19 runners and walkers came out last night to join GoodGym Ealing’s last Tuesday session this year, and in fact this decade!

And what a year it’s been!

But before we could celebrate we had one last task to do. Tonight we were delivering Christmas cards to local residents on behalf of St Peter’s church to let them know all about the services happening there over the festive period.

We were delighted to be joined by Ellie who wanted to squeeze in her first GoodGym before saying goodbye to 2019, big welcome and hope to see you back in the new year!

It was great to see everyone arrive in their festive attire and glad everyone got the memo about Christmas hats being highly encouraged this week! After welcoming everyone and a run down of the news we wasted no time in deploying groups in all directions to get the job done super quick time and get to the pub for our celebratory Christmas party! Each group had a map and set of flats to target so it was a bit like GoodGym orienteering and like that everyone was off into the night walking and running in all directions! With such a good turn out last night, Jenni, Phill and I stayed close to the broadway to give Ealing town centre a festive blitz with the trusty litter pickers.

It wasn’t long before everyone was back and raring to get the party started. So with that we bid farewell to 2019, we’re coming for you 2020!

Group runs are over but you can still do some good stuff before the year is out! Also if you do a community mission between Thursday 19th of December and Sunday 5th January there's an awesome badge in it for you!

• Tomorrow, Thursday 19th December, we have a community mission to help The Grove Community with their winter wonderland. All the details and sign up are here.
• Jenni and Alex are leading a plog at 10am on Saturday morning from Horsenden Farm. If you’re keen to keep our waterways safe and tidy, would like a nice walk or jog with some awesome people and are free for an hour, then sign up here to join them!

The light evenings are really bringing out the masses as last night in Ealing we had 19 GoodGymers out to run and do good! In the mix we had 4 fantastic newbies, big welcome to Jesse on his first GoodGym run and to Heidi, Jack and Sam on their first Ealing group run after joining in on the Earth Hour action last week!

After an introduction and chat about favourite city breaks we headed to Haven Green for a ‘round in circles’ warm up before we headed in our short run up the hill to St Peter’s Church.

A regular in our task calendar, churches like St Peters are so reliant on volunteers and community spirit, we’re extremely happy to give them a hand when it comes to getting this beautiful space ready before their big services. Our job this evening was a mix of cleaning and spreading the word about the parish party in the local area so upon arrival we split into teams. The hardiest of our members last night left the comfort of the lovely warm church and headed out to hit the streets delivering flyers to nearby residents to invite them to the upcoming spring service and party, while the rest of us stayed inside to get place sparkling clean!

It was lovely to have Sophie with us last night who actually got married in the church last year, she was excited to return and give back to the place that has provided her with so many happy memories!

No pew unturned!

Between the group that stayed to clean we left no surface undusted and no floor unswept! With such a big group we were able to really give all areas a good once over ready to receive the masses at the Easter services!

Mopping up the leftovers!

With the flyering groups arriving back it was time to stop dusting and polish of the biscuits (St Peter’s always leave us biscuits out but I promise it’s not the only reason we love helping them!) before heading out for our fitness session for the evening.

Using the last bit of light in the sky we headed to Montpellier Park for some team sprint intervals followed by Sally squats. It was a classic session of all smiles at first, grimaces in the middle and relief and joy to finish!

Great work team, next Tuesday we’ll do it all again! Same place and time with a different task, sign up on the right hand side of the screen! >>>

15 runners met on an oddly mild January evening to run and help St. Peter's Church spruce up after the busy festive period!

Lots of returning faces and regulars last night but we also had 3 brand new members join us. Welcome Basia, Elena and Dagmara!

Getting into the swing of things!

We kicked things off with a warm up focusing on opening up the hips and getting us ready for some good running form. It's really important to prepare your body for exercise especially in the winter when everything is cold and stiff or if you have a sedentary job and haven't moved a lot during the day. We did lots of leg swing drills, similar to these, as well as lots of high knees to raise our pulses! We also discussed our favourite pre-run food, it turns out lots of us are nuts about well... nut butter! It would appear a lot of the group are partial to a spoonful (or two!) before heading out the door on our runs!

We had a short commute to the church on the cards but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get a good run in, so we planned a route taking in a nice steady hill climb to start us off before arriving at the lovely warm St. Peter’s. We were met by church volunteer Moira who was on hand to show us all the tasks that needed doing.

Giving January blues the brush off!

We all quickly donned tools and got to work around the building, dusting, scrubbing and brushing everything we could! Lots of happy faces and people chatting their way through the jobs on hand showed that January needn’t be blue if you come to GoodGym!

Jenni (who was our lovely backmarker tonight, thank you!) was on hand to help everyone with some good RE refresher knowledge pointing out lots of things around the church and explaining what they were, hopefully useful for Sarb when helping with the kids homework!

Run for the hills!

