19 Storm Troopers stormed through a triple-task special with much gusto!

Despite the falling rain and strong gusts of winds courtesy of Storm Brendan (a regular at all GoodGym sessions this week), an amazing 18 GoodGym’ers ignored the lure of the dry and warm and braved the elements to get fit and do good in their community.

The good news was that Matt ‘it’s never rained on any task I’ve done’ Nash was in attendance and promised that “It will be fine. I guarantee it will stop by 7...”. And we all very much had our fingers crossed that Matt was somehow controlling the weather 🤞.

With everyone gathered we headed outside to a nice and dry cordoned off area of the Better Gym car park...oh the glam!

We started off by welcoming Mikaela's wonderful housemates, Stephen, Teo and Martina, for their first GoodGym H&F group run. Definitely a baptism of flyer run, thank you all for coming along, top recruiting Mikaela!

Just news it!

1. January Challenge 2020 - We're doing very well with 60 good deeds and over 600km run/walked as a group racked up! Great job team! You check on H&F's progress in the GoodGym leagues here. Will we beat our 2019 totals of 107 good deeds and 1,627 kms?!

2. Upcoming Races - As Sarah kindly mentioned, there's some great upcoming events that other H&F GoodGym'ers are getting involved with: Sunday 2nd February at 9.30am - Wimbledon Common 'Dash for the Splash' 10km and Saturday 8th February at 10am - Richmond Park 5km & 10km.

3. GoodGym H&F Starter Session - A date for the diary...Saturday 25th January. Details to be confirmed shortly!

Tonight we were going to be the session backwards, we’d be starting with fitness, then the group photo and then the tasks. I of course forgot to state this was not in a literal sense as Biscuits turned his back to me while others asked how we were going to be running backwards in this weather...what a bunch of comedians! 🙄😂

Following a quick-warm which included high knees, jumping jacks and spotty dogs we then smashed out a 6-minute legs, abs and arms blast. With some power lunges, jump squats, frog jumps, planks, elbow touches and dead bugs blitzed,all great exercises that build muscle strength and endurance to aid running, and it turns out quieten your GoodGym group 😉. Good work team!

Leaflets, leaves & lumbering

To keep everyone moving as much as possible on this damp evening we had a triple-task special, 3 short and sweet/sharp tasks completed as a group...

1. Open Age H&F provide hundreds of weekly activities for local residents aged 50+ to sustain their physical and mental fitness, maintain an active lifestyle and develop new and stimulating interests.

2. Maesbro Centre - The Maesbro Centre is the hub of all the Maesbro Community Centres. Maesbro offer a total community service from early years to older people – with arts and cultural events, sports and fitness classes, adult learning, help with gaining employment, and much more!

3. Christmas Tree-cycling - one final hunt for abandoned and hazardous Christmas Trees left on and around surrounding streets and roads in H&F that needed to be collect and taken to a Christmas Tree-cycling point.

Task 1: Leafleting for Open Age UK

With the leaflets in hand we captured a wonderfully lit team photo, and as Lucy and Katie humorously said, “you’d never have guessed it was taken in Better Gym car park!” or maybe you would…

Time flyers when you're having fun!

Ready to run and leaflet we began our run up towards Shepherds Bush, pausing briefly to regroup and for the beloved wall sit. Once on Bloemfontein Road the group split into two to cover both sides of the street in the now well-rehearsed ‘leaflet chain’. In just 5 minutes all the leaflets had been delivered and we set off towards the Maesbro Centre.

Task 2: Clearing leaves for the Maesbro Centre

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the Maesbro Centre and were faced with a car park filled with lots of wet and soggy leaves. Everyone gloved up ready to tackle the leaves, and after a long period of absence, Sarah was at last reunited with bin bags which she efficiently divvied up between the team.

A leaf encounter

Lucy and Matt ensured the team had ample lighting, to help with both the leaf collecting and the ‘gram photos. With a few barriers successfully negotiated and many piles of leaves scooped up into the 4 bin bags in just 10 minutes we called time on the car park clear.

