This evening saw a BONANZA edition of lovely new people and some equally lovely old-timers - so much so that we had FORTY-SEVEN runners on this somewhat balmy November evening. WOWEEE! Luckily we had just the task for so many hands - we were heading to Myatt's Fields to support the small team there with leaf collection. This time of year, thousands upon thousands of leaves fall from the trees and park gardener Taye has the thankless task fo trying to clear them all up. What he needed was FORTY-SEVEN runners to help him out. WHAT LUCK!

I wish I had forty-seven runners to help me out! Said Taye

On arrival, we headed down to the tennis courts and one team set about clearing leaves from inside the courts. Everyone else gathered leaves from flower beds surrounding the lovely bandstand area. Huge bags were filled up with the autumnal debris and were taken to a hidden away area, where a natural compost heap was formed, for them to rot away over the months. Hooray for nature.

When we had finished, everyone got into pairs and played a best of three squat knee fencing competition. Tactics varied wildly but everyone tested their quads in the process.

After we ran back to base, we enjoyed some delicious lemon drizzle cake from Jim and yummy biscuits from Iona. DELISH!

Hello Lambeth!

THIRTY THREE of you amazing people joined me in Lambeth last night as we helped two organisations, ran a combined 236km, gave out a shit prize and unfortunately failed again to produce cake!

In the news this week:

• A big Lambeth welcome to Hannah who joined us for her first GoodGym run.
• Hearty congratulations to artist extraordinaire Tim for winning shit prize of the month for his dedication in both running and drawing and for generally being an all round awesome bloke.
• Don’t forget the GoodGym-wide social is next Thursday in Angel and if you’re a Libra then this is the social for you!
• Fancy volunteering at a race – check out the Shoreditch 10k on the 14th October – perks included!

And finally a big thank you to the TaskForce and to everyone for helping me out and being such a great crowd to lead and run with! On to the night:

We had two tasks – revisiting the work at Clapham Common for Colour your Common and heading up to St Michael’s Fellowship to sort through some charitable donations.

Thank you to Tom, Nicky and Vix who were in charge of the St Michael's Fellowship group. Words from Tom:

We ran 4km up Streatham Hill to help St. Michael’s Fellowship. An amazing charity who work to break cycles of disadvantage so that children may lead more healthy and confident lives.

We were met by the lovely Hillary and team. Who informed us that our task was to sort donations of all shapes and sizes of baby clothes into seasonably appropriate packages for Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter wear.

This required a great deal of curation and attention to detail from the team. With lots of spirited debate over colour clashes, gendered onesies and whether it’s ever appropriate to wear socks with sandals.

With so many donations to sort through, the scale of the task was too much for one night’s work. But we hope to return soon in some form to help with the great work St. Michael’s are doing.

The rest of us headed up to Clapham Common, a shorter run but a much more physical task. Thanks to Frances, George, Jim and John for guidance and back-marking. Here’s our report:

Wanting to avoid the traffic of Clapham High Street we headed on a slightly different route but ably led by Frances, George and Jim we made our way to the common with no problems. There we were greeted with much darkness and also Adrian and David who were getting out various tools for the task. We split in to two groups, ‘Turfers’ and ‘Turners’. The Turfers worked on a specific area cutting the turf from the soil. A precise and tough job given the ground was still very firm. The Turners worked on an area that had previously been removed of turf and slowly but surely turned and broke up the soil working carefully to ensure that the ground they turned wasn’t trodden on or compacted. With various lights and headtorches being used it made for quite the eerie scene. After 25 minutes hard work it was time to go, I think packing up may have been the hardest part of the night particularly the travails of the wheelbarrow with a flat tyre! In any case all was put away and all that was left was for us to run back to Papa’s!

Thank you to Frances who led the stretch at the end of the evening and thanks again to everyone for a wonderful night in Lambeth - I’ll be sure to come back if I get the chance! Katie is back next week so do sign up here!

Cheers,
Pritesh

We had loads of lovely new runners this evening, giving it a decidedly 'back to school' feel, just without the new pencil cases. If only.

There were two run options, the first group were led by JKB up to the community growing project at Agnes Riley Gardens. he said:

We navigated the dense and cumbersome mesh, mainly there to keep birds out, in order to water KEY VEGETABLES. We trimmed back rose bushes to make them less hazardous, but the thorns proved tricky. Navigating the bush in the dark was not so easy so it's time for a JKB TIP which is BRING HEADTORCHES. Its getting dark!

