A trio of tasks awaited our runners this evening, as did an opening of the heavens!

We started the evening with a quick chat about the pressing issues of the day, namely the GoodGym social this Thursday and the Spartan race weekend which Chi is organising.

We were joined by a GG tourist, Matt, who was down from Liverpool, and 3 new runners; Lauren, Billy and Abigail - give them a cheer!!

We had a quick warm up on the courts, with the skies giving us a dose of some seriously chunky hail and then we split into our 3 groups:

Beth took a group to Loughborough Farm and had this to say:

A group of nine of us took a relaxed run over to Loughborough farm to do our usual task of moving soil from A to B. There’s quite a bit of construction work going on at the farm. The addition of a community workshop will be a great way for the farm to achieve even more but it does mean that the space is changing shape and various bags of soil occasionally have to be moved out of the way. With two and a half bags that needed shifting we got shovelling and wheelbarrowing and filled up a couple of empty bags on pallets ready to be moved by a forklift. After 40 minutes we’d moved two bags worth and all felt like we’d had a good workout so set off back to base, some of us with pockets full of fresh oregano.

Here’s a few words from Tom who took a group over to a garage at King’s College Hospital to help with the GP Food Co op’s storage space:

A merry band of 10 goodgymers took on the mission to sort out Ed’s garage. After running down pretty much the full length of Coldharbour Lane we met Ed where he showed us the job. He was doing a spring clean and needed some things moving out of the garage. Highlights included a rowing machine and Ruth did a sterling job sweeping out the garage with half a brush. A band of three members decided that the garage could only hold 6 folks and got to sprucing up the front garden by collecting the rubbish in the front.

At the end of the session, fitness guru Chi took us through our paces by doing some core exercises in Ruskin Park. We planked, we squatted, we planked and we did all manner of abs related things, top man, nice one. After 10 mins we were ready to head back, so peg it back along Coldharbour Lane back to a nice warm down.

Nice one team and cheers again Chi for the abs workout.

And my group headed to one of the St Michael’s Fellowship Family Residential centres to give them a hand with clearing up their gardens.

We took the scenic route with a little run up the hill in Brockwell Park with Nicky and Emily back marking. When we arrived, we were given a list of jobs and we got stuck in pretty pronto. We took on a serious amount of weeding, removing some old trellis, getting rid of some old toys which had been thrown over the fence from the nursery next door and cleaning the patio!

We could tell it was a pleasant and vital space for the service users and great to be able to make a difference. Nicky is even running the Marathon for the St Michael’s Fellowship!

Next week is a double task, helping out Crisis at Elephant & Castle or going to Brixton Windmill. Get signed up here.

Yes Lambeth! 👍