Tuesday evening = GoodGym H&F fun! The week had flown by and it was once again Tuesday evening, and another night of 'getting fit and doing good' awaited 22 GoodGym'ers. A big welcome to Zofia who all joined us for her first GoodGym run and to GoodGym tourists Amy and Ian - Ian came along to surprise Jeanette instead of running with his regular Tuesday GoodGym group, GoodGym Bromley - Adele I promise I haven't poached him...yet ;-). Lovely to have you all along, hope to see you all again soon. And of course, wonderful to see my ever present regulars, thank you as always for your enthusiasm and help!

Despite the rain falling earlier in the day, as we stepped out from the Better Gym and headed towards our regular warm-up spot we were greeted with a nice mild and dry night, hooray! The group formed a perfect circle as I ran through the intros and week's news...

Free to news

1. GoodGym Shindig 2019 - weekend of 19th July, in Ironbridge. Register your interest by 21st March.
2. Morden Hall Park - Trust10 Trail Run - Also on Sunday, meet at 8.30am near the White Bridge in Morden Hall Park. Sign up here. It is FREE - there are no admission charges at Morden Hall Park.
3. Putney Charity Pop-Up - The volunteer team at Putney food bank are running a charity pop-up on Friday between 10am-2pm, lots of great raffles prizes to be had if you are free!
4. Science & running with Jo Pavey, Martin Yelling & Friends - Wednesday 27th from 7.30pm, link is in the Whatsapp group, please let Sarah know if you are going and she may be able to sort some popcorn for her fellow GoodGym'ers!

AND a big well done to Helen and Sophie who smashed the Hampton Court Half at the weekend - PB's all round!

Wow. So much news!

More school you

With the name, number count and short pulse raising warm-up completed, with extra kudos paid to Martynas for his brilliant sprinting on the spot technique, we headed off on our short 1.5km run to our task tonight at Flora Gardens Primary School. With one quick wall sit completed en route, it wasn't long before we arrived at the school gates and were buzzed inside by the school's Business Manager, Jeanette who was waiting for us inside the school's 'The White House'.

In 'The White House', Flora Gardens Primary School run a before- and after-school club where meals and snacks are provided so that no child goes hungry. Unfortunately like most schools, they were facing tough financial pressures so did not have the Monet to pay for full price paint and professional redecoration of their school buildings. Thanks to Community Repaint, a brilliant scheme that redistributes leftover paint into their communities at around a third of the price, Jeanette had managed to source around 60 litres for under £150 and for the second time, the many helping hands of GoodGym runners to help revamp some white rooms. What a steal!

This was our fourth visit to Flora Gardens Primary School and it was lovely to see the main room that the team painted on our last couple of visits looking bright and fully functional - Jeanette had included a nice little feature and thank you in the school's latest newsletter which was really lovely, check it out in the Whatsapp group!

Someone like blue can green on me!

Tonight there was more painting on the agenda, and the task was to paint the following rooms: the toilet, the smaller room next to the kitchen and Jeanette's office upstairs in either the green or blue, or more specifically, 'Gilbert Green' or 'Heavenly Horizon' colour. As before, half of the group quickly armed themselves with paint brushes and covered up their valuable GoodGym tees and sportswear with the free oversized L'Oreal t-shirts that Jeanette kindly fetched - the t-shirts are normally used to protect the children's clothing when they do arts and crafts.

Sprinting at the speed of white

While half of the group were painting away under the watchful eye and camera lens of Jason, the other half made use of the playground area outside for this week's fitness session. First up, the group ran eight laps of the playground to get the blood pumping and pulses raised. On these eight laps there was some excellent short sprint work and perfectly executed indian running, or crocodile running as I have renamed it! Now that everyone had noticeably red faces (this is more assumed since it was dark!) and heavy breathing it was time for some 'child's play'....

Dodge in the dark

British bulldog, a classic playground game which was later banned in some schools due to overly 'foul play' was tonight's first game, the nice friendly version where only a gentle tap was permitted by the bulldog, and 10 jumping jacks were given to those that were caught. The first group managed four waves past the bulldogs with Will, Jonny and Amy the last standing, while the second group managed a massive seven waves past the bulldogs with Matt, Eloise and Sapphire the last standing, impressive effort! In a slight Gladiator-esk version of bulldog gauntlet, those that were last standing then guarded their 'home area', despite a couple of slips and slides thankfully no injuries or fallouts occured!