With lots of us on hand to chip in, the cleaning was done in no time leaving us plenty of time for a great hill based fitness session on our way back. We visited the infamous West Walk for some speedy reps up and recoveries down. Everyone pushed to their own ability and although it’s a tough session I think everyone really enjoyed the challenge and embraced the hills and the training benefit it will have! We finished things off with a one minute wall sit where everyone really felt the burn!

Just a short jog back to base where myself and Chris hashed out the pun, then we finished by stretching out our well worked legs and it was home time!

What a fantastic way to spend a dark January evening!

Don't forget the January Challenge!

Lots of talk at the moment of the January challenge! This is a bit of (friendly!) competition between GoodGym areas to see who can rack up the most good deeds and distance in what is easily the hardest month of the year in terms of motivation to go outside in the dark and cold evenings - this is where GoodGym comes in! This year in Ealing our goal is to reach 140 good deeds between us and to try and run 1450 kilometres as a team. To count just make sure you're on Strava/Runkeeper and connect it up to your GoodGym account, that way all your training miles are counted. Then just come along to as many group runs and missions as you can squeeze in - everything counts towards our target even if you visit a different GoodGym area, if you are registered with Ealing it all counts for us! Read all about it and see our progress here.

As world cup fever sweeps the nation, 6 runners from Ealing ditched the football to sweep for St. Peter’s instead!

We started with a quick round of ‘what’s your favourite…?’ and this week we discussed breakfast! Now I love my morning fuel so I reiled off long list of choices only to discover the rest of the you are more of a skip breakfast kinda group, I hope you’re all getting a good lunch in instead!

We also went over some news from the group this week:

• First up is that we have a FREE CONDITIONING SESSION NEXT THURSDAY evening at our wonderful hosts Bodyline Studios. It’ll be led by owner Roy with emphasis on strength exercises for runners and it’ll be great! Sign up and see all the details here.

• Next is that Jenni is still on a mission to get to 50 good deeds by her birthday next month! All being well our group run on 7th August will be her 50th good deed, birthday AND our monthly social! Take a look at her profile to see what she has signed up for and join her if you can!

Our numbers may be small at the moment but our force is mighty as 6 was the perfect number to get us all working hard for a clean sweep on the task at hand.

With new shared it was time for our snappy run up to St.Peter’s! They have a few big events happening at the church in the coming week including their parish summer party and a visit from a very important visitor, Libby Lane the first female bishop of London. We were there to get the church looking its finest for all the upcoming excitement!

Splitting up over the church we weaved in and out to the pews, mopping, sweeping and dusting and by the time we were done everything looked beautiful and the whole church smelt super fresh and clean!

We worked so well that we were left with a good amount of time to head to nearby Montpellier Park for a fitness session and a blast of The Police with burpees set to ‘Roxanne’. Two teams took it in turns to jump for joy when they heard either ‘Roxanne’ or ‘Red Light’. It starts off quite easy but soon ramps up and everyone was out of breath by the end of the song! We finished up with a few more sets of different timed bodyweight exercies before a nice short jog back to the start.

Special mention this week goes to Chris for completing his 25th good deed this week, half way to that ninja t-shirt already!

Hopefully see you all next time!

Hot to trot!

Last not proved too hot to handle for some as we had a very small but super efficient group of 6 runners out to plog and deliver invitations for St. Peter's Church parish party.

A big shout out to Marline (one of our newer GoodGym members, head over to her page and give her some support!) for still coming along despite giving blood for the first time that morning!

No warm up needed last night for the hottest night of the year so far, so after meeting Moira from the church to collect the invitations and decide on the streets to target we split into three pairs and headed straight off! In each team we had our brand new plogging (thats a mix of litter picking and jogging!) equipment kindly donated to our Ealing group by The William Hobbayne Charity. We had fancy litter pickers and handihoops to clean the streets as we went along delivering stacks of invitations to the streets surrounding the church.

6 turned out to be the magic number as we worked together for a clean sweep of three of Ealing's longest (and hilliest!) roads.

After collecting a surprising amount of litter and smashing our flyering task we reconvened at our agreed meeting point it was then time for the #GGOlympics2018 1km time trail! Marline was a superstar and waited with the equipment and bags while the rest of us sped down Park View Road to try our best to get on the leaderboard as part of this weekend's GoodGym Olympics. If you can't make it down you can take part by timing yourself on a 1km run anytime up until Thursday 28th June, click here for all the details!.

Chris led the pack with Carlos following closly behind, then it was myself and Michael hot on my tail with Jenni coming in strong to finish! Just a little jog back to the green to dispose of our rubbish collections and the group thought we were done, ha no chance! A round of Sally Squats awaited with Carlos feeling strong enough to try the push up version!

Great work everyone! Hope to see lots of you next week when we'll be giving back to The William Hobbayne Charity to say thank you for our wonderful new equipment! AND heading to the pub for our monthly social. I've heard there may also be birthday cake...