In what might be the next promo shot for big bags, Helen, Cookie, Mikaela and Sarah held a big bag over their shoulder as they struck the classic ‘smile and lookback’ pose 📸.

Task 3: Hunting for Christmas Trees!

PINE tingling!

After searching a number of streets with no luck, not even one pine needle, we decided to have one final check through the Trussley Road tunnel and on Hammersmith Grove. FINALLY, success!! We began to spot one Christmas Tree after another. The team divided up and worked either solo or in pairs depending on the size of the tree to collect and carry the Christmas Trees to the Christmas Tree-cycling point outside Loris Community Garden.

Searching FIR & wide!

Lucy and Jonny were still empty-handed so set off on an inTREEpid run up the road to find one final Christmas Tree. They had the important job of neatly placing the final Christmas Tree of the season onto the large pile of rather dishevelled and dead looking Christmas Trees.

PINING for home

With the temperature dropping and the rain falling harder, we set off back to base for a stretch off under the shelter of the car park before heading home for warmth and food. A total of 42 leaflets delivered, 4 bin bags of leaves cleared and 9 Christmas Trees successfully tree-cycled. Top work team! Fingers crossed for better weather next week!

Hope you all have a great rest of your week! Sign up for next week's run here. The monthly social has been rescheduled to next week, so please do join for drink, food and more chats following the run!

AND, if you'd like to get involved with Community Missions, there's lots coming up in the West, check them all out here.

450 leaflets distributed and 6km run by 22 GoodGym'ers? I don't be-leaf it!

On what threatened to be a wet and miserable evening, a lovely mild and dry (thankfully!) evening greeting us in H&F. An amazing 21 GoodGym'ers joined me tonight to run and spread the word about some wonderful local charities.

Baptism of flyer

Tonight it was lovely to welcome along Lauren and Tatjana to their first H&F group run, thank you both for coming along and lending some extra hands tonight, hope you enjoyed it! And thank you as always to my wonderful regulars 😊.

Today’s task was the distribution of leaflets for Open Age UK H&F, posters for Food2You and some postcards for Age UK H&F around the streets of Hammersmith. So what do all these local charities do and provide I hear you ask?...

• Open Age H&F provide hundreds of weekly activities for local residents aged 50+ to sustain their physical and mental fitness, maintain an active lifestyle and develop new and stimulating interests.
• Food2You, a grocery delivery service run by Age UK for vulnerable, isolated older people who can't do their own shopping. It will be up and running in Hammersmith & Fulham very soon and they are currently looking for volunteers to drive the delivery vans and assist with co-ordination.
• Age UK H&F offer services for the over 50s, these range from home cooked meals to physical activity classes to IT classes, led by the man himself, Johnny Wren. Part of the programme Johnny is heading up is getting those in the community more IT literate, and one side of the postcard promoted this service. The other side was a call for more volunteers.

Flyer flyer pants on flyer!

Following a pulse-raising warm-up and a quick-fire number game we set off towards Shepherd’s Bush and White City, weaving in and around pedestrians and puddles (some were more successful than others at the latter!) and regrouped at Shepherd's Bush Green.

Before continuing on, we smashed out tonight’s fitness session of “When I went to GoodGym H&F...”. This was based on the school game, except with exercises. Everyone was challenged to both remember and do all the previous exercises, and add in an additional exercise and repetition.

We called it a day when we reached Sarah at number 14 and had the following list: 1 squat, 2 twists, 3 lunges, 4 knee raises, 5 jumping jacks, 6 jumps, 7 ‘funky chickens’, 8 punches, 9 left-leg hops, 10 right-leg hops, 11 spotty dogs, 12 star jumps, 13 press-ups and 14 windmills. Cake and biscuits was also mentioned, but sadly today no-where to be seen (until next week...).

Which, by my calculations worked out as a grand total of: 14 squats, 26 twists, 36 lunges, 44 knee raises, 50 jumping jacks, 54 jumps, 56 ‘funky chickens’, 56 punches, 54 left-leg hops, 50 right-leg hops, 44 spotty dogs, 36 star jumps, 26 press-ups and 14 windmills. Phew! Great work team, 14 exercises and a whopping 560 repetitions done in total 🙌🏼. There was also the bonus of “We went to GoodGym H&F and got some ‘motivational’ heckles from some kids on bikes!” 🗣🚲 as captured and captioned by Lucy on the ‘gram! @goodgym_hf for those not yet following.

