We had a turn out of 27 last night, which was very impressive given England were busy playing football in the World Cup. The whole night was set to the OOOHs and AHHHHHs of pub gardens, shops, houses and restaurants, all glued to the screens.

Not us though. Brixton Windmill gardens are soon to receive a mystery shopper to judge them on their Green Flag status. One group took a nice short, quiet route to the Windmill, whilst John H led a group on a longer run around Brockwell park. On arrival, there were lots of jobs to do. We needed to use the hoes to neaten up all of the edging on the paths. We also had to pull out weeds from the edges of the playground too. George C went off to water the plants and some people did some handy litter picking. After 40 minutes of hard work, it was all looking so much better. Good luck Brixton Windmill, we hope you get your award!

London borough visitor Chi ran a short but horrific abs session involving 3 minutes of pain and discomfort. My abs will thank him in the end. Then Jess ran a much calmer yoga session. Once we were all stretched out we ran slowly back to base down an unusually quiet Brixton hill. After some stretches we got back home in time for penalties, which is really the only good bit of football. Hooray!

Well on June 30th 2018 many things were happening it was National Paddy Day of Nepal, Edmonton Royals beat Toronto Nationals by 8 wickets in the 20Twenty and the Nation sat down to watch Nick Knowles hosts the quiz for people who can't resist a list in another cracking episode of Who Dares Wins. Meanwhile in leafy Hampstead Heath Park dog walkers, parents and local residents were making reports of strange behaviour, incidents included lots of cheering, signs of red thunder, folks running with eggs on spoons and a sea of flags. Not only was the behaviour incredibly positive they were also plying spectators with these delicious homemade cakes, what these folks were witnessing was Olympic fever GoodGym style. So as reported, June 30th 2018 was the 2nd ever GoodGym Olympics. The day brought together 24 different GoodGym area, ranging from Lambeth, the South West to Colchester. The events on offer were a range of events varied from the egg and spoon, 400m to the elimination race. The events were varied but the competition was not and every race brought a bigger and bigger sea of cheers, particular highlights for me was the epic finish of the elimination mile between George Bright and Richard Dowling, Folks flipping pancakes, listening to our two wonderful commentators, the GoodGym relay madness, and human tunnel finish that welcomed the final 5,000m runners brought a tear to my eye that did. Not only were the runners being judged but we also had a torch parade before to show off each boroughs creative sides and although it was a fierce competition. All in all there were 18 different events which each borough their own brilliant moments. This year to even the field I placed the areas in two different leagues due to levels of runners from each area. So up for grabs was the Hunter-Sidhu Shield and the Kerry-Barnard Cup named after our two fantastic commentators, John Hunter and James Kerry-Barnard.

I could write about this for hours however I think picture would do a far better so I will leave some of Tom Hunters and Sarah Rajabalee fanatic shots up and will post a link to more when they come available.

These events don’t work without a band of helpers and I have to say a massive thanks to all the all members of taskforce and GoodGym who have gave up their time to volunteer, help time and marshal on the day and general mean that I didn’t have to do too much, it was amazing there are just too many of you to write down but again thank you it was really a truly lovely and special day, thank you all and here’s to next year. If you have any feedback please let me know on tomb@goodgym.org. I will be putting together a committee of people to help out and organise next years, if you would like to be considered please drop me a email too.

Nice one, Tom

Race Results please click here on the link below. Please note we did not record heat times and some events do not have times or positions as these got put away during the tidy up. Please accept my apologies if this affects you.

Here are the rest of the results we https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WR3tnGIEXq6ylA-JhZEduRuGKiW5SgD4alhfHJqJFWY/edit#gid=0

Here were the final results

Kerry-Barnard Cup

AREA	PLACE
Lambeth	1st
Wandsworth	2nd
Camden	3rd
Hackney	4th
Lewisham	5th
Islington	6th

Hunter-Sidhu Shield

AREA	PLACE
Greenwich	1st
Brighton	2nd
Hammersmith and Fulham	3rd
Colchester	4th
Southwark	5th
Barnet	6th
Hounslow	7th
Tower Hamlets	8th
Haringey	9th
Croydon	10th
Bristol	11th
Brent	12th
Newham	13th
King's College London	14th
Redbridge	15th
Westminster	16th
Waltham Forest	17th
Ealing	18th

Torch winners: Big shout out to team Islington for their Stella effort combining biscuits with a fantastic touch. Highly commended goes to Tower Hamlets, Bath and Brent. Well done everyone.

