16 GoodGymers ran 2.5km and composted, sieved and spread mulch for Skip Garden

Thank you very much for coming to the first GoodGym Camden Starter Session of the year, it was lovely to meet all the first timers - Teb, Lina, Mafalda, Amy, Matt, Haoming, Sophie and Natasha! Brilliant stuff!

In the news this week:

1. GG Camden is moving its start location from next week, 100 metres down the road. We'll be meeting at the following address: The St Pancras and Somers Town Living Centre, 2 Ossulston Street, London, NW1 1DF. We'll still be meeting at 6.45pm and finishing at 8.30pm as normal.
2. GoodGym is holding its first time trial of the year at Regents Park on Sunday 29th January if you want to take place, more information here.
3. There are lots of races and events that GoodGym'ers are attending. Fancy joining them? Look under the 'Events' section on website or the GoodGym Race Team page. It's always great to have an aim whatever the distance :)

Right onto the evenings activities; after introducing ourselves and using Beth Hoskins for lots of good deed examples we checked out the new start location so we know where to go from next week. We then had an active warm up with dynamic stretches, high knees and more.

With myself leading and Polly back-marking we ran the 1km to Skip Garden, up the hill to Granary Square, passed the Dishoom queues and along the path to the wonderful hidden garden.

Upon our arrival the wonderful Gwen, who works at Skip Garden, gave us a wonderful tour and introduction, here are some key highlights:

1. Skip Garden is run by Global Generation.
2. They grow their own produce and have a cafe.
3. Importantly they do lots of educational work with young people and workplaces in the area.
4. The idea of Skip Garden is that it's moveable anywhere in the Kings Cross area, this is their 4th site.

For the task we split into two groups - the workout team and the task team - we swapped around after 10 minutes so everyone had a chance to do both! The wonderful Polly led on the task and described it as such:

We took it in turns to operate the Ridan (manual composting machine). Meanwhile the rest of the group sieved the compost that came out of it's BOTTOM. The lumps left in the sieve got put back in the Ridan and the now fine soil got spread amongst the flower beds outside the Skip Garden!

Smelly stuff!

On team workout we focused on some conditioning with some bench steps, tricep dips, squats, star jumps and press jumps. This was all mixed in with 'out fast & steady back' running. When switching teams we were stopped by Kings Cross Security wondering "asking what we were doing!" With which Beth replied "I'm doing GOOD!" (well something like that). Pretty amusing stuff ha

Security STOP!

Once we were all collected together and lots of sieved compost had been spread we headed back to Granary Square for some glute-balancing exercises and a running game before returning home.

It was a wonderful evening topped off by Bob welcoming us back with hot chocolate and biscuits.

Thank you for coming and I hope to see you next week, we are going to Cecil Sharp House to do some gardening. Sign up here.

PB out.