Make like a tree...and leaf-let

Fitness completed we continued on our run. We reached Shepherd’s Bush Road and headed down one of the adjoining side streets. The team split into two and implemented the efficient 'flyer chain' down all the streets with perfection. With some helpful local knowledge from Lauren about a cut-through the large pile of leaflet quickly began to diminish and after 40 minutes of leafleting door-to-door the team had covered a substantial amount of the surrounding side streets.

Realising that we had yet to get a team photo with our leaflets, in a case of déjà vu from last week we headed towards the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden. Once outside we inspected the level of leaf fall over the past week and grouped together for some team photos, and under direction from team photographer, Mo, we struck a fabulous ‘flexed’ pose 💪🏼. In the words of Mo, “that’s lovely that!”

Time flyers when you're having fun!

With time flying (as it always does!) we began our run back to base armed with one Food2You poster each. The challenge was to get the poster displayed in a shop, supermarket or local convenience store. In a classic case of speaking too soon about it being an early Christmas miracle that no-one had been lost, as we reached Shepherd's Bush Green again we realised that we were 3 GoodGym'ers short! Thankfully the yellow viz of Johnny was soon spotted running with Rosie and Tatty!

With a handful of Food2You posters successfully delivered and displayed, and most importantly, everyone present and correct, we all headed off on our short run back to base for a stretch off and then back home. Another good deed done! Thank you for all your hard work and efforts tonight team...560 exercise repetitions and around 450 leaflets delivered, boom!

Shoutouts 📣

• A big well done to Matt who got not one but TWO PBs at the weekend!! 🥳🙌🏼.
• Well done to Alice and 'Speedy Jonzales', Jonny Knight for completing the Spartan Stadion Race at Twickenham! 🙌
• Thank you to all my backmarkers, and to Mo for his fantastic camera work as always 📸.
  

News 📰

1. H&F Community Mission - Age UK H&F's Christmas party is on Thursday 12th December. Please sign up here if you can lend a hand anytime between 4pm-8.30pm.
2. Other local Community Missions - Tree planting in Chiswick on Saturday 30th November, all the details are here.
3. Santa Dash 🎅- Sunday 8th December at Brockwell Park. Run a 5k or 10k dressed as Santa! All the details are here - Andrew has kindly created a team called 'GoodGym H&F'.
4. GG-all areas Christmas party 🎅🎄⛄🎉 - Friday 6th December. Places are limited so make sure you sign up! All the details are here.

Next week, we’ll be spreading some Christmas cheer as we will be delivering some Christmas Cards for H&F Foodbank around Fulham. Please sign up here. Have a great rest of your week and weekend. Hopefully see you next week!

The leafs have leaft the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden thanks to the hard work of GoodGym H&F

Tonight there was the 'great debate' on ITV, at GoodGym H&F however, our great debates tend to be around 'weed or not a weed?' and the big questions in life such as 'what is your favourite pudding and what animal would you rather be?' - I feel we do a good job at putting the world to rights!

Despite the noticeable cooler temperature due to a cold front from the North Pole*, 14 other GoodGym'ers joined me for tonight's task at the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden.

Big welcome to our new runner tonight, Rosie who joined us for her first GoodGym H&F group run - thank you for coming along, hope you enjoyed it! And great to see Analiese (our new token Kiwi!) back for her second run.

With everyone layered up and ready we headed outside for our news round-up and warm-up...

Some pro-leaf-ic running...

We started off the evening by first congratulating our Fulham 10k runners...Lucy, Jonny, Alice and Arba. Well done all and congratulations Alice on the new PB!! 🙌🏼🥳

We also congratulated Tom on his tough Maverick Trail race, one of those 'flat' races with a brutal 217m of elevation!

In other news...

