GoodGym Adventure to Barnwood Community Garden – A Night of Fun, Fitness, and Forest Paths

Last night, GoodGym Barnet hit the streets for a session unlike any other! The goal? Make a difference at Barnwood Community Garden, a beautiful green space devoted to connecting people through woodland crafts and Forest Schools. This hidden gem offers people of all ages a place to hone craft skills, enjoy nature, and grow as a community. For us, it was a chance to get outside, work up a sweat, and make some real impact!

We kicked things off with our usual meetup at the Phoenix Cinema, where all but one of us gathered. It was inspiring to see new faces and many others opting to walk, showing GoodGym’s inclusivity in action! To mix things up, we played a quick round of “Two Truths and a Lie” in the cinema foyer, sparking hilarious debates that lasted the whole evening. Rachael’s detective skills were truly tested, especially with the help of her trusty head torch!

After a challenging warm-up, with hill sprints, heel kicks, and crossovers to get our blood pumping, we divided into running and walking groups. George led the runners, taking them on a longer, scenic route, while Paul led the walkers. Along the way, Paul’s group stopped for static squats, building quad strength and some friendly competition. At one point, the walkers challenged the runners to try their squats, which kept spirits high and added some laughs as they raced ahead.

When we finally arrived at the garden, Leo greeted us with a quick briefing on the amazing work Barnwood does, including an inspiring project pairing community mentors over 60 with young people. The night’s task? Laying down fresh woodchip on paths to keep them safe and mud-free for Barnwood’s upcoming Halloween event, complete with pumpkin soup cooked over the open fire!

Jack met us at the venue, despite being on the injured list, as he trains for his marathon. We all pitched in, shoveling and spreading woodchip until the garden looked ready for its Halloween debut. The walkers made an early exit and reached Phoenix just in time to meet up with the runners for a warm-down. Almost everyone stayed afterward to relax, share laughs, and continue the debate over who told the best lies!

This week’s squad of GoodGym heroes:

• Francesco Ruvolo: Braving the autumn heat in a T-shirt!
• Tom: Fast becoming a GoodGym regular and proving his runner’s endurance.
• Jack Da Silva: Cheering us on from the sidelines as he heals for his marathon. Good luck, Jack!
• Rachael Melinek: Walking group back-marker and social media wizard, helping GoodGym spread the word.
• Beattie: Star woodchip shoveler and part of the running crew.
• George Ttoouli: Our fearless running leader!
• Paul Salman: Leading the walkers with strength and skill.
• Lucinda: Opted to walk this time but no stranger to running.
• Hamid: Taking every chance to practice his English and join in.
• Kirsten: First-timer, who we hope will join us again—perhaps in the running group next time?
• Anthony: Another newcomer. Looking forward to having him back for more adventures!

Reflecting on the night, it’s these quirky conversations and shared moments that make GoodGym so unique. Imagine telling your coworkers how you ran through East Finchley, laid woodland paths by night, and debated lies over tea in a cinema lobby. Only at GoodGym! Join us next week for more fun, fitness, and community spirit—walking or running, everyone’s welcome!

Tonight we celebrated Earth Day with a digging task. It was a continuation of what we started last week at St Mary's Farnham Royal Primary School in their learning garden.

Last week we dug up bed 2 and removed as many weeds as we could. This evening we carried on ensuring the bed was weed free and did a little bit more around the strawberry and garlic sections.

We met directly at the task and our task owner Chrissy made sure we were given all the access we needed.

Great to have Firmo and Jason join us on their first task tonight. And Anna on her second task. Hope you enjoyed it and will come back again soon.

It's your bEARTH DAY!

So what exactly is Earth Day?

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. It includes a wide range of events and activities arranged by Earthday.org. Check out their website for more info - Earth Day: The Official Site | EARTHDAY.ORG

Planets vs Plastics

The theme this year for Eath Day is Planet vs Plastics

Did you know?

• Global plastics has reached an estimated 460 million metric tons in recent years;

• It is estimated that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans;

• One million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used a year;

Earthday.org have a goal to reduce plastics by 60% by 2040 (60X40).

At GoodGym we are very active in litter picks and keeping our outdoor spaces clean and clear, we get involved in helping community groups with restoring their nature areas back to useable spaces as well as supporting conservation groups with their projects....but can we do more?

Check out this toolkit for some ideas -

EarthDay-2024-Toolkit-March-12th-Update.pdf

So after all this information on Earth Day 2024 and completing our task this evening, we did a mini fitness session in the playground - after all it's important to keep ourselves active and fit! The team did really well in the circuits based exercises which consisted of ladder exercises; med ball throws and slams; kettlebell swings; cone to cone running and good old fashioned playground hopping and jumping!

We will be sad to see Hamid leave Slough. We hope you will come and visit us and we are always here to help you Hamid so please keep in touch.

And finally….. huge congratulations to Ricky on his London Marathon race yesterday! He smashed it with a new marathon personal best as well as a huge time off his half marathon timing!! And he looked fresh as a daisy when Harsha and I saw him at mile 23(ish) with the GoodGym cheer squad! We are all so proud you!

Next week we will be meeting at Salt hill activity Centre, in Salthill park, Bath Rd, SL1 3SS. Our task is to help Raggy Rd Allotments with their allotment space. We will be walking or running down to the allotments.

This evening we were doing a spot of gardening for St Mary’s Farnham Royal Primary school. The task was to tidy up bed number 2 and get it ready for the children to do some planting. This area of the playground is used by the children as part of their learning garden and like any other garden it needs a bit of TLC.

There was no run for this task as the location of the school didn’t have an accessible road where we could park then run so we made it a ‘make your own way’ session.