Another lovely sunny June evening and - as the last Tuesday of the month - the evening kicked off with the Shit Prize of the Month (SPOTM) award. This month Lavinia was awarded the coveted prize, which this month consisted of a Sky reusable mug with the phrase "Plastic is not fantastic." Not only does Lavinia now possess a truly unique and remarkable mug that will be the envy of all her friends, she can also save 50p when ordering a hot beverage from many popular coffee outlets across the length of Britain. CONGRATS!

The whole group headed 1.5km to Myatt's Field park. We met Helen, who is the park manager. She had lots of jobs for us and we started off with a nice history lesson. It turns out this lovely Victorian park was designed by Fanny Wilkinson - yes that's right, THE Fanny Wilkinson, one of the first professional women landscape gardeners and an active campaigner for women’s suffrage - you know the one. Hooray.

How great that a Victorian lady designed this park! Said everyone.

Helen was very organised and had A LIST, which we all deeply approved of. She split the group into 4. Group 1 went to disentangle some very tangly bindweed from some lovely lavender plants.

This is the best smelling task I have ever done! Said Tess, as she stood amidst the lavender.

Group 2 had lots of mops and buckets and wipey things and they cleaned a beautiful Victorian glass house from top to bottom. Group 3 pruned some roses that were quite dead and didn't have any leaves left on them and did some weeding.

I think you mean PETALS! Said Lucy.

Yes we did mean petals - and for all your other gardening needs, just ask Lucy. Group 4 took to the park armed with litter pickers and bags and did a huge clean up. Sadly in the summer months many people choose to enjoy the free space of the park but leave it in a right old mess after. Great work to the team for sorting it out but really, come on people, tidy up after yourselves!

After this we all took part in the GoodGym Olympics 1km challenge. JKB designed a pattern within the park and the rest did a speedy lap around the outside. There was some really good running and impressive times. Well done everyone. And with that it was back to Papa's for stretches then home.

It was another lovely evening and we had more lovely new people. Which is quite amazing and lovely. We congratulated Frances on reaching her 100th run with a party popper. Well done Frances!

After a nice warm up we split into two groups. One group went with Katie directly to Agnes Riley Gardens about 3.5km away up some long straight roads. It was quite warm, phew, but we got there and they were quite surprised by how many we were. Little did they know (until Katie immediately told them) that there was another group of almost the exact same size, led by John, that was on the way, they had just taken a longer route.

There was a range of saws and loppers and people got to work quite literally chopping down some large trees as well as pruning some fairly ferocious shrubbery. Some others took to neatening up the bed edges and even more did some lovely watering. A gang with wheelbarrows and trugs collected woodchip from over there and brought it over here. It was wonderfully organised (yet of course safe) chaos. We smashed the glass ceiling by insisting that they didn't need 'four strong men' to cut down trees and in fact showed them that a wonderfully diverse group of capable people could in fact achieve the same thing.

John took half the group and did some truly tough exercises with them involving some horror of a burpee involving a sit up. And he's relaxed having just come back from his honeymoon imagine if he was having a bad day lads?

With 5 minutes to go we were dragging the aforementioned ferocious shrubbery to a different resting place and the big tree branches had been chopped into smaller ones. The cut grass was taken over to the compost heap and you really would never have known we had been there except for the improved look of the place and the mixture of shock and awe on the faces of the lovely people who run the gardens.

'They came, they saw, they massacred', they said. Which was in fact a good thing.

And with that we ran home again, did some stretches and went our separate ways. EXCELLENT WORK!