Run report by Ben Cooper!

22 green-fingered runners ran 4km to bring back some nature at St Joseph's Primary School!

Tonight’s task saw us make a return to St Joseph’s Primary School – Neil’s place of work. Give Neil a cheer for setting it up.

Matt and Deb were making their debuts, and thankfully the rain held off for them as well. And Imogen also made a comeback.

The group was further enhanced with the presence of new trainer Ben A, from soon-to-be GoodGym Cardiff. Ben had been to Wandsworth, on Monday, and Barnet, on Tuesday, before finally landing the royal gig – Greenwich. You know you’ve made it, when the starting point is in a World Heritage Site!

Proceedings started on fishy note, and no I am not referring to the smell of Ben P’s hairspray. Sarah, GoodGym Greenwich Trainer, asked the group what their favourite sea animal was. It seemed to stump our resident medical student, Amy. Obviously, she is more at land with working with humans (we hope).

Before Sarah closed the intro, Ben P stepped forward and said he had something to say. Sarah admitted an audible gasp - ‘What was this usurper doing!?’

HAPPY 50th GOOD DEED!

Alas, it was our esteemed trainer’s 50th good deed, and unknown to Sarah, a small clandestine group had been planning some festivities as we couldn’t let the occasion pass without acknowledging it aka ritually embarrassing her.

When I say, clandestine group don’t think ‘meeting under the cover of darkness, in the Old Royal Naval College Undercroft, wearing red robes and chanting’ but rather Alex setting up a separate messenger group.

Unfortunately, most shops have not yet seen the potential growth market of stocking 50th good deeds products, so we plastered Sarah with a 50th badge and helium balloon. Hope we haven’t given you a complex about how old you look. ;-)

The temperature was dropping so Ben A took us a few warm-up dialling up the exertion knob from 1-5. Ben A’s use of the word shimmy also piqued people’s interest with style points going to Brin for his interpretation of a shimmy. Watching him reminded me of the famous French-American fencer Maitre Michel Alaux.

Setting off we resembled some sort of weird hen/stag/birthday/running group mash-up with Sarah in her full regalia. A short run along the river; we do like to show off our * cough * royal borough when other GoodGym tourists come to visit, and we were there.

Headteacher Mouquet informed the group that 1 in 5 school children don’t have a house garden. Hence, the importance of connecting children back to nature. Putting the green back into Greenwich as we always like to do, we got straight to it.

Gareth had kindly brought some spare pair of gloves, although Charlotte and Mridula looked dubiously at them - Black and latex. More fitting for handling corpses than carnations.

Isabella, Linda and Marta picked up the paintbrushes and started painting the fence green. Marta did some touching up of a few plants as well for good measure.

Working on their hands and knees (Sarah is a hard task master), the rest of the group split up into lines do some planting – lavender, carnations and pansies. Alex was assigned the chief compost bag ‘shakey’ ‘shakey’ distributor.

Overhearing a few conversations did expose a perhaps worrying lack of gardening knowledge in the group. For example, ‘we need something to dig a hole’. The top answer you were looking for was a spade, and another conversation debating the difference between a trowel and a trident. From my little knowledge of Greek mythology, I am sure Poseidon, God of the Sea is not pictured with a trowel.

No sooner from fence we had came we were compotted. Great work everyone! It’d be great to see the look on all those children faces when they come into school and see plants painted green. Ha ha.

Then we offshooted back for our fitness session. But not before the obligatory group photo. Ben A even cajoled Sarah to get in the photo. No hiding this week boss.

Ben A led the fitness session. We did some speed interval training around the quadrant (we have quadrants in Greenwich) running at 50% halfway, and then cranking it up to 100%.

Everyone pushed hard and there was still time to play a game like British Bulldog but more in keeping with the fish theme, called Fishy Fishy.

Ben A: "Fishy, fishy swimming in the sea" All: "Sharky, sharky you can't catch me"

Ben A was a shark swimming around trying to catch the fishes. There was also a curious seaweed dance that Ben A briefly showed us. Expect and hope that comes out at future GoodGym Cardiff socials!

With sharks circling, some fishes were swimming too fast and Jo got caught in some cross streams. Jo hope your knee is ok.

Appetites found and how – thanks Ben A, we embarked to the Cutty Sark pub for our monthly social. Alex had secured the Crow’s Nest room, at the top of the Cutty Sark, with great views looking out on the river. Pure Bliss. And Sarah got up the stairs spritely for someone of her rapidly increasing years.

And with most people picking the fish n chips option, the fish theme just wouldn’t go away. The injured Christian also joined the group for the meal bringing some much missing decorum to the evening.