But we did have a fitness session lined up!

Great to have Zoe join us on her first Slough session. Thank you for coming along.

And it’s was so so good to see Mehdi return back to this area. His journey from Slough to the Bibby Stockholm barge and back to Hounslow has been a painful one and we have very much have missed having him at the sessions. In the background we had lots of the Slough members petition our local MP for his help in getting Mehdi taken off the barge plus we started an online petition.

I hope all our efforts somehow triggered Mehdi being taken off the barge and bought back closer to us. For this we are very grateful. We even had a rainbow over us tonight celebrating his return.

Easy-Peas-y

With all the rain we’d had recently the task was a nice easy one. Digging up the weeds and turning over the soil was easy peas-y! Nothing beets a bit of gardening. Lucky Peter had bought some ‘adult’ tools but the kiddy sized spades were just as good for us shorter ones!

Within 35 minutes we had completed the task and made it look totally radishing!

Thyme for some fitness!

With kettlebells, med balls and resistance bands as our kit we had 3 sets of 4 exercises on a rep range of 8. Everyone did very well with the root-ine!

Then we finished off with a best out of 5 basketball shots! Hamid and Peter drew at 2 each and went head to head for a final play off!

Ruth took the photo of the night! I never knew I could have flying feet whilst throwing a ball!

Thank you to everyone for coming down tonight to help.

Next week is Earth Day so we will be back at St Mary’s primary school doing something good for the soil!

Be great to see you there!

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions

Back for its ninth year, the Great British Spring Clean is the nations biggest mass-action environmental campaign.

The Great British Spring Clean and Great Big School Clean 2024 will take place from 15 - 31 March, and tonight was our efforts to help as the Slough #LitterHeroes

For Keep Britain Tidy's 70th year we pledged to pick up 70 items in 70 minutes today...and we might even pledge to collect 70 bags till the 31st! #PlatinumPledge

Waste no time

So as Hamid and I went for a 2 lap run of the park, our Dumpster Divas (Jen, Ruth and Agnija) got started on counting their rubbish!

The good news is we didn't find any Retro Rubbish - (rubbish that is years old and still causing harm to our environment today, releasing greenhouse gases as it slowly breaks down in our soil and water, which contributes to the climate crisis)!

What we did find was nappies!, lottery tickets, fast food trash, beer cans and plenty of wet wipes!

We ended the evening having collected 5 bagfuls of rubbish tallying in at over 1000 pieces

We would like to continue with this effort so I have listed a litter pick community mission till the 31st of March - #GetInvolved!

Tonight's task has a theme going through it...and I'll give you a pew to what it is!

When I checked the sign up list last night and only I was signed up, I did have a momentary panic so I sent a little note on the whatsapp group to see if anyone else could join me...luckily both Peter and Sara were able to come along...pew for that.

I knew Leonie (our task owner would be present), so I wasn't too phased if I did have to do the task alone, however it's always good to have some company.

Our meet up point was Upton Court Park at 6.30pm with the option of a walk or run down to the Church. Only Peter met me at the park, the rest of the team made their own way to the Church (on time)...on arrival we did see a few people lingering around the entrance so I personally was very grateful to have Peter and Hamid (who was now with us too) to wait with....a blessing in disguise!

We were soon joined by Devajani so were ready to go inside to see what our task was.

Leonie explained that they had a concert on Sunday and needed some help with sweeping the floors, vacuuming the altar, cleaning the pews and the entrance area....and a little bit of high dusting!

We had a web of laughter as we chatted, caught up on our weekly antics and cracked on with the task in hand.

Peter and Hamid took to the sweeping duties like pro's whilst Sara was on hoovering and Devajani and I took a pew.

It is always amazing how quickly and efficiently we can all work and get the task done. Within 50 minutes we had swept, hoovered and wiped. Then Hamid took the longest duster we have ever seen and cleared away cobwebs that had most likely been hanging around for years! And that's no web of lies! But pew we did it!

I had great eggs-pectations from the team tonight and they didn’t let me down!

We had a nice chilled out task today of filling knitted chicks with eggs for Alexander Devine Hospice and their Big Chick Knit campaign. We needed a nice warm indoor space to do this task and very kindly Clare offered her venue at Stoke Park Trust and as a bonus she invited some of her team to join us.. winner winner chicken dinner!

We are as chick as thieves and wanted to get started on the task as quickly as possible but before we could do that we had to do a warm up of course! So with a nice gentle warm up of walking to lunging to arm swinging we were egg-cited to start.

We had the best table to work on too! One covered in egg like balls also known as a pool table!

Working around the cluck

You better watch your behavior or you’ll get eggs-pelled from the group - actually that would never happen so we worked extra hard to be naughty! Each chick was given a name … egg-stra challenge was that it had to start with D (for duck!… because they looked more like ducks!)

The names started off easily enough… we had a Derek, a Doug and a Dickie… we then went deep to our roots and chose names from our cultures (or near enough)… so we had Punjabi ducks called Davinder and Daljeet, Iranian duck called Darius, Irish duck called Darragh, Bengali ducks called Devajani, Muslim ducks called Daniel and good old British ducks called Dave!

We worked slowly but surely and soon had all the chicks (aka ducks) filled so it was time for the fitness fun to begin.

Best of cluck!

In pairs we worked around the room working on 4 exercises from agility ladder to med ball halos to lat pull downs and overhead raises..

Followed by a good old party game of musical chairs!

Well done to Hamid for being the ‘Champion’

Thank you all for getting involved in tonight’s task.

Next week we are at St Mary’s Church on Church St helping with a spring clean (meet up point is Upton Court park at 6:30pm)