17 GoodGymers ran over 6k to help One Big Family helping the homeless charity make the food for the evenings food offering.

A bright, beautiful at an ideal temperature met us for our weekly run of fitness goodness!

Zipping our of the New Balance shop and weaving our way south through some of the busiest areas in the country is no mean feat! Keeping a nice pace while ducking and diving away from the floating pollen got us down to the 3k Ebury Estate.

With food donations down this week we made light work making up 4 loafs of Jam sandwiches while bagging up over a hundred pastries! All bagged and boxed in 20 efficient minutes of team work!

With a though clear up done we embarked on the first of our double circuits sessions! Testing our upper and lower body conditioning big time we had to dig deep to complete the team challenges at the end!

So to break up the run we nipped out of the youth club and 2k up to Green Park where we dominated 7 minutes of core conditioning on the grass before taking the very direct route back with a superb workout complete!!

Thanks for coming along and hope you all had a great time! Next week we are on our monthly food donation run where (if you would like) we will bring along donations of soft fruit donations then running around Westminster handing them out to the homeless community.

Hope to see you there!!

Smooth Running

Joel

11 GoodGymers ran 5k to give 200 chocolate treats to Westminsters homeless community in the Sunshine!

The Sun has finally come to London!! As we dusted off our shorts and vests from their prolonged Winter hibernation it was great to have some GoodGym first timers along to show them the ropes.

As always this session in particular is nothing without your super generous donations and huge thank you for bringing along a contribution to the chocolate treats!!

After dividing up the chocolate we got running fully loaded with treats ready to brighten up Westminsters most vulnerable’s evening with an act of kindness.

As we started our regular local Homeless hot spots seemed to be unoccupied and our efforts looked like they may be thwarted as we zipped through the Back streets near Oxford Circus and down to Piccadilly. We started to find a few very grateful recipients of our chocolate treats as we weaved in and out through Leicester Square and lovely to have the time for a quick chat with people that are often just passed by, by many.

Then we found our stride as we located many of the Capitals homeless community in the Charring Cross area and in Trafalgar Square. Great to hear from a few homeless people that they remembered us running around giving away *Hotcross Buns * last month.

With an extended route around Charring Cross we had almost exhausted our resources so decided as a treat to ourselves we would shorten the running route back to base and add in a lower body mini circuit in Green Park. Lunging in all directions, adding in a calf raising recovery got those legs firing with our 8 minute strength workout before we got plyometric to finish with a range of jump lunges and squats to really increase the fitness!!

With our legs nice and worked out we ran back to base giving away the last few chocolate treats. Back to New Balance in perfect time to stretch out and head home with a top session in the bag!

Have a great week and hope to see you next Wednesday same time and place for a trip to St Andrews Youth Club to help them keep up their amazing youth work.

Smooth Running

Joel

The snow had subsided this week and HOORAY to that as we had some serious work to do on Clapham Common. After a nice warm up from George C we headed off to Windmill Drive to meet the Two Davids. David One runs our pals Bandstand Beds, who we help out regularly. David Two is a wild flower expert and is leading the Colour Your Common initiative to plant a wildflower meadow.

We are helping them out regularly over the next few months to get a lovely wildflower area planted up in time for summer. This week, we broke ground for the first time and took top soil off the first strip of land! We had diggers and wheelbarrowers and overseers and headtorchers. It was a riot of action and people. After 35 minutes hard work, we had finished off the strip and put up some protective fencing.

We ran back to base and did some stretching, then Sarah handed out some lollies that she had as a reward. Great work Lambeth - we look forward to enjoying the finished meadow!

36 brilliant runners moved loads of garden waste for gardening social enterprise Streetscape before saying a sad goodbye to Vicki

It was finally a mild enough evening to meet outside at Papa's and this was good news as our numbers were big this evening. Katie would like to think it was due to her superior run leading skillz but in actual fact it was due to many folk wanting to say goodbye to Vicki. Our favourite New Zealander is heading back to live Down Under and, after three years of pounding the pavements across many London boroughs, we are all sad to say So Long.

Vicki managed the great task of earning her 100 wings last week and whipped off her top as soon as her t-shirt was given to her. Thankfully / sadly (delete as appropriate) she had another top on underneath. With wings newly donned, we were off to the basketball court with Beth for a lovely warm up.

We split into two groups, Tom Benson's group ran down the right side of the road and George and Elise's group ran down the left, so that we didn't mow down all of Lambeth as we sped the 1-mile towards Myatt's Field. We have been visiting Streetscape for over three years now and it is always a physical task. There was loads of garden waste that needed moving onto a bigger pile of garden waste at the back, to make space for more garden waste.

Move this garden waste onto that garden waste, said Alex

We also learnt from Alex that 75% of the unemployed young people who enter the Streetscape programme find employment upon graduation, which is a pretty awesome figure. Of course this is something that GoodGym wants to help, so we kept in our two groups and Tom's group went into the park to do some strength work with Katie and George and Elise's group got stuck in moving some gaden waste on top of other garden waste.

After about 12 minutes, the groups swapped over so that everyone got stronger bits (ankles and core to be exact) by the end of it and we had cleared a massive space ready for MORE garden waste!

I can't wait to receive more garden waste! Said Alex

And with our good deed done, we whizzed off into the night and George took us through some lovely stretches. We then presented Vicki with her leaving gift, which was a school-style tea towel with our faces drawn on it. A brainchild of the Lambeth crew, Tom Benson had set about getting input from all the Boroughs that Vicki runs with. Polly had made the lovely GG border and Emma had been kind enough to make all of the backgrounds the same shade of white. A true team effort and also an interesting psychological insight into the minds of each GoodGym artist.

Wow guys I love my tea towel! Said Vicki 'Now let's hit the pub!

We all know Vicki loves a drink and so how could we say no? Off we went and some people even had some food! Great work Lambeth and we shall miss you Vicki. We look forward to shots of you wearing your GG wings on the other side of the world.