1. H&F Community Mission - Thursday 12th December for Age UK H&F's Christmas Party. Please sign up here if you can lend a hand anytime between 4pm-8.30pm.
2. GoodGym have teamed up with food poverty charity FareShare and Tesco to help people struggling with hunger in a series of community missions. There's one happening in Wimbledon Metro on Saturday 23rd November. For all the details, click [here].
3. GG Training Run - 13 Bridges Battersea - Tower - Sunday 24th November. All the details are here.
4. FoodCycle, East Acton - Volunteer to cook community meals from surplus foods. All the details are here - if interested, speak to Cookie and he can make it a Community Mission!
   

Leaf it out!

Before we headed off on our run we had a quick warm-up comprising of some high knees, jumping jacks, spotty dogs, lunges and some perfectly executed side-to-sides, both clockwise and anti-clockwise! With everyone nicely warmed up we headed off through the busy streets of Hammersmith up towards Shepherd’s Bush, pausing briefly for the beloved wall sit en route.

Matt, Tom and Andrew kindly continued on up the road to distribute about half a dozen leaflets for Open Age H&F, a charity which provides hundreds of weekly activities for local residents aged 50+ to sustain their physical and mental fitness, maintain an active lifestyle and develop new and stimulating interests - the good news is we'll be distrubuting more of these leaflets next week!

As it was a good few degrees colder than of late we had a nice brisk run up and it wasn't long before we'd weaved our way round pedestrians and zig-zagged through the streets to reach the Nubian Life Centre. In perfect synchronisation, we arrived with Matt, Tom and Andrew who appeared in the darkness from the opposite direction.

Read it and sweep!

We entered into the Josiah Briathwaite Community Garden, part of the Nubian Life Centre, and were greeted by the lovely, Susannah. The Nubian Life Centre provides adult day care services for the Afro-Caribbean community with health issues such as Dementia and Alzheimer's and Susannah explained that the garden was used by the elders at weekends to grow organic and medicinal food, and as a safe space for children to explore and find all the bugs!

Susannah went on to give us an interesting gardening lesson around the benefits of green manure and the permaculture principles to restore fertility and nitrogen to the soil, and the Gardeners' World visit last year - check it out here.

Tonight's full list of tasks to be done that Susannah ran through with the group were:

• Planting green manure 🌱
• Sweeping the patio and paths 🧹
• Removing and cutting up the old climbers ✂️
• Raking and collecting all the leaves from the grass 🍂
• Fixing up the new signs for the garden 🔨

Green manure planting that's a cut above the rest

Matt and Marissa got stuck into the garden bed with the assistance of some secateurs to cut the dead plants. Eloise, Tom and Andrew worked together to remove and cut up the dead climbers from the dead garden bed and began the planting of the green manure.

A clean sweep

Opting for the brushes were Rosie, Analiese and Johnny who teamed up to give the paths and patio a good sweep, with Johnny taking on the important role of bag holder in Sarah's absence.

Rake that leaves

Lucy, with her new found love of the rake, systematically raked the garden and formed many a piles of leaves that Andrew and Tom efficiently collected and bagged using the 'handy' hand-scooping tool. Cookie ensured the new signs for the garden were securely put up, while Alice and Sarah got fully stuck into the garden beds, meticulously combing through the plants to remove all the leaves that had fallen, forming yet more piles of leaves!

With the time coming to call it a night, everyone finished up with their jobs, piled up the 5 bags of leaves and garden waste, and branched out for a team photo around the tree. Susannah was incredibly appreciative of the teams hard work and efforts to get the entire list of jobs completed as they have a visited from their funders tomorrow - what good timing for a GoodGym style garden makeover!

Check out the transformation!....

We said our final thankyous and goodbyes and began our run back to base. En route back we bumped into two familar faces in GG tees, Jonny and Mo, who earned their good deed by delivering the final Open Age H&F leaflet. Back at base, Mo kindly led the cool down and stretch off before everyone headed home to the warm! Great job team. Amazing work as always!

Next week we're we're leafleting and postering for two local charities, Open Age H&F and Food2You. Please sign up here. Have a great rest of your week and weekend. Hopefully see you next week!

*according to the Metro, other newspapers are available!