What a delightful evening for a GoodGym run. And what a fabulous turn out! 37 hardcore GoodGymers hit the pavements to help two local projects - Ruskin Community Garden, and Springfield Lodge, a Salvation Army hostel for young people.

We had 8 new runners with us this week: Nice one Fiona, Jade, Rosa, Phoebe, Tom, Caitlin, Rachael and Elinor for coming along!

We started off with a visit from Paul who smashed the London Marathon on Sunday as well as fellow GoodGym Lambeth stars Nicky and Phil! I think he tempted some of us to GET SIGNED UP.

And we heard how GG Lambeth has our Bank Holiday weekend sorted with a community mission this Saturday for the GP food coop as well as our social to sample the Brixton Windmill Bread and Beer Festival on Monday. 🍞🍻👅

We also awarded our SPOTM, which had a hair and head theme, with a shower cap, comb and white cap (complete with all-important 90's style, flip down eye-visor - you know the ones). And this went to a person, who is very new to GG Lambeth but this week completed her 4th good deed, sorted her DBS last week and has now completed all the training and become MISSION VERIFIED so she can now get signed up to help older people with one-off tasks:

Everybody give a big cheer to Laura! 👏👏👏🎈🎈🎈🎉🎉🎉

After all that, we had a quick warm up and headed off.

---

Tom had this to say about his group who ran to Ruskin Community Garden:

14 runners made their way across town on a 5km round trip to Ruskin Park. After successfully resisting the temptation to join the Trapeze School in session; We met up with Justin who showed us round the community garden. Our task was to dig over a particularly wild looking over-grown patch of the garden to be used as a flower bed.

We made short work of this with the group really getting stuck into the task with some particularly satisfying hacking tools. Ably assisted by Rose heading up a wheelbarrow ferry service for all the green stuff we turned up.

Our duties even stretched to rehousing a family of newts; Who were quite friendly, despite us levelling their home in the wild patch of grass.

Sorry guys!

With our work complete we headed back against the backdrop of a very picturesque looking sunset. A perfect summer's night for GoodGym. Many more like this please!

---

My group took a 6km hilly run past Denmark Hill up to Springfield Lodge. We were greeted by Rosanna, also a GoodGym runner with Southwark(!), and she quickly set us some tidying up tasks including:

Removing bindweed 🌱

Moving some huge dustbins ♻️

Clearing leaves to compost 🍂

Litterpicking 🚮

We split into teams to tackle the different areas and everybody made a massive difference to the space in such a short amount of time. Rosanna was super happy we ran back, sprinting the final section of the route from Ferndale Road which is a new STRAVA SEGMENT. Check it out 😉 and well done to Jim for being the fastest runner today (19s!).

Awesome work everyone and see you next time... ✌️