On the week of Valentines Day Ealing was filled with love as 11 of us ran to help do some tidying at The Log Cabin children’s charity!

One of our favourite places to visit on our group runs, The Log Cabin provides a setting where children and young people with additional needs or disabilities can socialise, grow and have fun alongside their mainstream.

A cheesy start to proceedings

After meeting at base we started with a few hip opening exercises whilst discussing our favourite type of cheese. Laurianne and I pondered on our pre vegan life filled with Morbier and Brie whilst others talked of their love of all things cheesy. A brief talk about the latest GoodGym happenings, which are all listed up on the website and we were off on our run down to Northfields.

Barking mad

This week’s task was to rearrange some potentially hazardous and climbable logs, sweep the playground and rake over the sand pit and bark. Everyone distributed themselves across the site and got stuck straight in with the mix of tasks!

The logs were quickly tackled to make more even and less appealing the clamber over whilst others were a sweeping success over the playground. The bark however left us potentially well... barking up the wrong tree! In the dark we struggled to differentiate between the leaves and the wood chips but we did our best to even it all out and remove a large amount of the fallen leaves in the process!

Chair force one!

We finished up with a quick strength circuit involving lots of single leg exercises (which on first glance looked quite appealing as it partly involves sitting on a chair), however this sit down is not relaxing! We did lots of single leg chair sits and leg extensions as well as a mix of lunges and jump squats. After working our way through the 4 stations I think we’d all identified a few balance issues to need to work on! Luckily all those exercises are really easy to do at home without any equipment, well maybe a chair...

After all that hard work, a jog back and a quick stretch I think we all deserved more than a sit down, time for a lie down!

With the weather much kinder than of late, last night 13 GoodGymers met to help Cultivate London with some woodwork tasks down at their site in Acton!

Two new runners in the mix last night with Tom and Annamaria joining us for the first time, big welcome to them!

A pallet-able task indeed!

Our task last night was to help the wonderful West London social enterprise, Cultivate London, break down, de-nail and sand pallets to be used in their community gardens sites. They will be used for loads of great projects including creating a fruit & veg stall, potting benches, recycling stations and vertical salad walls! As this is a task we love to help with regularly, we thought it would be fun for us to start tallying the slats we process so that we have a target to aim for each time we visit.

Free therapy!

With the task set, everyone got to work hammering away trying to get out the pesky nails, some of which were very stubborn to remove! Once we had a good hoard we set a team to work to start sanding them down to be used in the final product. We all agreed it was an excellent upper body workout and a great way to come a de-stress if you've had a hard day, free therapy for all! Time for the final count and we managed to get 103 pallets de-nailed and made a good start on the sanding process too, now the number to beat for next time is set!

All the single leg squats, all the single leg squats...

Once back at base we did a but of focusing on the ABC's of running, that's agility, balance and co-ordination. Even those who have been running for a long time (myself very much included!) sometimes lack strength in this area so I went through a few exercises you can sneak into your everyday life or tag onto the beginning or end of a run. Completing just a few of these whenever you can could make a big difference to your running! Running is very much a single leg sport, so to really target these exercises for running just do everything on one leg, it's much harder but forces you to really work on the balance and co-ordination instead of just strength!

• Single leg squats
• Single leg calf raises
• Single leg dead lifts
• Single leg clams

With that we were done and dusted and headed to the pub to celebrate a super successful January Challenge where we completed 132 good deeds, had 2 members join the 100 club, one member join the 50 club and ran nearly 1500km between us in Ealing alone! Special mention to Jenni who completed 16 good deeds in January and Michael who completed 13, that's a lot of extra GoodGyming! But overall a MASSIVE thank you to everyone who got involved in any way over the past month, we couldn't make all these amazing things happen without you! If you're keen to see all the heroes leader boards and see how you're doing in the mix, you can check it out here.