Linda and LSH Ed turned up at the SHP Allotment just about on time to find Chloe and Jem already there and keen to get started.

Welcome back to Chloe, who has been on a study break from GG and congrats on your qualification. 🥳

Finding the area soggy from the biblical downpours at the weekend there was no need for any plant watering. Ed restarted defending the shed from the prolific growth of the walnut tree. Chloe and Jem set about tidying the planted beds, this is a tricky task as the task owner likes the wild flowers, which some of us call weeds but with a little previous knowledge, a plant identifying app and a little commonsense a good job was done...we just need to find a way of keeping Jem out of the biting ant nests 😳

Linda cleared the bases of some of the fruit trees from brambles and bind weed. Its good to see some of the fruit trees we planted earlier are now bearing fruit. 🍐🍏 Jem also found some sizable courgettes planted by the SHP team too.

Sometimes we feel a little unmotivated when it looks like we are not keeping up with the overgrowth but today we could actually see the fruits of labour. With the new fortnightly Saturday missions maybe an even bigger difference can be made.

On the first Goodgym Redbridge run of a new decade, 10 runners turned up to hunt Christmas trees and ran 5 miles in the process. You gotta love January!

The first run of January is always one of our favourites. Not only do we get to catch up on all the things that have happened over the festive period but we get to do one of our bestest tasks - Christmas tree hunting.

Each January, trees are kicked to the curb, their limbs bare of needles, unloved and unwanted. Unfortunately, they also block pavements and generally make the place a bit untidy. Redbridge Council do, in fact, have a collection service but trees must be left near bins and despite this some still get dumped on roadside.

Armed with gardening gloves, maps of the local area and plenty of Goodgym spirit, pairs and trios headed off into the night to hunt down those pesky Xmas trees and drag them to the recycling centre some 3km away. No one quite knows how many or how big the trees will be but the aim was to transport at least six trees to the centre.

45 minutes later, the team had found seven trees in the local area with Cedric and Kathryn winning the award for two trees and John and Julia collecting a monster of a specimen - it was no mean feat to get that tree all the way there.

All that was left was a run back to base for some easy stretching and some delicious blueberry cake, expertly baked by Sharon! Thank you!

Goodgym is on a drive to do 8,000 tasks and run 100,000km in January. If you fancy helping us crush this goal you can sign up to next week’s run here!

17 GoodGymers ran over 6k to help One Big Family helping the homeless charity make the food for the evenings food offering.

A bright, beautiful at an ideal temperature met us for our weekly run of fitness goodness!

Zipping our of the New Balance shop and weaving our way south through some of the busiest areas in the country is no mean feat! Keeping a nice pace while ducking and diving away from the floating pollen got us down to the 3k Ebury Estate.

With food donations down this week we made light work making up 4 loafs of Jam sandwiches while bagging up over a hundred pastries! All bagged and boxed in 20 efficient minutes of team work!

With a though clear up done we embarked on the first of our double circuits sessions! Testing our upper and lower body conditioning big time we had to dig deep to complete the team challenges at the end!

So to break up the run we nipped out of the youth club and 2k up to Green Park where we dominated 7 minutes of core conditioning on the grass before taking the very direct route back with a superb workout complete!!

Thanks for coming along and hope you all had a great time! Next week we are on our monthly food donation run where (if you would like) we will bring along donations of soft fruit donations then running around Westminster handing them out to the homeless community.

Hope to see you there!!

Smooth Running

Joel

14 Westminster GoodGymes ran 5k to help St Andrews Youth Club.

Just to follow up on a couple of things I talked about at the start!

If watching or hearing about running London Marathon inspired you to run the ballot opens on the 30th of April for 5 days only! You have to be in it to win it so think why not enter! Click here for all the information on how to enter via Ballot, charity place or time qualification.

We need to get active organising ourselves for the GoodGym Olympics!! all the information on what it’s about and all things we need to prepare are here. Be amazing if we could get a team together! Sign up and let’s have a chat in the coming weeks about we can represent well!

Next week post Wednesday Group Run I thought I would be fun for anyone who fancied it if we went for a little social to refuel after the session!

So 2.5k through the heart of London Town to St Andrews Youth Club where we met Adrian the Youth Club manager. Splitting into groups we first had a little dirt out of the boxing kit store room while the second group cleaned the gym kit down stairs. Before we returned to the ground floor to find a revitalised garage store following on from our hard work on our last visit! We persuaded Adrian to finally get rid of the last remaining relics so the amazing and usable kit can be accessed for the brilliant activities.

We were even able to recycle some let’s say mature cricket and softball kit for our own summer sporting endeavours.

With a little time to spare we ran up to Green Park for a sharpe circuits blast focusing on our core and upper body conditioning!!

All back done and dusted at New Balance by 8!

Next week we are helping Open Age who are a charity who provide support and activities for Westminsters older and often isolated community. We will be distributing flyers about the lates courses to the most difficult to reach residents.

Smooth Running

Joel