51 absolute heroes were out last night to start the year with a bang 💥

And some of those heroes were totally fresh to GoodGym! Massive cheer to Molly, Lawrence, Charlotte, Lara, Clare, Kirsty, Campbell, Jasmine, Faris, Mitch and Jessica. So great to have you along :)

Our task was simple - give Lambeth council a hand by picking up some of the trees from the roadside (they don’t have enough space for all of them in their van when they pick them up) so that they’re not clogging up the streets - and take them to the TREE-CYCLING (😅) plant in Clapham Common.

And after a quick warm up, we split into 5 fabulous teams heading to different areas to pick up as many trees as we could.

After worrying that we wouldn’t find any, we were blessed with absolutely loads - some on the pavements, some hiding behind bins, some small, some massive and some so dead they must've spent their Christmas getting intimate with a radiator.

Trees in hands, we all descended on the centre of Clapham Common like some sort of weird tree cult. Each tree was ceremoniously thrown on top of a big pile and then we ran back to base with plenty of bonus FITNESS DRILLS thrown in.

TREE-MENDOUS

Amazing stuff everyone and such bravery shown when awkwardly carrying trees through some very crowded areas...

Next week is Lambeth’s 6th Birthday!! To celebrate we’re going to Jubilee Primary School to do some GOOD. Then we’re going to the pub to eat cake. 🙌 Sign up here.

22 brilliant runnners brave the storms to complete TWO tasks in Lambeth

It was a typical June Tuesday - gale force winds and torrential rain. This can only mean one thing: there's work to be done of the gardening varierty.

After a lovely warm up involving drama-based games from John the ACTOR, we headed off in two groups.

Team 1 went to a nearby estate that Loughborough Junction Farm have an outreach programme at. We wiggled our way in to a fantastic allotment space. They needed a path digging from the back to the gates and loads of woodchip spreading over the path. We got to work and managed to finish the whole pile of woodchip and spread it across the whole path. It looked great!

Team 2 headed over to Clapham Common and the friendly Bandstand Beds. We have been clearing an area between the fence and a shipping container over the last few visits. This time the end was reached and a new storage container got put down by a smiling Rich and George - apparently this container used to carry art to the Tate Modern - ONLY THE BEST FOR CLAPHAM COMMON!

With a return to base and some stretches, we all went home to dry off, happy with an excellent and productive evening.

Many excellent athletes took to the field for GoodGym Lambeth's qualifier for the egg and spoon race at the GoodGym Olympics in June! We also did lots of good at POP Brixton and Bandstand Beds

We met at Papa's as usual, but this was no ordinary night, oh no. Tonight, Lambeth, was the night we were to decide who will rep us at the most mighty of events - the EGG AND SPOON at GoodGym Olympics. The stakes were high and tension was in the air. We had eggs and oh boy did we have spoons, but first, we had some serious good to do, sprucing up the community gardens at both POP Brixton and Bandstand Beds.

POP Brixton - in John's words We split into three teams - a gardening squad who were planting a series of different...plants; a neatening squad who were spreading pine bark in planters to make them look nice; and a heavy lifting squad who had to get two massive palm trees out of their temporary buckets and up into oil drums on a platform - this involved sawing away some of the ROOT BALL but it was all for the best.

Bandstand Beds - in James's words We had team LEVELLING - who were removing the crap from a patch of land and then levelling it out. We had team STONES who were darting around trying to find all the big rocks in the ground and eggs-cavate them. We had team HAYBAIL, who were moving a slightly decomposted hay-bail. Who knew that we were standing on a veritable goldmine of LOOT!

The loot: A discarded teddy bear. An old metal iron. A mini-dolphin. Some seeds. An antique penny from 1917.

It's such a help for us oldies! Said Diana

And now to the MAIN EVENT! Split into 8 teams of 4, the athletes had to undertake a series of tricky egg and spoon races.

• First up, the SPRINT. A simple run back and forth, you may think, but look at the egg to spoon ratio! This was tough for even the steadiest of hands.
• Next up, the SKIP. Who knew Steve had quite such a capable skip on him? Noone knew, that's who!
• The MEDLEY was for the all-rounders among us. They had to lunge, side squat and high knees themselves to victory.
• Then came the RELAY, where 4 lengths had to be completed with all team members taking part.

It became clear that Neil, Matt, Sarah and Jim were victorious in the team round, so what better way to select our winner than to pit them against each other in a ferocious fight to the death. They were to do one final length, and the winner must come first but also drop the least times. The results were in and Matt was victorious, with Sarah taking first reserve in case injury or fitness means Matt is unable to represent us.

After lots of chocolate egg feasting, there was a slightly queasy run back to base, some stretches and hometime. Excellent work everyone - don't forget to sign up to the Olympics on10th June here!

This week we had two lovely runs and one new task. After a nice warm up on the basketball court and potentially recruiting a Deliveroo rider to the GoodGym cause, the main group set off 2.5km to Clapham Common. We went to help out Bandstand Beds - a community growing scheme that has got some more space to expand their veg patches.

The space was full of old fences, branches, weird old clothes and other assorted rubbish that needed shifting to the dump area, ready to be taken away by the council. With head torches on, we got stuck in and moved all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff in 25 minutes. This is a brilliant effort that will enable the Bandstand Beds volunteers to carry on with their work. Hooray!

We then moved on to the common for some nice core work and Tom Hunter picked up the pace leading the group home. Great running team.

A group of 8 headed about 1K down the road to a GP surgery in Stockwell which is part of the wonderful Lambeth GP Food Co-Op.

They had had a delivery of 5 bags of soil but as the crane that delivered them wasn’t very big they had only made it just over the fence. The job was to distribute the soil amongst the big wooden planters so that they can grow even more stuff. Luckily for us with a short run to get there, we had plenty of time to get shovelling. It was a small space but we worked together like a well-oiled machine and had plenty of opportunity to chat.

There were lots of coincidences – task leader Andy (who we all assumed was a GP but it turned out was an audio-visual guy instead) and Shanice realised they'd worked together many years ago, before Shanice became quite the GoodGym tourist racking up good deeds and badges aplenty on the website.

Tom and Tessa compared notes on being a teacher and how Tom's disappointment in never getting to compete with his students in a school sports day lead to him putting the plans together for a pretty epic sounding GoodGym Olympics on June 10th. And Freyja, Beth and Andy compared notes on life as a plastic scouser, all having grown up on The Wirral.

Despite having the classic fear of ‘there’s no way we can finish this task’, after an hour of shovelling and spreading we had emptied all 5 bags and ran back to Papa’s feeling very pleased with ourselves.

There was also quite a bit of talk about this summer’s Welsh event, Race the Train which is happening in August, more info here.