Last night 12 runners ran 5.8km to sort food and baby clothes at Salvation Army

Southwark News

• STOP THE PRESS! OLYMPIC TORCH MAKING PARTY THIS SUNDAY!!!! We'll be eating takeaway and making a torch for the Olympics on Sunday evening. Bring creative ideas, glitter, glue, something red/orange for flames ANYTHING! It'll be ridiculous crafty fun. Let us know you're coming here.

• GoodGym Olympics on Saturday 30th June, come and cheer on your team. There's a bake off and plenty more fun!

• Community Mission to set up Blythe Hill Festival with the Lewisham gang on Sunday 1st July. IT'LL BE A CORKER.

• 15th July is the British 10k. Come and volunteer at the GoodGym water aid station. You get a free place to any Virgin sports race as a thank you!

• We're on Instagram! Follow us @goodgym_southwark.

Phew.... That's enough of the business

12 runners waded through the thick soupy humid air to get to Old Spike for 18.45 last night, ready to go on our weekly volunteering spree. After a few weeks off due to my sprained ankle I was back in action and hell was I excited to actually run with you all!

Girija and Sally took the reins for the route out, challenging us with a shorter but steeper route than anticipated. Big shout out to Allison who made it up the hill without stopping for the first time. All hail Allison, give her a cheer here. We made it all in one piece to meet Janet at the Salvation Army who set us to work on two different tasks:

• One group sorting and labelling foodbank items
• One group sorting donated baby clothes for the baby bank
• One group cleaning toddler cushions

We were reborn!

In 30 minutes not only did we finish everything, we actually had to go into the loft for more baby clothes to sort. We also put all the tables down that we'd used and packed them away. We even clean up after ourselves... the perfect guests!

Fun Fact! Spanish is the second spoken language in Southwark!

We sorted tons of baby clothes, reorganised the entire foodbank cupboard and cleaned all the toddler cushions. Excellent work team! We headed back a different way using the Southwark Sweep - where the runners at the back shout 'sweep' when the front runners are getting too far away and the front have to run all the way to the back of the line. A few peeled off home and the remaining goodgymers executed a brilliant sprint for home when we rounded the corner onto the Rye.

Next week we're going to the Giraffe House on Burgess Park to help build a planter for tomatoes. There will be lifting, shovelling and weeding. See you there!

Lucy J

For our first group run of the year 16 runners arrived at old spike, ready to get 2018 off to a really good start. While people signed in we chatted about the 10 things Rich had been advised to do on moving to London, one of which was come to GoodGym so he can already tick that one off the list. We also chatted about GoodGym’s January challenge and how Southwark is ready and willing to play our part in reaching an impressive number of good deeds and kilometres in January.

A last minute change of task meant that our journey there was as simple as walking through a door. The area behind the roastery is being converted into a community yoga studio so there’s lots of building work going on at the moment. Out the back there was quite a considerable pile of rubble that needed to be bagged up and moved round the corner, ready to be taken to the dump. With such an array of items in the pile it did bring back memories of a late nineties TV show but none of us really had the skills to make a functioning machine out of a lot of plaster board, hundreds of coffee cup lids, some discard chip paper and an old toilet. After half an hour or so we felt like we’d all had a good upper body work out and set off on our run. Half the group came with Tom and I to do a 3km circuit of Peckham Rye and half went with Matt on a slightly extended 5k.