Wowzers! 38 people came along last night to our run to help a local homeless charity improve their garden. One of our biggest runs ever on one of the colder nights of this impending winter... you guys all rock! An especially big welcome to all our new runners (well, the 3 new ones).

We squeezed in to our meeting point at Vivo and warmed up whilst people signed in, and then Gary led the run to Emmaus - it was a very short run though! We grabbed gloves and tools and set to work.

Our tasks were these:

Moving a sofa dumped on some plants we planted last time.

Weeding the beds we literally smashed apart last time (there was cobbled stones before!).

Litter picking

Mulching

Bulb planting

Sweeping

The list goes on but with 38 people we were done in under 20 minutes, so one of our fastest accomplished tasks too!

To get more exercise out of the gang, Gary led a hilly run and Dave led a flatter run back to Queen Square, although I was waiting for Dave's team at the end with a couple of games that were hopefully both fun and fitness boosting too.

We'd just finished the second game (Stuck in the mud) when Gary's team came in to the square and saved the rest of the group from lunges. Phew. So instead we had a big stretch, some announcements, and then quite a few of us went for a pie too!

Top job, ladies and gents!

Meanwhile in Westminster a large group of incredibly nice people headed down to Sayers Croft to help maintain one of the small pieces of green wildlifey spaces that Westminster has to offer.

With lots of newbies starting this week they were given a fulll extended in depth breakdown of why GoodGym is so good and why them coming along helps to make it better. A quick health and safety brief, discussion around current affairs and upcoming races we were off. Now as this weeks tasks was a 10k round trip with the option to return via uber we went out at a conservative pace before I sneakily dropped in a few intervals.

The plan on our arrival was to clean the classroom windows from the outside. Sweep and weed the yard. Give the area a jolly good litter picking, wipe down the signs around the site that were covered in leaves and weed out any bad stuff that was left floating in the pond.

Sadly when we arrived the key to let us in to the area to do all of these wonderfully good deeds had disappeared so instead we took a tour of the area, kept an eye out for wildlife and areas that on our return we will pay extra care and attention tooooo.

Now as we hadn't expended to much energy doing the task EVERYONE ran the full 10k back but sadly some were caught napping when the Sky kindly opened up. But as we said, it's only water.

Hopefully on our return they will have found the keys and we can once again turn these fingers green.

4 runners ran 5-10.5km to clean to tidy up Sayers Croft

A small but perfectly formed group of runners made the intrepid 5k trip to Sayers Croft in Paddington Recreation Ground last night to rid the pond of gooey green stuff and water the plants.

A gentle run down there, with some nice sprinty bits up Maida Vale had heart a-thumping and sweat a-pumping in the glorious evening sunshine. Sayers Croft, nestled in Paddington Rec's 'environmental area' provides a space for wildlife and vegetation in busy North London. It's popular with school kids and sweat GoodGym-ers alike! They even left us some very detailed instructions with a map!

In our small but efficient team we set to work watering plants and scooping lovely green stuff from the pond and dumping it on the surrounding pebbles - natural compost so they say!

15 minutes of hard work later we were off - it's a long way home after all! Lucy had the team do some star jumps whilst she returned the key and off they went, skipping and high-kneeing and bum-kicking to get everybody's muscles back in gear for the trip home. Kiera hopped on the tube at Maida Vale and we raced her home - taking a beautiful detour through Regents Park, admiring the park and the architecture as we whizzed back to base.

Howard - who just this weekend completed his GoodGym goal of a ten mile run! Yay Howard! - really pushed the pace on the way home and got us back in cracking time. The particular star of the show was Isabelle who - apparently not a regular runner - absolutely smashed the entire 10.5k and looked pretty darn relaxed doing it! We'd better be seeing you again Isabelle ;)

After much talk on the route back of a particular can of cold refreshing fizziness, I couldn't help but pick one up - we sure deserved it in all that heat! A great run, task and most importantly a laugh was had by all. A Wednesday evening to remember!

Lucy J