We were a small team of 8 last night but we still made a big impact down on the waterway last night with The Canal & River Trust!

We started out the evening by talking about lots of exciting things that are happening at GoodGym Ealing:

• Shan & Tash have now joined the taskforce.
• We spoke about lots of exciting community missions on the horizon, with a few festive ones in the pipeline!
• And finally we also spoke about potential new partnerships I've been working on with Ealing Half Marathon on thier CIC arm and being able to do more in the community, watch this space!

A few warm up exercises while we discussed our favourite past GoodGym tasks and we were off in a new direction for the evenings tasks. Jack (fellow GoodGymer and Canal & River Trust extraordinaire) had identified a new section of canal for us to visit up by Hanger Lane that really needed some attention. We only had a few runners on board last night as a few of us made our way on wheels due to injury, but it was lovely to know that people are really dedicated to the volunteering aspect of GoodGym, so much so they will come even when they aren't able to run!

After a little safety briefing, high vising up and arming ourselves with pickers we were ready to attack the can situation on the approach to the canal!

Modern life is rubbish...BUTT we CAN try to fix it!

We swept a hell of a lot of cigarette butts, cleared hundreds of cans, found a few pairs of discarded knickers and a bra(?!), so many crisp packets, a mystery parcel that turned out to be empty (throughly disappointing as we were hoping for gold) and so much more.

Our hope is that if we keep trying to improve the area eventually it will have an impact and make people think twice about littering in such a beautiful space!

We could have stayed all night but we'll be back in a few weeks to continue our good work and help support this charity in maintaining our canals!

Just a jog back (I think everyone was very excited to run DOWN west walk instead of up like we did on the way out), a few stretches focusing on calf muscles and we were done and dusted!

Thank you to everyone who came out for this rubbish task (pun intended!) and hopefully see you all next week when we'll be inside with The William Hobbayne Charity doing something slightly more glamorous! It's also Steph's 50th good deed and we'll be heading to the pub afterwards to celebrate, there will be cake so sign up now!