24 GoodGymers booked a trip to the library at John Betts Primary and made shhhh happen!

That old c word is very much the talk of GoodGym and the World, but it didn't stop 23 GoodGymers from joining me tonight to help out with a range of jobs at Eloise's school, John Betts Primary.

Tonight we welcomed along, Erica, Dan and Katherine to their first H&F group run, hope you enjoyed it! It was also lovely to have David join us and GoodGym tourist, Leticia, from our neighbours GoodGym Hounslow. Thank you all for joining us and lending some extra hands tonight! 🙌

The 'authoritive' red whistle made a return and helped us kick off the night where akin to obedient school children, everyone fell silent and headed outside as instructed. Once settled in our 'glamorous' cordoned off car park spot, we began the intros and news round-up...

Shoutouts 📣

• A big well done to Matt and Eloise for completing the Cambridge Half, with a few bonus miles thrown in at the beginning!
• Thank you to Cookie for backmarking and to Lucy for the additional photos and insta boomerangs!

The book end...a recap of this week's news

1. Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Please read GoodGym's current guidelines here 🦠📝. At the moment, all GoodGym activities are carrying on as normal but will be updated as the situation progresses. REMEMBER...Catch it. Bin it. Kill it! 🗑️

2. Upcoming H&F Community Mission - Last Saturday of the month...help out the Fulham Palace Volunteers, all the details are here.

3. Race volunteers needed 🏁 - Volunteer at adidas City Runs: 1 hour - Sunday 5th April and Hackney Half Aid Station Volunteering - Sunday 17th May.

We began with a pulse raising warm-up which involved some high knees, spotty dogs and inner foot taps, which seemed to more resemble Morris dancing for some...Lucy! With everyone warmed-up and stretched we set off to John Betts Primary School, with Cookie kindly backmarking to ensure no one was lost en route.

Having successfully navigated our way through the busy central streets of Hammersmith, Matt spotted the perfect spot for our weekly wall sit and thus began the most beloved 30 seconds of the session....

Wall sit complete, we sped off towards the front gates of John Betts Primary and tracked down Matt who was inside awaiting our arrival. Katie and Tom were both left in amazement and disappointment when they learnt that the 2 people in the picture they recreated on our last visit to John Betts were in the school last Monday! Both were completely gutted that they'd narrowly missed out on meeting royality!

Another toot of the 'authoritive' red whistle silenced the group and they gathered round in a circle. Matt and his daughter, Emily greeted the team and explained the jobs that they'd be tackling tonight:

*Sticking new labels on the library books 📚 *Moving 2 storage units from one side of the school to the other 🗄 *Helping to sort the school uniform back into the storage units👕

With Eloise being Head of English at the school it was only right she led most of the team to the library to begin the relabelling library book process. On the way into the library, we spotted the wonderful 'Welcome back GoodGym' PowerPoint slide that Matt had made earlier in the day...lovely!

Three weeks ago, the team had helped the PTA with categorising all the library books by genre. But now the fun really began...

Book us up

Each label represented a genre and all the correct coloured labels needed to be stuck on each of the library books, what could go wrong?! Green 📗 = Nature, Blue 📘 = Science and Technology, and 📙 = History, amongst many others!

Booking on gas!

The team spread themselves around the room onto the different tables that had been allocated with a genre and coloured label.

Book in the day!

With everyday being a school day the team learnt some interesting facts and stories, including one about the water cycle! Tom even discovered that many of the books preceded his birth!

Book in business

With a whole heap of books to get labelled, yes there really was A LOT of books in the library, who'd have thought it(?!) the team efficiently got a labelling production line going. GoodGymers labelled the books,then passed them to the PTAs who added the freshly labelled books to the shelves in the library.

While the others tackled the labelling, Cookie, Andrew, Biscuits and Matt headed upstairs to the storage cupboard where they were faced with a tiny room. In the room were two storage units that needed emptying and then moving across to the other side of the school.

Piles of uniforms, boxes and shelving were moved out of the storage room and from inside the cupboard into the adjacent room.

Treat yo' shelf!

With the storage units now empty, Team muscle, who had some extra muscle added with the arrival of Annabel, began to shift and wiggle the units out the room and up the stairs. Matt practiced his escapism and slid between the narrow gap between the doorway and unit.

When push comes to shove

Wth the storage units successful shifted, pushed and shoved (amongst other methods!) across to the other room the first job was to slide the shelves back in to the units.

Biscuits couldn't contain his excitement as he joined Matt, Cookie and Andrew in ferrying across the final few boxes from the storage room.

Some shelf indulgence

With the units shelved and ready, it was time to sort the uniform into ages and place them neatly on the shelf. Bags and organisation, this was definitely a job made for Sarah! Both Sarah and Erica helped one of the PTA members sort through the mountains of bags and uniform until they were all nicely sorted and organised.

With all the jobs completed the team reconvened in the hall with their eye on the climbing frame. Eloise was first to climb to the top, closely followed by Cookie whilst the rest of the team gathered round for a top team photo

Matt had kindly given out some glow in the dark wristbands leftover from a cycling proficiency course which also provided another excellent group team photo op.

