Tonight's GoodGym mission saw us racing against a (frankly beautiful) setting sun as 11 GoodGym-ers headed to the gardens outside Trinity Hospital in Greenwich, with the aim of helping tidy this area by the Thames Riverside.

Our tasks included a lot of weeding of plant beds, clearing away fallen autumn leaves, as well as a good pruning session to chop back overhanging trees/shrubs including the aforementioned Buddleia. A tough battle was fought but all too soon, the setting sun gave way to a Harvest Moon, signalling our task was done for the evening and we could head to the pub!

Hopefully we had a positive impact on this lovely area by the river. Thanks all!

Next week we're at the Prince Maritime Collections Centre. Until next time!

This week’s run was looking a little sparse at first glance, but fortunately we made it to a total of 5 runners (including Leader Mark, who had less photo time this week as was carrying a Mattock ...ssshhhh) and we even had a reporter to join us! Yep straight in jumping with a microphone in the warm up and then after tweaking her recording equipment, our keen reporter interviewed Kate as the rest of the group went on to Latchmere Recreation Ground. Our mission was to help prepare the area for trees to be grown.

When we arrived at Latchmere, after a couple of wrong turns and getting lost from myself and Tom, the reporter Keyari and Kate were still to arrive (busy trying to power walk and talk at the same time!!). So we made a start on the mission at hand, which involved digging, weeding, and fighting with brambles.
Kate and Keyari (Our Reporter) now on the scene so Kate was straight into ACTION and as we worked we were interviewed with all sorts of questions on why we enjoyed Good Gym so much. Answers spanned from “helping the community” to “getting fit”, to “meeting great people” AND “Ouch those brambles hurt”.

After a good bit of digging around by all and a few photo opportunities with the lovely people from the Friends of Latchmere Recreation Ground, we set off on our return journey.

There were posing opportunities beside illuminated wreaths on the Kingston river’s edge to be had on the way back, which gave a Christmassey end to a nice run! I wonder if Mark got the one running in front of the Bauble on the way out… hmmmm

Good stretch Kingston and a great physical workout at the task.

Don’t forget to sign for next week already!!

A group of red t-shirt’s gathered in the foyer of Glassmill can only mean 1 thing, it was time for some running and doing good! This week we were off to GRACE which always means lots of sorting and organising.

A quick recap of this weeks news:

• Well done to Bradley who came second at the Chiswick Half Marathon at the weekend and to Liv who ran her first marathon in Amsterdam, amazing running from both of you.
• A huge good luck to Stephen who is running Venice Marathon this weekend, I hope it’s not the same conditions as it was last year when I ran it!!
• On 2nd November we have a GoodGym takeover of Hilly Fields Parkrun, if you would like to volunteer, drop Adele an email with what role you fancy doing.

We began the evening with a quick headcount in a rather oddly shaped circle, that wasn’t really a circle, but I went with it, it worked. And then straight into a game of “I shout a body part and a number and those who are leftover have to do squats”, I’m sure the game has a proper name really! Then we set off as a group through the centre of Lewisham, detouring for some roadworks and up the busy main road to GRACE, it’s not the most picturesque of routes.

We arrived promptly, picking up people on the way and great work by those that met us at the task, getting stuck in before we arrived!

The tasks for this evening were pretty straightforward, sorting through cages of clothes and organising them into men, women and children piles and then removing the items that couldn’t be of use and saving the items that could be sold in the shop.

And the other task was sorting boxes of baby clothes into size order and packed neatly to condense the amount of boxes.

The first difficult task was getting the plastic gloves out of the box! Everyone got to work and there was quite a lot of concentration on organising the clothes until we found some very questionable pieces of clothing, see pictures!

It was time to be wrapping up but there was still half a cage of clothes to sort and put in bags so it was all hands on deck to get everything sorted, I couldn’t write labels for the bags quick enough!

Group photo done and we made our back back to Glassmill to stretch and try to remember what next weeks task is..it’ll be a good one.