Ignoring Sarah’s 50th get-up, perhaps the oddest sight of the evening was seeing Brin drink out of something other than his now legendary water bottle. However, the change in receptacle clearly seem to knock him off course as he couldn’t seem to find his words at points.

Festivities included Ben C delivering a short quiz titled ‘Know your Place’, testing Sarah’s GoodGym knowledge. Evidently, Sarah does write all her own puns as she demonstrated nearly perfect recall when called on to complete the pun phrases.

Ben P, who had been covertly collecting signatures for Sarah’s card throughout the whole session, presented Sarah with her card which had some great group photos from previous tasks splashed on the front.

And Vickie, designer and socks/trainers combo trendsetter had made Sarah a little artwork.

Following the food, the kind staff, at the Cutty Sark brought, out a cake as made by Mridula. This cake had criss-crossed it way across London from home to work and to its final resting place, the pub’s fridge. Co-worker Helen confessed she had opened the fridge, at their workplace, to admire said cake but she wouldn’t be drawn if she had licked the icing or not.

Whoever, buys the movie rights to Mridula’s anecdote about getting the cake to the pub has got a sure-fire blockbuster on their hands. (PG12 owing to lots of mild peril scenes and rude innuendo about buns.)

Thanks for visiting Ben A! Car-you-diff Ben A some love here. On tonight’s evidence, GoodGym Cardiff is going to go swimmingly!

Mridula have a nice holiday. You can find a link to the cake recipe here.

Lastly, like the Murder on the Orient Express, a lot of people had been complicit in arranging Sarah’s 50th celebrations in the full knowledge that Sarah might beast us extra hard the next week, but we wanted to do something to show our appreciation for all our trainer does.

Next up for the big five-o is our Social Sec, Alex. Don’t worry Alex, we’ve already got your red mankini on order! It will hang nicely next to your blue and purple ones!

33 GoodGymers ran between 3-6km, made beds for the homeless and helped Skip Garden!

Thanks and welcome to all the new people that came this week; Chloe, Pierre, Enrica, Joanna, Marium and Emma. We also had a photographer and journalist from Runaway Mag, article and pictures to be released soon.

In the news this week:

1. Tom Benson is organising the GG race team monthly time trial on Sunday in Victoria Park if you want to take part. Full details here.
2. Next week is the GG monthly social, we're on tour down to Lewisham. More details here, it's gonna be good!
3. The BIGGEST TASK of the year is next week helping Grounded Ecotherapy lift and carry cement mix at the Southbank Centre on the Thames. SIGN UP HERE

C4WS Task by Frances:

Frances and Pritesh led 15 GoodGymers back to C4WS to help them make beds for the homeless shelter. It's a quick and simple job for us, but a great help to the volunteers organising the shelter.

Quick & simple

Most of the people in the group were either new to GoodGym, new to the homeless shelter, or in Axel’s case, new to making beds. Everyone got stuck in and made the beds in super-speedy time before we headed over to Granary Square to meet the others – ready for the Time Trial!

Skip Garden Task:

Fifteen of us headed to Skip Garden near Granary Square to help Global Generation. Our tasks this time:

1. Moving planters, pots, tables and bags of soil around the garden. This was like a massive game of jenga.
2. Turn the compost machine and sieve the contents to use as mulch in the garden.

We split into teams, got lots done and rotated the teams - well done everyone! After finishing our 'tasking' Gwen explained about Skip Garden and Global Generation the charity who runs it, here is some of what we found out:

• Existed for 12 years across four different sites in Kings Cross
• The team work with young people in the community to educate them on alternative living
• They keep bees who make lovely honey & there is a HONEY CLUB
• Also they keep chickens who provide lovely eggs for the cafe :)

Fitness:

First off we did a series of strength and conditioning exercises, including squats, press ups, tricep dips and plenty more. We mixed this up with some intervals and balancing exercises.

90 degree angle PLEASE

With both groups now combined we moved onto arm technique. When running your arms are as important as your legs, they are vital for efficiency and power. So to develop our arm technique we got into pairs and practised powering our arms at a 90 degree angle, have an open chest and no crossing of the arms!

Next we moved onto our monthly Time Trial - 880 metres around Granary Square. Everyone did brilliantly! Nice arms! I have a record of everyone's time, if you would like yours please just let me know. I'll be keeping an eye on times over the coming trials and I can keep you updated on your progress.

Sign up for next week here, we are breaking out of Camden and heading to the Southbank Centre to help Grounded Ecotherapy. It's a fantastic task,a really great charity and a big workout - come along and tell your mates too - it'll be a great intro to GoodGym for them!

PB out.