October, 9 runners, a grey morning, a sunny day, some talking to do and some litter to pick.

We met up for a #runandtalk session on what started as a sunny evening and soon dropped down a wet and somewhat wintery session. After a bit of a task let down, we jogged around the Rye getting nice and warmed up whilst welcoming Ellen to her first ever GoodGym experience.

Then it was into teams, gloves on, black bin bags in hand and a direction each to go in to litter pick. The idea being to clean up the area where we live as well as have a chance to chat to each other.

Shoes, balls and cans later, we rendezvoused and it was time for our regular time trial. 720 metres against ourselves. There's a regular route we use and we had already recce'd it during our warm up. Amazing first effort for some and repeat effort for others.

EVERYONE matched or bettered their time

Time to work you harder, and that we did....

5 exercises as the heavens opened. Did someone say #nationalburpeeday? Burpees, mountain climbers, complete abs, squat jumps and planks climbs... 10 of each, 9 of each, 8 of each.... I could go on but it'll seem never-ending. You get the idea and everyone kept each other going. Despite the burn, despite the sweat and the rain.

Such an amazing effort could only be rewarded with... a gentle jog home. We stretched off, we dried off and washed our hands clean of anything untoward.

Running, doing good, having a chat and getting fit check.

Check you all out! What a wonderful social again - you do make these brilliant! 43 of you turned up in Islington this month to celebrate the heroes of September and because you're all a cheeky lot you managed to celebrate my birthday too - thanks so much to all of you and apologies again for a slightly late drinks report! To the details:

Heroes

Everyone's favourite Redbridge-er James Poole topped the distance charts with a whopping 467.3 km, Nico from Hackney was second with 441 km on the dot and everyone's favourite French-man Axel Manzano was third with 413.6 km!

Bristol are still very much the cheeriest in the land and Paul Becker was top of the charts for giving out the love with 527 cheers, he faced stiff competition from Sarah Moore though, who was just pipped with 526!

Those cheers went out to everyone's favourite American - Danica Priest! Danica couldn't make it to drinks but had a fantastic month smashing up all kinds of races, breaking her half marathon PB and generally being awesome - give her cheer she definitely deserves more!

To the big one, the theme for September was clearly sharing as we had a three way tie at the top - with 13 good deeds apiece Kike, Jack and Frances topped the good deed charts, in a close 'second' (joint fourth) were Danica, David Guest and Tom Hunter! Fantastic guys!

In everyone's favourite new feature new kids on the block Hammersmith and Fulham were the GoodGym area with the most new runners last month winners - 40 new runners last month - congratulations! Tower Hamlets and Wandsworth keeping them in check in a close joint 3rd!

News

In news we celebrated the races of the year and some fantastic recent performances :

• GGxCardiff - The final GG Race of the year - it was a fantastic day with some fantastic results!

• GGxBerlin - Rodney, Patrick Luong, Tom Benson and myself ran Berlin!

• GGxGNR - Frances took herself north and completed the Great North Run

And many more but I think if you missed it you missed it! Apologies to any who haven't been mentioned in this report - you were on the night!

Finally, watch out for announcements from GG Race Team - our six races for the year have been chosen and are as follows:

• Larmer Tree Races - Mara/20m/Half/10m 11th/12th March

• Riga - Marathon/Half/10k/6k - 13th/14th May

• Bath Two Tunnels - Half/10k/5k -10th July

• Race the Train, Tywyn - 14 miles - 19 August

• New Forest - Marathon/Half/10k/5k - 10th September

• Oxford Half - October (usually second weekend)

Right...enough of that - what you all actually came for...oh yes:

International Pun of the Month

Somehow we had 19 on the long-list - but i got it down to five and with 18 out of 32 votes on the night the winners were...

A litter less conversation, a litter more action from GG Lewisham!!!

Congratulations!

Right, I'm outta here again - til next month - 3rd November - we're back on tour and we're hitting the orient!

Cheers,

Pritesh

p.s. thanks as ever to John for additional photos!

4 awesome Greenwich runners ran over 5km to spread the word about the Big Bike Ride in aid of the Greenwich & Bexley Community Hospice

Last night we were joined by Stacey who came on a few runs earlier in the year and is now back woohoo! Welcome back Stacie! It was lovely to meet you! We also had the lovely Simona back after a few weeks off and brilliant Ben and his head torch!

We did a little warm up and got going relatively quickly as we had a lot of leaflets to get through! Even if we were to only deliver half of them it would have been a success but we had quite a bit of time so I was hopeful! So we set off towards Maze Hill station. There is a good cluster of residential streets around there and the plan was to hit as many as possible in the 45 minutes we had. So off they went, running between each house.. AMAZING! Good interval training right there!

There were some pretty annoying post boxes. Those ones with the brushes in are a real pain and the ones really low down on the floor as well. Ben and I got stuck on the high side of the road for a good 5 minutes with each door having a flight of stairs leading up to it! What a workout! And then the houses with the gates... urgh! #postmanproblems.

After 15 minutes everyone's flyer pile was noticeably smaller, and the end was in sight! Just a few more houses to go! Simona struck gold with a block of flats with all of the postboxes on the outside.. Nice one! A few minutes later and they were all cleared! Amazing! We took a group photo and headed back for the fitness session.

Even though we were running and walking the whole time, it was at quite a nice chilled pace so we finished off by a little track workout! We did 5 sets of 30 seconds at 80-90% effort and 30 seconds rest in between and the idea was to run further round the track each time. We used the quad back at the college which made a pretty good makeshift track! This is a pretty hard workout but everyone absolute nailed it!

Really well done guys, hopefully the event will have lots of attendees now! Thanks so much for all your hard work and see you next week!