The rest of us were led to the Portico Gallery in West Norwood by George, who was celebrating his 100th run. After the 4km mainly uphill climb we reached our destination and began sorting gazebo sides into dirty and need cleaning or OK. These are used for the monthly West Norwood Feast, which takes over the town in the summer months.

On running home, we all enjoyed some banana bread from Lavinia as her #GBBO2018 offering and then we went to the pub for some food and a drink. Lovely stuff.

We had two lovely runs this evening, one was back to the historic Brixton Windmill. Tucked away off Brixton Hill, lots of people don't even know this windmill exists but it does and it is a great place of learning, surrounded by a peaceful garden. Beth led a group on a 1km route to the mill, whilst those wanting a longer run took the 4km Tom Benson run bus.

Here's what Beth had to say:

For those of us that took the direct route up Brixton Hill there was some chat on the way there about how few of us knew that Brixton had it’s own fully functioning windmill. On arrival we were a little disappointed to see that the sails had been taken off the windmill but once they are repaired they’ll be back on and it will be looking more functional again soon. Jean handed out tools and showed us what needed doing. A large group neatened up the edge of the path, a group of three started digging a spot for a new tree and there was also trimming of some overgrown plants to be done. Once the reinforcements arrived in the shape of Tom’s long run group there was even more digging going on and plenty of sweeping and bagging up of weeds.

The rest of us went 2km up to the Tulse Hill Estate. Hidden amongst the buildings is an incredible polytunnel that serves as an educational food growing project for the whole estate. Over the summer, hundreds of tomato plants were cultivated and given out to residents to grow on their balconies. The project gets lots of reclaimed wood that is used to make pallet beds for growing but at the moment it was all piled up next to some garages. Presenting a fire risk, it needed to be moved so we squeezed into the small space and started pulling them out and taking them to a safer space. The pile was quite big and there were bits of timber, old fence and even a fireguard that we pulled out of the way. It was a fantastic effort made all the better by not scratching the very nice VW Golf parked precariously near to the work area.

On arrival back to base, we tucked into some Bake Off treats from Tess and Sarah. It was all delicious and we headed off home happy.

September has come round and the nights start to draw in again. The hot summer has started to leave us but that was lucky for this evening as we were back to Clapham Common to take off some more top soil as we finish off the wildflower meadow. As the summer was hot and dry, the ground was still pretty hard and everyone had a tough session trying to get their spades through the roots!

It's hard to get through these roots! Said everyone

After running 2.5km there, we split into two groups. One went off to do some fitness with Katie and a lovely yoga for runners session from newly returned Sarah, whilst the other half got digging. After swapping, we then ran back in three groups at different paces. On return we all enjoyed WEEK ONE of our Bake Off Sweetstake - Vix and John H brought us some sweet and savoury biscuit joy. Wahey!

After weeks and weeks of scorchio last night saw the weather break and a bit of rain happened. This was somewhat ironic as one of our tasks was helping our pals on Clapham Common to water the wildflower meadow that we planted in the spring. After a serious amount of back and forth with watering cans, the heavens opened last night and the lovely pitter patter of refreshing H20 could be heard falling from the sky. OH WELL.

Before all that though, we welcomed back Vicki - HI VICKI - who is visiting from Oz for a bit and it was lovely to have her back. We also celebrated the brilliant Emma and Jim, who earned their 50 and 100 t-shirts respectively. WELL DONE GUYS!

After a quick warm up we split into two groups. Jim and Beth led one group about 1.5km to Larkhall park:

11 of us took a leisurely jog over to Larkhall Park to meet Carl. He had a lot of weeds that needed pulling up and was grateful that we would have them out before the rain came and they would be reinvigorated and take over even more. We split into two groups - Team Weed and Team Thistle. There were noticeably different approaches in the two groups, Team Weed went with a ‘bend at the hip, bums in the air’ vibe while Team Thistle crouched down and really got on the same level as their targets. After half an hour or so the area was looking much better and we set off on an even more leisurely jog back to Papa’s.

The rest of us headed to the aforementioned Clapham Common to do some solid watering. The plants were so dry that we certainly did some good and the rain that came later can only help the lovely plants on their way to perennial glory.

Nice work GoodGym!