19 turned out to be the perfect number of people for last night’s task to help St. Mary’s get their ivy under control!

In honour of The Great British Bake off returning to our screens we did a quick warm up with a chat about our favourite cakes whilst welcoming four new runners into the fold. Great to have Chris, Lizzy, Zoe and Sonam with us for their first GoodGym run! Now about those cakes, sticky toffee pudding (is it a cake or a pudding?!) and lemon drizzle were clear favourites which was good news as Alex had baked a lemon cake for the group to enjoy after after the run. Something to work for!

The long or short of it

We had two route options last night, Chris led a lovely longer park route and Jenni led the direct route to the task. Thanks to Harvey for back marking the longer route while I led a walk run on the shorter option. Tell your friends, we have options for everyone!

Arriving at the task we were met by Vicar Steve who was all set up for us to get straight to it and the task today was all about battling the ivy to the front of the building.

What lies beneath...

Many hands make light work and we were soon uncovering grave stones that hadn’t seen day light for some time, along with pulling back ivy from the walls and trees in the garden. It’s a tough job as ivy really does like to hang on for dear life but by the time we had left the difference was amazing!

Raking it in

The last job was to scoop up all the ivy and deposit it for composting, after initially struggling to collect it all by hand the magic rake appeared to make the job a whole lot easier!

’That would have taken me 10 hours worth of work on my own!’

As Steve pointed out that’s a lot of time and an overwhelming job for one person but with us there it’s all mopped up in one night. Go team!

We finished up by using the church gardens for our fitness session where we worked in pairs to practice some good high knee form with resistance bands and some partner core exercises too.

After all the hard work we had definitely earned a trip to the pub so after a jog back we headed to one of our favourite Ealing pubs and shared some baked treats. We also toasted to Alex’s 100 good deed and Michelle’s 50 good deed achievements from last month!

See you all next time!

Wow, 28 of you apparently love a good leaflet stuffing session on a Tuesday night!

We were joined by 5 brand new GoodGymers, a big welcome to Karina, Rachel, Esther, Raja and Ehtasham. Be sure to give them all your GoodGym love and head over to their profiles for some cheering action!

We were also lucky to have new GoodGym Trainers Rebecca and Nicola in the midst, they did a wonderful job warming everyone up before the session and led the group to the task beautifully! Be sure to head to Warwick & Leamington Spa and Crewe for their area launches very soon!

Tonights task was all about helping our wonderful local event, Ealing Half Marathon, with some essential prep work ahead of the event next month. We had thousands of leaflets to stuff in envelopes ready to send to local residents about the road closures on the day of the race so it was a good job we had such a huge crowd ready to get stuck in!

Get stuffed!

We were hosted by the lovely Foresters pub in Northfields for the task and they'd been so kind as to book out the whole bar for us to use, good job as there were A LOT of boxes and A LOT of people to squeeze in! Everyone split into teams of folders and stuffers and got well... STUFFING AWAY!

We worked relentlessly for nearly 45 minutes however we may have bitten off more than we could chew with this one as the piles were going down as much as we'd hoped... We had a few hacks along the way which helped but after working until the very minute we had to admit defeat... for now! We're looking to set up a few community missions to finish the job over the next week, so watch this space.

With that it was time to head back and say farewell for the week but I just want to finish by saying what a wonderful group we had tonight, a real mix of new members, regulars who come week in week out as well as some returning faces which is always a delight to see. We had walkers, runners, joggers. Pregnant participants, runners returning from injury and those who are new to it all. It's great to see us all working together to get out there, do a bit of exercise and help our local community!