It only feels like yesterday that we started the month of February and now can you flippin’ believe it…it’s nearly March…March has just crepe’d up on us for sure..

But before we end the month there are exciting things going on this week to end February with a bang:

• You batter believe it…it’s pancake day tomorrow…Sara cant wait to make flippin’ delicious pancakes
• On Wednesday we see the launch of our neighbouring Goodgym in Windsor and Maidenhead – Good luck Amy…we are all rooting for you..
• And on Fri-Yay a fair few of us will be at the Get Berkshire Active Awards in Reading hoping for a home win! I’m getting a bit emulsional just thinking about it! But regardless of a win or a runners up award…it will still give Goodgym some frame and fortune! (these puns will make sense as you read on!)
• Then on Saturday, you have the opportunity to run a leap year parkrun!

Paint No Sunshine

The weather over the past few weeks hasn’t keen kind to us…so by a stoke of luck we had an indoor paint task today at Sewak Housing.

So with the task brief and risks covered off, we did a quick tag based warm up and headed off the 3.5km to the task location. Thank you Ricky for back marking and Jen for leading the way.

That’s how we rock n’roll

On arrival the centre manager gave us the low down on the areas that needed some care and attention.

So we spilt off into smaller units of 2/3’s and set to splash the paint with our colour instincts (and each pair were asked to come up with their own puns!)…lets see how punny they really are: -

• Ricky and Meera were on skirting boards duty…Meera had a great pun but Ricky gave her the brush off! Ricky also did nothing tonight but look glovely

• Jen our Queen of Puns...was also on skirting duty, but today she was:- Skirting off duty... Making me emulsional... Getting wired... And didn’t want to take the gloss off it but she was doing a good job!..

• Chris was on a roll with the porchway wall – He made it all white on the night

• Jean was on frame duty - she really is our frame and fortune (is it all starting to make sense now??)

• Kam and Kate had the skirting on the stairs and bannister to do…making sure that not a drop was wasted.

• And Helen and Gail had the upstairs landing – they had a bit of a waiting frame as they were sharing one brush but they had a stroke of genius on how to make that work..

And the winner of the Most Punniest of Painting Puns is......Jen

Forty minutes in and we breathed a cyan of relief as we came to the end of our task.

Tool’s down, we cleaned the brushes, the rollers and ourselves and made our way back to base.

We are due back again next week to give it all another going over, paint nothing stopping us now...we are on a roll..

Coming up

On Friday, we also have a community mission to help The Thames Hospice with a clothes sorting task. Sign up details are below: https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/helping-thames-hospice-sort-through-spring-season-items

Have a great week Manjit

It’s over and we did it! Totally smashed last years good deeds and mileage challenge! So what were our stats I hear you ask?

137 Good Deeds ** Done by 35 participants ** Covering a total of 1282 km

Overall, we came 2nd in the Silver League! And Goodgym smashed the 8,000 good deeds target by 641 good deeds…

So much goodness achieved in just 31 days…thank you to each and everyone of you who came out when you really didn’t feel like it, ran in the rain, did a good deed when you felt less than 100%....your efforts, camaraderie and determination to get Slough as high up as we could on the leagues table is very much appreciated..

And a super well done to the new members that joined us in January…hope to see you in February – December too.

Focus on fly-ering

We had a fair bit going on tonight…as well as our leaflet drop task in Cippenham for the Cippenham Community Fitness group and Neighbourhood Watch Scheme which one of our runners Mabu is helping to set up...We were also helping Erin with her University dissertation.

Erin came to us at the back end of 2019 asking if we would help her in a couple of focus groups for her dissertation looking at the motivations and benefits of community sport volunteers! Five team members were going to help her tonight so ably led by task force members Sandy and Jen, this team left a bit earlier in order to get back in time to focus!

Welcome brief, task overview, safety elements all ticked off….we let our walkers Gail and Helen head off (Gail and Helen are also our task owners at a local primary school that we help out – so it was great to have them along tonight) whilst we did a quick warm up and then set off.

A very warm welcome to Jenny on her first session with us tonight and great to have Kate back after coming along to our starter session in January. Thank you to Pam for back marking tonight.

Fly’ering with leaflirts

To make the task of flyer distribution a little more exciting…I set the team a challenge of finding and evidencing as many red things they could find to tie in with the February ‘give it heart’ Goodgym theme…

Team Ricky (yes he’s back!) got a kebab van and apparently Meera is now available in a winter sale!

Team Sutyee had Kate’s red nails

Team Helen had the SCS sign

And our team…well we had a red bench from a red bus-stop where red buses go along!

Within 40 minutes we had completed the task. Each team had to meet back at Costa by 19.45, where we then gave the walkers a head start whilst the rest of us did a fitness session of press ups by Pam; single leg drops by Meera; skaters by Sut; single leg/arm raises by Mabu; squats by Ricky; star jumps by Jenny; side bends by Jean and finally pavement step ups by Kate! (Don’t think I actually need to come to any more sessions…these guys got it nailed).

Great efforts by everyone...

See you all next week