20 Ninja Gardeners gathered on a not to cold evening in wonderful Hackney to help show what can be done when Good(Gym) conquers evil (well Christmas food 🍫🍰🍩 and alcohol consumption🍾🍺🍷).

An injection of new Hackney GoodGym blood was mixed in with some returning friends and some die hard regulars so get 2016 started in spectacular fashion. A brilliant and informative guide to Coach runs and Missions from Hackney Coach rep Kev who is working his way very nicely towards the magical century club of Good Deeds. We got the scores on the doors of the January Challenge, where we lie 6th a 10,000k and 150 Good deed target in the challenge but think GoodGym Hackney is looking strong💪🏽💪🏻 and fast 🏃🏾🏃🏿 So let's smash through the 1000k 100 good deed barrier by the end of the month!! Make sure you log all your training runs and coach runs!! If you need any help with this just drop me an email (Joel@GoodGym.org). The Victoria Park 10k is approaching on the 24th of January if you would like to start the year off with a traffic free, flat road race sign up here. If you would like any training advice come and have a chat to me next week.

We set off skipping down Mare street after a mobilising dynamic warm up getting our walking lung and side to side squat on, looking a bit like we were playing the old computer game space invaders with the passing commuters. We were talking about this weeks Triple T (Tuesday Talking Topic) strangest food we had eaten in December. Keeping together and getting aquatinted we kept a steady pace as we took in the various sights and sounds of our tour of Hackney on our way to the marvellous Wilton Estate community garden. Where we meet Lisa would took us through all the areas needing to be weeded and cleared so that more local residents have space to join the community garden. As quick as a flash we were off! Gloves on, head torches turned up 🔦🔦 we split into 3 groups of Ninja gardeners and got to it. The first group made light work of a weed dense flower bed and were soon filling up the bins at a great rate.
Group 2 were hard at work battling with big tree and bush roots calling to tool reinforcements to really work hard to get the unwanted roots out! Group 3 were having a bit of a party in the original community garden, head torches flashing and DJ Pat rocking the old school 90's tunes on his water proof speakers showing all the new comers how at 113 Good deed vet gets it done while having fun.

As quick as that in just 35 minutes of lung pumping root pulling work the fearless Hackney GoodGym team had cleared 3 flower beds filled 2 huge bins and only left 1 pesky root! Great work team 👏🏽👏🏻👏🏾

We cleared the tools back to shed and Lisa thanked us for our super speedy work and we headed on our way. We tested the Wilton 500 meter track to make sure it would be ready for our next time trial when I noticed a few runners chomping at the bit to go a bit faster and longer on the way back so we split up with Kev leading the long range tribe on a speedy 4K loop back to base past Hackney Downs with a super sprint finish from first timer Amy breaking the finish line first 🏁🏁. The sexy crew knew they wanted to have so speedy fun but in the more refined 2k glide back to base. We set the streets alight with some land mark Fartlek bursts and we took to the back streets to get one last interval in before a calm and relaxing warm down at base before we said our goodbyes and disappeared off into the night having done Good had Fun and started 2016 in a great way!

Hope to see you all again next week, same time same place where we will be off to St Luke's to do some more great work and get fit! Sign up here.

Keep it Ninja

Joel

Meanwhile on the Southbank bright and early, 14 GoodGymers kicked off their weekends off with nothing but good.

The task at hand? To help out Grounded EcoTherapy , a company that specialises in creating thriving green spaces from neglected urban environments. They currently look after the roof garden at Southbank so it was our job to get rid of leaves, do some weeding, some sweeping, some cleaning, some turning of soil and fill some giant bags up with soil so it could be used elsewhere on the site.

A wonderful meet and greet from myself and the lovely Madeline from SouthBank, a breakdown of how amazing GoodGym is, a health and safety briefing followed by a nice warm up incorporating the lovely steps and we were off.

A steady pace down to Southwark Bridge, some more work on those steps followed by some sprints up and down the bridge like kids, back down the steps and a niiiiiiiiiiice tempo run back to where Madeline was eagerly awaiting our arrival.

Strait up the steps and INNNNNNNNNN on the tasks with 30 mins on the clock.

Team 1 on sweeping and litter picking duty - CHECK Team 2 on leafing duty - CHECK Team 3 on shifting and lifting duty - CHECK.

All i will say is 30 mins flew by. All the soil was moved from the ground into giant bags for transport, all the rubbish and litter was placed strategically in litter bags and all those leaves that proved to be so elusive due to adverse weather conditions were finally trapped and taken to there new home.

A round of applause and genuine surprise from some who didn't think we could get all that done in such a short space of time.

Thank you all for coming out to play ;-)

Another amazing session... Roll on next week