12 GoodGym-ers ran 5k to help C4WS Camden make beds for the homeless or 16 ran 10k to help in the Abbey Community Centre garden!

With regular trainer Paul still in Kenya getting even faster at running, it was Frances’ turn to take the helm at GoodGym Camden this week. We had 28 runners, including Enrica, Heather and Amy who all came along for the first time!

Frances led a group to the American Church in London, helping with our regular task of making the beds for the homeless shelter they provide. We got it done in record time – less than 10 minutes! As it would take around an hour for the staff to do it themselves, they really appreciated the help as always.

Record times!

With the task done, we headed to Granary Square for a fitness session. This week we split into two halves for a group fartlek session, each heading around the square in a different direction. Fartlek is Swedish for speed play, and basically means playing around with different paces – like an interval session but more fun. The twist was that each person in the group got a chance to pick the pace and how long the group did that pace for. Would you give your fellow runners a sprint, or a nice relaxing recovery pace? Both groups did a great job, covering three laps of Granary Square and mixing up the speeds nicely.

Then we headed back to base for a nice stretch and awaited Pritesh’s group, who had been on a 10k run to Abbey Community Centre for some gardening.

Abbey Community Centre

Pritesh and his merry band of 15 GoodGymers went 'long' this week and headed over to Abbey Community Centre in the heart of Kilburn. It was a lovely night for a run and despite the hard slog the view that greeted the runners at the top of Primrose Hill was certainly worth it. The challenge with the trip to Abbey is maximising time, the time it takes to run meant only twenty minutes were available to do the task. Laura from the community centre explained to everyone what Abbey does and then showed us the work that needed to be done in the garden. We split in to two groups, one group taking on the pesky weeds between the paving stones and the other turning over a flower bed so that the community centre members could get some planting done in the next week. Everyone worked super hard and Laura was extremely grateful and impressed with how much we got done. With that we said our goodbyes and then headed back to base before a good stretch after that long run. Great running and tasking everyone and thank you to Rosie who led the run back!

Lovely to see you all, hope to see you back again soon, you can sign up for next week here, Pritesh will be leading in the last week before PB is back!

Don’t forget the next time trial in Regent’s Park on 26th March – in a bit of a twist, it’ll be a handicap race this time!

33 GoodGymers ran between 3-6km, made beds for the homeless and helped Skip Garden!

Thanks and welcome to all the new people that came this week; Chloe, Pierre, Enrica, Joanna, Marium and Emma. We also had a photographer and journalist from Runaway Mag, article and pictures to be released soon.

In the news this week:

1. Tom Benson is organising the GG race team monthly time trial on Sunday in Victoria Park if you want to take part. Full details here.
2. Next week is the GG monthly social, we're on tour down to Lewisham. More details here, it's gonna be good!
3. The BIGGEST TASK of the year is next week helping Grounded Ecotherapy lift and carry cement mix at the Southbank Centre on the Thames. SIGN UP HERE

C4WS Task by Frances:

Frances and Pritesh led 15 GoodGymers back to C4WS to help them make beds for the homeless shelter. It's a quick and simple job for us, but a great help to the volunteers organising the shelter.

Quick & simple

Most of the people in the group were either new to GoodGym, new to the homeless shelter, or in Axel’s case, new to making beds. Everyone got stuck in and made the beds in super-speedy time before we headed over to Granary Square to meet the others – ready for the Time Trial!

Skip Garden Task:

Fifteen of us headed to Skip Garden near Granary Square to help Global Generation. Our tasks this time:

1. Moving planters, pots, tables and bags of soil around the garden. This was like a massive game of jenga.
2. Turn the compost machine and sieve the contents to use as mulch in the garden.

We split into teams, got lots done and rotated the teams - well done everyone! After finishing our 'tasking' Gwen explained about Skip Garden and Global Generation the charity who runs it, here is some of what we found out:

• Existed for 12 years across four different sites in Kings Cross
• The team work with young people in the community to educate them on alternative living
• They keep bees who make lovely honey & there is a HONEY CLUB
• Also they keep chickens who provide lovely eggs for the cafe :)

Fitness:

First off we did a series of strength and conditioning exercises, including squats, press ups, tricep dips and plenty more. We mixed this up with some intervals and balancing exercises.

90 degree angle PLEASE

With both groups now combined we moved onto arm technique. When running your arms are as important as your legs, they are vital for efficiency and power. So to develop our arm technique we got into pairs and practised powering our arms at a 90 degree angle, have an open chest and no crossing of the arms!

Next we moved onto our monthly Time Trial - 880 metres around Granary Square. Everyone did brilliantly! Nice arms! I have a record of everyone's time, if you would like yours please just let me know. I'll be keeping an eye on times over the coming trials and I can keep you updated on your progress.

Sign up for next week here, we are breaking out of Camden and heading to the Southbank Centre to help Grounded Ecotherapy. It's a fantastic task,a really great charity and a big workout - come along and tell your mates too - it'll be a great intro to GoodGym for them!

PB out.

Four of us paid another visit to Ealing Road Baptist Church last night. After a 2.5k jog we met with Roger outside the premises who was wearing a new hat and explained how his wife often hides the hats of his that she doesn't like. I don't know why I included this in the report, it just seems funny :-D

So, to work...

Graham and Alicia set about emptying two large cupboards of various tinned food, packets of pasta, biscuits, tea, a dodgy perfume set and some strange biscuit/cream cheese combination that looked a bit scary.

While at the same time Andy and Simon carried some chairs upstairs and then organised a bookshelf.

As usual we got loads done in a short space of time and had a little while for Roger to offer us various items of food that were unsuitable for the food bank, such as out-of-date mince pies, which we sampled for a bit of fuelling for the journey back.

On the way home we stopped for a mini "leg-buster" challenge. A short lunge walk, followed by five squat jumps up and down a kerb and then repeat twice more. Gets you to just about the point where you don't want to walk any more. Ow.

That's it, I'm off now. Thanks for having me GoodGym Hounslow. It has been great fun and I'll see you at Gunnersbury parkrun on the 4th March

Ana from Wandsworth is taking over next week. Sign up here

Simon