Peeling off layers and getting hot under the buff (it's a stretchy scarfy thing, OK?), an impressive 31 runners covered 5km and tackled a whole host of tasks at Voluntary Action Lewisham.

It never fails to amaze me how many people turn up on a grotty, grey, wet evening in February, all in the name of good! No first-timers tonight, but it was lovely to welcome Julia, who joined us for the first time at our starter session last week, also to say hi to Bliss, who has been away and to welcome back Kate, who used to come way back in the day, but has been busy becoming a parent! On another happy note, our very own mission man, Stephen, was showing off his lovely wings - a rather special new red t-shirt marking his 100 good deed milestone. A good sprinkling of Lewisham Love to you all.

Big Breakfast

Did you see us on the telly?! Yes, I know, we've been on the BBC before, we've done podcasts and we've featured in various articles, we're old hands at this media lark. This time we were filmed during our river wading session last Saturday, with the little feature being aired during yesterday's BBC Breakfast. It seems all our mums were up and ready, remote controls in hand, eager to see us in action. Meanwhile, many of our runners were out there smashing the miles, in preparation for the Big Half in two week's time (or the Bath Half in Emma's case). It was lovely to see some really great support amongst our runners, with Kim and Helen off out towards central London, Amber running a half-marathon - her furthest run yet, Conroy sharing a long run (and post-run drinks) with Frances and a few other GoodGym members and Juliet, who couldn't get to her planned race, deciding to tackle 20km just for fun. Amazing.

Here we go round the Mulberry Centre!

We were visiting another brand new task tonight, exciting times! This week our run took us over to New Cross and The Mulberry Centre, home to Voluntary Action Lewisham (and other organisations and groups). With Stephen back-marking, we headed out to Deptford, enjoying some Winter Olympics-style slalom, through the detritus of the market and shops - still packing up for the day - and were soon passing The Albany Theatre (where we will be going in a few weeks) and over to VAL. Here, we were met by Rachel, who told us about the various tasks and divided us into smaller groups (31 people remember, that's a lot of organising!). The jobs for tonight were:

• Moving some heavy furniture to the lower floor
• Painting the stairwell
• Painting the bright yellow toilet (great colour-match there Rosemary!)
• Re-potting some baby spider plants (possibly one of our most unusual tasks to date?!)
• Cleaning up the droplets of paint and scrapings from the wall
• Checking out another space for some future painting

With such a large group and limited space and supplies, there was a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing, with new jobs being picked up once others were finished and some last-minute sponge-grabbing to ensure all of the paint was wiped away (excellent work here by Monika, who dealt well with those people who just couldn't put the their brushes and rollers down!). With just enough time to grab a biscuit (thanks Rachel!) and take a group photo, we gathered our belongings and headed back towards Glass Mill. Farewell to Vic, who lives nearby and had already run a half-marathon this morning, as you do and also did her 25th good deed this evening!

Glutiful!

I had planned a really tasty glute-focussed fitness session but, by the time we got back, it was stretch and go-home-to-eat time. We looked forward to our last group run for February next week (already?!), which means a celebration of our Heroes of February (still time to edge up the leaderboards!) and a return to VAL to finish off the painting and anything else that might need our attention. Keep up all the amazing running this week everyone and I'll see you at parkrun, or next Monday for more of the same good stuff :)