Five of us met at Jubilee School to shovel some wood chip into big rubble sacks.

There was some torrential rain on the way over but the five of us were brave enough to venture out! Juan took us to the pile of wood chip and provided us with a couple of sacks and a selection of shovels of varying size and quality.

We took turns shovelling and tipping the wood chip into the sacks whilst discussing Wimbledon vs Love Island, the rules of Love Island and a lot of food based topics.

After just under an hour we were done and the sun was shining on us.

What a delightful evening for a GoodGym run. And what a fabulous turn out! 37 hardcore GoodGymers hit the pavements to help two local projects - Ruskin Community Garden, and Springfield Lodge, a Salvation Army hostel for young people.

We had 8 new runners with us this week: Nice one Fiona, Jade, Rosa, Phoebe, Tom, Caitlin, Rachael and Elinor for coming along!

We started off with a visit from Paul who smashed the London Marathon on Sunday as well as fellow GoodGym Lambeth stars Nicky and Phil! I think he tempted some of us to GET SIGNED UP.

And we heard how GG Lambeth has our Bank Holiday weekend sorted with a community mission this Saturday for the GP food coop as well as our social to sample the Brixton Windmill Bread and Beer Festival on Monday. 🍞🍻👅

We also awarded our SPOTM, which had a hair and head theme, with a shower cap, comb and white cap (complete with all-important 90's style, flip down eye-visor - you know the ones). And this went to a person, who is very new to GG Lambeth but this week completed her 4th good deed, sorted her DBS last week and has now completed all the training and become MISSION VERIFIED so she can now get signed up to help older people with one-off tasks:

Everybody give a big cheer to Laura! 👏👏👏🎈🎈🎈🎉🎉🎉

After all that, we had a quick warm up and headed off.

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Tom had this to say about his group who ran to Ruskin Community Garden:

14 runners made their way across town on a 5km round trip to Ruskin Park. After successfully resisting the temptation to join the Trapeze School in session; We met up with Justin who showed us round the community garden. Our task was to dig over a particularly wild looking over-grown patch of the garden to be used as a flower bed.

We made short work of this with the group really getting stuck into the task with some particularly satisfying hacking tools. Ably assisted by Rose heading up a wheelbarrow ferry service for all the green stuff we turned up.

Our duties even stretched to rehousing a family of newts; Who were quite friendly, despite us levelling their home in the wild patch of grass.

Sorry guys!

With our work complete we headed back against the backdrop of a very picturesque looking sunset. A perfect summer's night for GoodGym. Many more like this please!

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My group took a 6km hilly run past Denmark Hill up to Springfield Lodge. We were greeted by Rosanna, also a GoodGym runner with Southwark(!), and she quickly set us some tidying up tasks including:

Removing bindweed 🌱

Moving some huge dustbins ♻️

Clearing leaves to compost 🍂

Litterpicking 🚮

We split into teams to tackle the different areas and everybody made a massive difference to the space in such a short amount of time. Rosanna was super happy we ran back, sprinting the final section of the route from Ferndale Road which is a new STRAVA SEGMENT. Check it out 😉 and well done to Jim for being the fastest runner today (19s!).

Awesome work everyone and see you next time... ✌️

Oh it was a hilly one today, with a run up Brixton Hill, along Hillside Road to Hillside Gardens.

We set off at a steady pace, dodging the crowds in Brixton until we got to clearer paths before making the ascent towards our destination. Our legs got some respite at the traffic lights and to pass the time, some of us were brave enough to do squats with some cheeky inbuilt calf raises!

We arrived at Hillside Gardens to be met by Tom and Stu, who split us into small groups of us to do different tasks - clearing weeds, transporting compost and moving wood, rubbish and rubble. It was great to get stuck into the tasks while it was still light. After a solid half hour, we finished up, took a group photo at the top of the hill (with some killer views behind us!) and set off on a nice downhill run back to Papa's.

Tom said they were really impressed with what we got done and that sorting through the yard has helped them work out what they need to do for the future.

We had a bunch of new runners to GoodGym Lambeth and some totally new runners to GoodGym, Maya and Sophie! - a massive welcome to you, and well done to everyone for a cracking task and run! 🐣

After thunder and lightening very very frightening during the afternoon, we actually managed to have a dry run come evening in Lambeth. As the last Tuesday of the month we had our Shit Prize of the Month to give out. The lucky winner was Andrew, who finally, finally bought some new trainers. This has made trainer Katie very happy as she feels sad when she looks at his sad, sad shoes. WELL DONE ANDREW.

James KB led a small but perfectly formed crack team 3km through Brockwell Park to the South London Botanical Institute. They had to move some seeds and boy were there lots. They moved boxes and boxes of the stuff in a human chain. And they only got about half way through. Don't panic Botanicals, we'll be back!

Katie led the rest of the group back to Clapham Common, where we were all happy about the rain as it softened the ground for our nearly final round of digging. We removed loads of the turf and wheelbarrowed it over to the park edge. It was hard work and sometimes even two people jumping on a spade didn't manage to get beneath the surface. But after a lot of arm muscles and a serious portion of elbow grease, we left happy to have made such a big dent in it.

After running back to base, we did some nice stretches and then went home. Well done Lambeth!

Everyone clearly had increased energy from the mass chocolate consumption over Easter as loads of people brought their documents to be checked so they can do our work with older people. Woohoo!

We started the evening by celebrating George who hit 100 big ones. Nice one George!

A small group went off with John to dig some soil out of planters at a GP Surgery in Stockwell. We'll be moving the planters to another surgery and re-filling them with soil quite soon.

The rest were back to Clapham Common to continue our work making a wildflower meadow. This week, we got to turn the soil from the two strips already made and we planted some flowers! It's a true honour that GoodGym got to lay the first plants in this lovely new space. You can see a nice tweet with photos of our handiwork here.

We did some stretches back at base and look forward to next week being even lighter than this one!