29 runners ran 4km to finish decorating at the Grub Club in Caius House

Wandsworth News

• The GoodGym social is on tour this month in Wandsworth! 18.30 onwards at the Plough. Don't miss international pun of the month, GoodGym heroes and a mystery guest speaker. Sign up here.

• You can follow the grub club on Twitter and Instagram @grubclub_edu

• A big old welcome to Rochella and James who joined us for the first time last night. Give them a cheer!

That's enough of the business

With Ana away, I hopped, skipped and jumped over from Southwark for an evening of painting galore. Briefed and warmed up we split into two groups - one 'in a hurry' and one 'at a more relaxed pace'. Chi took the former and I took the latter and off we went, being careful to avoid the mayhem of Clapham Junction on our way.

The Grub Club runs free after-school cooking courses for both parents and children who wish to improve their cooking skills, confidence and knowledge. It's within Caius House, a Youth Centre that provides incredible opportunities and facilities for young people in the community. They're most popular facility is the recording studio - the area is bursting with talent and Caius House release an album every year.

Chi's group arrived before us and were already hard at work painting a section of wall green when we arrived. Aisling from Grub Club greeted us and gave a solid briefing. We split into four groups painting different things:

• Pillars

• Chairs

• Tables

• Walls (and ceilings!)

30 minutes multiplied by 29 is 14.5 hours!

As a group we got the equivalent of 14.5 hours' work done. It's a GoodGym miracle. I counted 7 chairs, 3 benches, two pillars and most of the walls done. Phew! Excellent work team. We cleaned up, thanked Aisling and Emma for having us and headed off to Shillington Park on the way home where Chi put us through our paces: scissor kicks, sit ups, squats, burpees and more. It was tough but our cores will thank us.

Then we were off for the short run home - including a strava segment on the hill that everyone had a good crack at.

A lovely evening for a bit of tourism, thanks for having me Wandsworth!

Keep running happy, Lucy

With blue skies as far as the eye could see and not one but two tasks ahead of us last night, GoodGym was hot and ready to trot!

We kicked off the night getting cosy in a very warm room at the BAC with a lot to celebrate.

We had some new faces along for their very first group run last night. A massive Wandsworth welcome to Em, Jilly, Lucy - lovely to have you join us!

We were also fresh from our silver medal position at the GoodGym Olympics the previous Saturday - a huge well done to everybody that came along, cheered and raced. Go team Wandsworth!

Don't forget there's an unmissable chance to socialise and hear all about the amazing things everybody has been doing and the monthly social next week. It's an extra special one as it's the first time that Wandsworth will have hosted, so let's get as many of us together to welcome the rest of GG as possible. It will be at 6:30 on the 12th July, venue TBC.

With two tasks ahead of us, we headed outside to do our warm up. And also to discuss our favourite cocktails and mocktails, because that's important too. The winner was far and away espresso martinis, but we also love mojitos, dark and stormys, margaritas and, um, beer.

We started off the run together, with our first stop at Battersea Park Library. We've all seen many of our local libraries being shut or having their opening hours reduced as they suffer from funding pressure, so we reckon it's important to help out these amazing community centres when we can. Our job last night, under the watchful eye of James the Librarian, was to tidy up and weed the area outside the main building. It may have been a library with only one storey (sorry) but there was plenty to be done, so we left half the group there and the rest of us ran over to The Venue, a community centre which hosts loads of local events and community projects, to help out there. The job here was to empty two rooms of stuff that needed chucking out, so we immediately got ourselves into our fav formation - human chain - and got cracking.

Half an hour later the two groups were reunited, but our job was not done. The van that was meant to be there to receive all the bits from the Venue didn't turn up, so we ended up carrying it round to Space Max, a charity which helps families living with overcrowding in their flats.

With such a busy night we didn't have time for a huge fitness session, so we stopped where we were and smashed out a quick EMOM (every minute, on the minute). The idea is we started with 5 reps of three different exercises, increasing it every minute until we were trying to fit in 10 of each within the time slot. Tough! Luckily we had the self-appointed Junior League of GoodGym there to challenge us, cheer us on, count down the timings and generally act as our support crew. Nice work.

There was just a hot and sticky run ahead of us, and one little chin scratcher of a hill, so off we went to finish off our session. Well done everybody, that was an awful lot of good done in a short amount of time. Next week it's our final visit to the Grub Club, a local community café, to finish up the decorating job there ready for their big opening. Sign up here, gang!.

With the sun out, a great task ahead of us, and some lovely new runners, last night GoodGym really found its happy pace!

Team, show some Wandsworth love to Elle, Timothy, Oli, Matthew, Stephanie, Madison and Beth!

After our weekly round up, which featured a round of applause for Morag, Chris and Paul (in absentia) for some great racing over the weekend in London and Swansea and a reminder that the Goodgym Olympics is THIS SATURDAY! Have a look here for all the details and do come along to cheer on the Wandsworth team and for the social afterwards even if you're not competing!

It was hot, hot, hot last night, but we still needed to warm up our muscles ready for the 6k run ahead of us, so we headed outside to begin with lunges, squats, fast feet and other dynamic exercises. With our heart rates up, we were ready to head to our task, but not before finding out everybody's worst habit. Now, there were several of us who are terrible at time management, one naughty tupperware misuser, those who constantly hit snooze and don't empty the bins on time, but by far and away our biggest collective bad habit is biting our nails! If that's as bad as it gets, I think we're alright, Wandsworth.

Our task tonight was at the beautiful Paradise cooperative garden, right opposite Wandsworth prison. This once abandoned piece of land was taken over by a charitable organisation, and the hard work of their volunteers has transformed it into a beautiful small-holding including an orchard, poly-tunnels, raised vegetable beds, a fish-pond, bush-craft area and community celebration area with pizza oven and running water. The place is much loved by the community but relies on volunteers to keep it running, which is where we came in.

It was a warm and sunny run to the site, and we stopped along the way to knock out a few wall sits and one legged squats. Once we arrived we split up into three groups to tackle the list of jobs. While the first team started immediately on spreading the wood chip all over the pathways, the second took on the massive watering job on the beautiful raised beds. The third group's job was to weed all the areas around the plants, and just half an hour later the place looked so much tidier, well-hydrated and re-chipped.

After a little jog over to the common we started on our short but not-so-sweet fitness session. Our pyramid workout involved doing a series of different exercises in decreasing reps until we reached one sprint, before having a little breather and working our way back up again. Short bursts of high energy like this is great for increasing our aerobic capacity and burning calories.

We finished off the evening with a nice steady run back home (downhill until that last stretch) ending up hot, sweaty but having worked hard both for ourselves and our local community. Way to go! Sign up here for next week's run when we'll be lending a hand in Battersea Library's outside area.