25 GGers ran between 3-10km across the borough collecting 27 Christmas Trees for recycling!

Happy New Year and welcome back - new year, new hat (for me) but same old amazing GG Camden! Welcome along to the newbies - Alexandra, Jessica, Chris, Katie and David - lovely to have you along :)

We learnt all about GoodGym, for some more information see the About Page here BUT I forgot to tell you all about the news:

1. This Saturday we are doing a Camden Starter Session in Hampstead helping Antrim Allotments, plus we are going to do Hampstead Heath Parkrun before if you'd like to join.
2. Also in May GoodGym are going to Bucharest Running Festival to race, party and have our annual GGxEuro fun - come along!

Right onto last night our task for the evening was to find, collect and deposit Christmas Trees at four recycling centres throughout Camden. We split into four groups covering Somers Town, Kentish Town, Camden Town and Hampstead - with distances covered ranging from 3.7km to 10.6km.

Each year GoodGym areas all over the UK take up this task to help the local council properly recycle trees. The thing is lots of people leave them out on the street and expect them to be collected but in Camden it's unlikely they will be as the services are stretched. Here is what Camden Council say on there website:

If you have a ‘real’ Christmas tree, please recycle by taking it to one of our recycling points and we’ll compost it so it can be used to grow new ones. Please remember to remove any decorations.

Following the instructions given this is where we come in. Using four different recycling points and collecting an amazing 27 trees between us, that's 1.125 per runner - nice!

Competition Time

Staying in pairs at all time and bouncing around Camden looking lost we did great work doing such GOOD for our community. Importantly though this was a competition to find the most trees with results being:

• 1st Team PB - Kentish Town - 13 Trees (7.5km covered)
• 2nd Team Chris - Camden Town - 8 Trees (7.3km covered)
• 3rd Team Katherine & Rosie - Hampstead (10.5km covered)
• 3rd Team Frances - Somers Town (3.8km covered)

What a display of skill, awareness and the ability to find trees in the dark - very unique set of skills. You should all be proud!

Well done all, see you next week for Cecil Sharp House gardening, Veg Box Leafleting and more Tree Collecting - sign up here

PB out

At GoodGym Bristol we love a bit of fun and creativity, which is why we think the Children’s Scrapstore is awesome. Companies donate their unwanted junk and the Scrapstore sort and pass it onto schools and community projects who turn it into toys, art, stage sets and anything else they can think of. As it is such a popular project they are always thankful for a helping hand sorting the donated scrap, so this time we brought over 50 helping hands!

After meeting at Vivo Sports Club and introducing ourselves we realised that not only did we have a massive group with even more happy new faces, but a lot of runners were called Emily and Dave, so remembering names on this run would be a lot easier than usual!

We ran 1.5 miles from Vivo to St Werburghs with an epiphany of Emilys and a deluge of Daves taking Bristol by storm. Our goodness must be contagious as a guy who was jogging by saw us and after a quick chat with Paul, who explained our task for the evening was to “go and cut stuff”, decided he wanted to join our helpful hoard.

After this gentle warm up we were ready to take on whatever the lovely ladies at the Scrapstore had to throw at us. We were shown around the warehouse of wonder before being split into groups and set to task. And what do you know, Paul was right in his prediction that we would be cutting stuff up. People were ripping apart curtains, cutting guttering, tearing tents, dismantling chairs, burning through rope, taking thread off of reels and our old favourite, taking phones out of boxes. It may sound destructive but rest assured that there is method to this madness. As ever when the time came to leave it was tough getting everyone to finish their task in hand. “Just one more curtain…” they exclaimed, “We’ll be quick, just gotta finish this…” came another shout. Eventually we got everyone together for a group shot before heading back into the night.

After jogging back, we assembled in Queens Square for a rather random but productive warm down. With a few tricep-dips, squats, sprints and lunges we finished off a very successful evening. Thanks to everyone who came along, you are all ruddy brilliant. Don’t forget the Scrapstore are having an open day on Saturday 17th October when you will be able to go and grab yourself a basket of scrap for a small donation. So why not come and help us build a rockery in Redcliffe at 11am and then head over there to get creative afterwards.

26 runners met at Vivo Gym last Tuesday for a bit of action down on the farm - Windmill Hill City Farm that is.

We headed off for the short run to Windmill Hill and were greeted by Chris, who is responsible for their project to transform a car park in to a garden. It's come along such a lot since our first run there; the flower beds are almost built and as a result it was our job to start to move about 120 tonnes of topsoil from the various mounds around the site to the beds and make them lovely and flat, ready for plants.

A wealth of tools awaited us - shovels, spades, forks, rakes and wheelbarrows. It was a GoodGym dream! We gloved up and set to work, various teams shifting the soil, others using their forks and spades to get any lurking lumps out, and barrow masters and mistresses racing around the site with their earthy burdens. Lastly the rakers got in touch with their inner zen and like a feng shui garden raked the soil flat.

After the allotted 30 minutes, the main flower bed looked almost complete but there was one thing we had to do - compact the soil a bit. This was an ideal time for a few sprint drills! The team jogged about a little, warming back up and then did several 10 second bursts of on the spot sprinting. They moved around a bit, chose a new spot, sprinted again, and again and again; afterwards the soil was a lot more compact and flatter, thanks to the leg power of GoodGym!

As the run there was short, the run back was a tiny bit longer and we ended up in the leafy embrace of Queens Square for a cool down and stretch.

Big thanks to Ana for coming up with the name for the run!