Squatshots

Finally, was a quick 2-minute game of 'shot up, shot down' with 29 red plastic shot glasses. It was Team Up v Team Down, who would emerge victorious? There were some interesting tactics and battles that occurred with shot glasses quickly being up then down or vice versa, shadowing of others, naming no names (Rowena!). All round it was a highly competitive game which provided a great quad workout. In the first match-up it was a landslide for Team Up, and in the seoncd match Team Down pipped Team Up by 4. Awesome shot work all!

Forget me shot

With the rotation of the groups seemless, the walls were quickly transformed from their original white colour to a fresher and brighter blue and green colour. Paint brushes were quickly cleaned and the tidy-up operation in full flow when the first painting group returned from their fitness session. I admired everyone's handywork and was amazed at the incredible transformation in just 45 minutes, the phrase "many hands make light work" felt very apt!

Pulling out all the shots

Before we said our goodbyes and thankyous to Jeanette, the group put together our '24' photo to represent our launch area number in celebration of the 50th GoodGym area launch in Solihull tomorrow. With some excellent props: red plastic shot glasses, paintbrushes and of course a ladder, in order to gain the best vantage point, the group posed for a fabulous group '24' photo - definitely cover photo worthy, big thank you to Sarah and Sapphire for leading on the artistic direction and to Jeanette for kindly providing a ladder.

The magic 24

Task, group '24' photo and fitness session completed, we said goodbye to Jeanette and headed off on the final part of our run down through Furnival Gardens, along the towpath and back to base - with a couple of bonus pistol squats thrown in when we regrouped. Everyone ran a strong pace back and aside from a couple of quick stops for the traffic lights, there was no stopping everyone! There was a closely fought sprint off between Matt and Jonathan on the final stretch that may have needed a photo finish. Back at base we all regrouped and completed a quick cool down and stretch off.

Cool down and stretches complete the class were dismissed to enjoy some delicious and moreish homemade banana bread (1 of our 5 a day?!) made by "the baker man, Johnny", in early celebration of all the 50th good deeds that are coming up in the next few weeks! Thanks as always for the baked delicacy, Johnny!

Next week we're heading up to White City Adventure Playground to help them with a range of painting and environmental jobs, sign up for next week's GoodGym x Earth Hour run here. Have a fab week and good luck to all those who will be running a parkrun on Saturday or the London Landmarks race on Sunday.

Thank you very much to Jason for the wonderful array of photos and for backmarking!

On GG York's 2nd birthday, a big crew rocked up to run, get fit, dig clay and celebrate!

We were joined by two brand new runners, so let's give some big ol' Yorkie cheers to Amy and Savannah. Also worth a cheer, team Beningbrough who collectively clocked something like 240km yesterday for the January Challenge, nice one.

Extraordinary Ed ran his 22nd good deed in 21 days and also got to wear the Cape of Good Deeds as he did his 50th on Friday, whilst Jolly Jenna was running her 50th tonight, and got to wear the cape on the way back. Make sure you give them both some cheers too, 50 good deeds is a brilliant achievement.

After a bunched up warm up (even a car park isn't enough space for us), we headed off for Heworth Holme - where our task was to dig up lots of lovely clay, bag it in heavy duty blue rubble bags and carry it a couple of hundred metres to the end of the path. The clay is to be used to create a new wetlands area at St Nick's Nature Reserve.

The hardest part of the task was figuring out what was soil and what was clay. The clay was much firmer than the soil and could be dug out in blocks. Some people were poking it to see if it felt clay-like whilst others just dug massive holes and took whatever was deepest.

It didn't take very long for us to fill every single bag (around 40), so with a bit of time to spare, we kept digging more holes to make 'wildlife scrapes', which are temporary ponds for wetland wildlife.

After the task we ran over to our favourite birthday workout spot, Morrisons Tower. We had a speedy mini circuit session including all of these treats:

• walking lunges
• sprint circuit
• sit squats
• press ups
• tricep dips
• single leg sits
• mountain climbers

Love the lunges, it's a bit like stretching! (new member Savannah, already my favourite)

We ran back, enjoying the climb of Micklegate Cobbles and then celebrated our birthday with a beautiful bit of cake made by Vicky.

If you want to join us tomorrow to empty out all those bags of clay and get mucky compressing them into the base of a pond - you can sign up here.