piles!

Toys were the biggest give aways! They had the trolley all to themselves.

Within 50 minutes we had cleared the whole area!

Well done team.

And an extra well done to me for achieving my 750th good deed today

We returned to Slough Outreach's community hub shop for another clothes sorting task.

On Friday we made good headway by clearing a mountain of donated bags into 3 piles and we had managed to find the floor again by the end of that task. Tonight we were repeating what we did on Friday however we did not think the mountain could have grown that fast in just 3 days..yet it had!

We met directly outside the shop with the intention of doing a run before we started the task. Did you feel the freeze today?? So did we! With Hamid, Mehdi and Ali arriving super early, I watched them doing football style drills to keep warm! Hamid had created a star shaped warm up which on arrival new member Ryan plus Ruth and Gauri all started doing. With 20 mins still to go before Shin was arriving we decided to get some walking km's in by going for a round robin loop around the shops. We managed to squeeze in 1.6km before starting the task!

Once inside we did a task brief on what went in which bag.

• Bags for rags;

• Bags for the homeless and;

• Table top of shop saleable items

Oh and a bag for summer clothes

Quickly we got to work. We managed to get the hang of deciphering the good from the bad (via the sight test) and the odour to the odourless (via the sniff test).

Great to have Ryan join us on his first session and Ali returning for his second! Thanks for coming along guys.

Slowly yet surely, we watched the mountain melt down to a small hill to a valley of emptiness! You could see the floor again! Superb efforts by everyone.

We are only in week one of our January challenge and so far we have already clocked up 34 good deeds! Keep up the great work...we should totally smash our target this year.