We said our thank yous and goodbyes to Matt and Emily and headed outside for a quick fitness blitz. Upon hearing the word “fitness”, Team Nash waved and exited stage right as quick as a flash!

In front of the school, the team smashed out some frog jumps, pistol squats, snowboard jumps, supermans and partner squats before beginning the short run back to base. En route we had a brief pause that enabled Sarah to complete one of her physio exercises, some side squats - two birds, one stone!

Back at base we book ended the evening with a good stretch off and class was dismissed!

Next week, we'll be flyering for Open Age H&F around White City, please sign up here. Absolutely awesome work tonight team!💪 🙌 Have a lovely rest of your week and weekend 😊.

8 westminster GoodGymers ran 6.5km to One Big Family Homeless Charity to sort out a ton of clothing donations!

Big welcome to Jenny and Catherine on their first GoodGym runs!!

Look out for next weeks GG10 tasks and celebrations next week at GoodGym turns 10!!

Next Wednesday we are plogging along the canal path in Little Venice.

Big shout out to Emily for leading the charge down to and back from Victoria with some expert navigation and running!! We had to negotiate the Central London foot traffic and made out way just over 3k to One Big Family to meet Mike and team.

Mike was not his usual self today after being let down again from the powers that be. He is doing a magnificent job providing support, food, clothing and supplies to Westminster’s most vulnerable. He is having to really fight to keep going while the Ebury Estate is being knocked down and shut down around him.

Even though we could do the task we had hoped by clearing out the storage sheds and rehoming them into the container. We still hopefully made their life's a bit easier by shorting out a tonne of clothing donations into clothing type and gender order so that they can be easily distributed to those that need. Also having the added benefit of creating space in the clothing donation bin so that further donations can be made.

With socks, jumpers, pants, tops, coats, and even knee pads all sorted and speed away in the lodge we had completed the task and zipped away back to base!!

A strong run back perfectly to time rounded off a top evening!! Hope to see you all again next week!

Joel

This week we welcomed some new runners to King’s - Wai Jean Koh and Juliane Gleitze - give them a cheer everybody!

We had a quick intro into what GoodGym is all about and also heard about the last GoodGym social before the Christmas Party - it's on 9th Nov at The Cow in Westfield (Stratford), you can find out more here.

We started our evening run with a warm up and some quick introductions to find out what everyone’s favourite chocolate bar is - there were no two answers the same but here at King's we definitely seem to like the caramel and chocolate combo! It was a cold evening so we took a steady 2.5km run down to Charles Dickens Primary School to help move some carpet tiles and do a stock take of the tools and equipment in their basement.

We were greeted by Mark, who showed us where to move the tiles and which things to count in the stock take and we got straight to work.

The task: The women took one side, tackling paint pots, storage boxes & a variety of different cleaning materials, while the men took the other side and sorted out the toilet rolls and gardening tools. We then combined forces at the end to move the carpet tiles so they could be easily accessed by some people coming in next week to lay them.

Once finished (but not before a quick picture outside their fantastic school sign) we made our way to Mint Street park for some sprints work. We focussed on the backwards arm drive that we worked on last week, but also added in some posture work! Once everyone was tired out, we headed back to King’s for some stretches.

Fantastic sprinting from everyone - see you next week, when we will be heading to a local nursery to tidy up their garden.

With the summer holidays in full swing, tonight we were a small group but we still packed a punch and got a lot done between us!

We started our run tonight with a warm up jog down to Walpole for a running technique and drills session before the main event. This consisted of a number of different exercises designed to get our bodies ready for running including some very graceful looking horse style kicking (I promise this is a real running drill!).

We then set off to run to the Elthorne Park stretch of canal on the River Brent where reunited with the wonderful Jack from The Canal & River Trust. This was our second task on this part of the canal and it was great to be back even though it did look like someone had recently had a cider party there and forgot to take all their rubbish home!

Jack split us into two groups, one to tackle an overgrown buddleia bush and make the canal safer for passing cycles and pedestrians and one to paint over the unsightly graffiti on the underpass. Andy, Emily and Larissa were quick to express their interest in painting which involved some lovely boiler suits. It was a strong look guys!

Ronan, Mike and Alex put their hands up to saw and shear the vegetation growing over the towpath whilst I did some ad hoc litter picking between checking on the groups and taking photos, afterwards it was like the cider party had never happened.

Jack always comes really well prepared when he meets us with lots of tools and a number of different tasks we can complete in the location, however the one thing he did forget this week was a wet paint sign! Therefore we've made a little make shift wet paint sign which we will return to paint over next time!

With a good nights work complete we did an Indian file running session to get back to base for a quick stretch and cool down.

Thank you all for coming, every one of you guys are great but special mention this week goes to our visitor Andy from GoodGym Hounslow whose on a mission to get to 50 good deeds before his Wandsworth (friendly) rival! We were deed number 41 on the list so it's getting close now, good luck Andy hopefully see you back with us soon (or will your rival use us to get their numbers up too?!).

Next week we are heading to Ealing Food Bank to help with a bit of maintenance and you can sign up here.

See you next time, happy running :)