Our 4 heoric heros tackled the terrible trash that had built up at the Westbury Nature Reserve!

While our fearless leader Commisioner Gramps was out town some dastardly villain had been chucking umbrellas over into nature reserve!

But with the finest in Wayne Enterprises litter picking technology we soon dealt with the problem, and retired to a nearby hostelry to celebrate.

4 runners laid the foundations for an overflow pond.

With Gramps away, another robin came to watch over us working this week. I'm begining to think he's training them.

It was a solid work out this week. Relocating heavy clay from the foundations of the building work at Wolves Lane. Into wheel barrows, over rough terrain, round a little hill, down, and heave it up to form the wall of a new pond!

With half the crew not signed up to any races this year, there was much celebration for Julie's tripple marathon weekend, bringing her total up to 150!

3 runners dashed from Blue House Yard to Meadow Orchard, only to realise there was no GoodGymers meeting us at the task, so we could have ambled along at a party pace.

But that didn't stop us from working flat out at the task! The meadow had a tonne of wood chip delivered, which the fungus was starting to turn onto good quality mulch outside in the car park. With some solid shovel work, we cleared the lot before sunset! Starting to reclaim an old spoils ditch into a usable path. Despite all the goodness this will add to the soil, there was no worms yet. Sorry little robin assistant!

6 Goodgymmers did their best to literally put on the Ritz in Russell Park last night as they brought down an unsteady bug hotel then rebuilt it to a much safer spec in a kid's playground. Boom!

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like...

As the good folk at Noel Park Big Local get ready for the grand opening of their new playground this Saturday, they requested our help in securing a bug hotel that had been built with some questionable foundations and was presenting a risk in the brand new playground.

Our Goodgymmers, armed with gloves and boundless enthusiasm, got on with the task at once. Niamh, making her glorious return, took it upon herself to rally the troops with her inimitable style - in other words, the evening was dominated by innuendos about drilling and enjoying a good Bosch™. You were greatly missed, Niamh <3 And many thanks for today's musical pun.

Dave even found time to take a factory-sized broom to the outside of the playground and swept a small mountain of leaves to prepare the area for some power-washer action that will happen later this week, much to Julie 'I love power tools and putting people in bins' Fisher's chagrin.

After an hour, a much more steady and secure abode had been constructed for our our friends of the bug persuasion and the new playground looked in amazing shape for this weekend, if we say so ourselves.

Boom!

7 Goodgymmers were in for a proper biceps workout as they helped the always wonderful Alan from the Meadow Orchard to harvest some clay for a forthcoming session.

CSI: Haringey

Our Goodgymmers arrived at the Meadow Orchard tonight, full of smiles and bonhomie, completely unaware of what a bit of clay harvesting actually entailed.

Very soon we found out it was a matter of get busy living, or get busy digging and as the Shawshank Redemption references rolled out from our Goodgymmers, we shovelled our way into the bit of the Orchard's prepped for us for the task at hand. The area, formerly the site of tennis courts apparently, was tough to get through but once we reached a depth of about a third of a Gramps, we reached the beautiful, sticky, messy London clay. What a sight to behold.

We then began packing it up in bags to be used at a later date in an eco-building project.

Boom.

Then, in true Andy Dufresne style, we effectively snuck out of the Orchard while Alan from the Friends group was distracted looking for more bags to fill! You can read their much better version of this story - here

We made our way to the pub afterwards for beverages and to celebrate in true #BadGym style our Paul's birthday.

Fun.

Emily and myself arrived and got straight to work with this familiar task at Traid to help the team there with their seasonal stock changeover. Or so we thought.

The usual task is to bundle all the unsold clothes into boxes, easy! But today they needed to send cages of carefully folded clothes on the hangers to another store for them to sell. So after a bit of a wonky start, the team graciously showed us the correct way to fold them on the cages, sorry! Correct folding method shown in photo! Emily even picked herself a fancy new GoodGym outfit!

We were all done in the allotted time and on our ways into the evening, to a life drawing class for one of us and home for a lie down for another of us. 😃