One way to cure post-holiday blues...GoodGym H&F Tuesday's! It was lovely to be back and to be joined by 16 wonderful GoodGym runners despite the cooler and darker conditions. Welcome along to Freddie on his first GoodGym run, welcome back to Serena and a Haringey 'high five' welcome to Dave doing some GoodGym tourism! And a big thank you to Alyx who covered the run last week, it sounded like a fun run.

With everyone gathered at base we headed outside and had a quick penguin-esk group huddle of introductions and the weekly news round-up...

1. Community Mission this Saturday! We will be following-up our August group run visit and lending a hand at Springvale Estate Residents Hall. No DBS check is required. Sign up here.
2. It's the London-wide GoodGym monthly social this Thursday in Angel at the Islington Townhouse! Full details here.
3. Next Tuesday is the GoodGym H&F monthly social - come along post-run for food & drinks. Location TBC.

Well done to Tom for completing the Tough Mudder Half (the mud may be gone by next week!...) and to Dave for completing the Spartan Race at the weekend.

With the intros and news done we did a quick name and number count and warm-up before setting off on the short 1km run along to the task, a GoodGym H&F first, toil and lay an artificial lawn for Hestia Housing and Support. At their Talgarth Road home, Hestia Housing & Support provide personal care and accommodation to those with complex and mental health support needs.

Always Look on the Bright Guide of Life

It wasn't long before we arrived and we were met at the door by Debo who led us inside and out to the garden area. A large cardboard box of fresh tools and equipment had been provided along with some step-by-step instructions of how to lay the artificial lawn. However, with Autumn well and truly upon us there was a large amount of leaves that first needed to be cleared from the area before the existing grass could be removed. Sarah was of course the first to excitedly grab the bin bags and hold them open as others swept and tidied the area.

Step 1 - clear the area & remove the leaves and exisiting grass...nice and simple, quickly & easily done! 8 full green bin bags filled within minutes

Step 2 - keep the weeds out, roll out the black weed membrane...focusing on half of the garden area the group cut the membrane to size and fixed them in place using the pins

Step 3 - roll out the artificial lawn...

At this point everything become a touch more complicated...what way should the sheets go? how do we fix them in place? Despite some lingering uncertainty of how this was to be done the group rolled out 4 sheets of the artificial lawn and began laying them as described in the guide. However, with only half of the membrane down on the whole area, and a lack of light and hammer, as well as no prior knowledge or experience of how to join and fix artificial lawn sheets together, everyone decided to just pin down a few of the sheets and fluff up the artificial lawn to make it look more realistic - while most used their hands, Freddie had the genius idea of using a broom to speed up the process! With time now also against us we decided to call it a night and used some of the green bin bags to help temporary secure the sheets of artificial lawn.

A Green Streak

We said a quick goodbye to Debo and set off on the short run over to Brook Green to complete a quick 1km time trial lap around the outer perimeter of the Green; to ensure the group got some extra few metres of running I of course 'purposefully' took a wrong turn en route that required a nice semi-synchronised U-turn. Building on the running technique work done with Alyx last week the group all set off on their sprint behind leader, Tom and it wasn't long before everyone was back at the start having completed the lap of the Green in super quick time. There was some excellent 'pockets to sockets' technique and good postures displayed, and post-lap everyone had significantly raised pulse rates, and redder and sweatier faces. Brilliant effort all! Thank you very much to Jason & Bex for being the time-keepers and bag holders.

With the group nicely congregated we did some squats and lunges before heading back to base for a quick cool down and final stretch with some Slovenian biscuit treats.

Lovely to see you all last night, a big welcome to Freddie and Serena, and thank you for your help with the 'rather complex' task! Good luck to Tom this weekend in the Royal Parks Half and to anyone else that is racing or parkrunning (It's National parkrun day on Saturday so why not go along to one and join the fun!).

Next week we have a slightly longer run to help Family Friends move and dismantle their office furniture. Sign up here. Have a great week!

With Beth on holiday in Slovenia, she trusted me with the Hammersmith and Fulham crew for the evening.

After a little welcome, and chats about upcoming half marathons like the Ealing and Oxford halves (come and cheer on fellow GoodGym runners at either of them if you can!) and the GoodGym Social next week, we made our way outside for a warm up and introductions. I wanted to find out the best things about Hammersmith and Fulham, so we got everyones ideas. Fitting for a running group, the most popular thing turned out to be the running route along the river, so I'll be sure to come back and try that out some more!

After the warm up we headed out to Maystar Estates, a local housing area where they have some communal green areas that need looking after and lots of smaller individual gardens. Despite back-marking being one of his favourite things (sorry!), Jason did a splendid job leading from the front, and got us there safe and sound. We met Pauline there, who got us all armed with gardening tools and bin bags and set us to work. We also caught up with some of our friends from the Chelsea FC Foundation, who we helped out last week, at the task.

The Task: To turn a grassy area into a patch of turned over soil, ready for planting some bulbs, to give the communal space a bit of colour. Plus we also had a couple of individual gardens to tend to, cutting back their hedges and doing some weeding on of their grass.

Everyone got stuck in quickly, and so before we knew it the task was completed and we found ourselves eating biscuits in their community hall - what a treat! After a group picture, and goodbyes to Pauline and the Maystar reps, we jogged off to the famous riverside to do some sprint training. Using a small length of the path, with some handily placed street lights, we focussed on different factors of our sprint to try and improve our running techniques.

• Socket to pocket (focussing on driving that elbow backwards!)
• Lifting your torso upright, imagining a helium balloon pulling you up
• Increasing your cadence to maximise speed

After a tiring little session, it was time to call the run to an end for the night, so we made our way back to the Fitness and Squash club for some stretches and chats about next week's run, which you can sign up to here.

Don't fear, you'll be back to normal next week when Beth returns. Hopefully see you all soon. Thanks for having me H&F!

The nights are drawing in and it was ominously windy, but that didn't stop 13 brilliant GoodGymers getting down and dirty all in the name of doing good!

More on that in a bit, but first please give a huge GG welcome to Lizzie who came along for her first group run last night! Lovely to have you run with us.

A bit of an advance heads up, but on October 6th we have the GoodGym monthly social in Islington. This is a great chance for GoodGymers new and old to get together, have afew drinks, and hear about all the amazing things you've been doing. Plus there is the all important pun of the month vote, and lots of cheering to be done. Hope to see you there!

Bags of Fun

Tonight we had a shortish run to our task, and as usual we kicked off with a warm up and a very important sandwich-related poll before heading off on the 2k run ahead.

Cultivate London is a brilliant organisation based across multiple derelict sites in West London. They train unemployed young people in landscape gardening and horticulture, and work to engage the community in food growing. They aim to have a long term impact on the lives of young people and change the way Londoners think about their fresh produce and where it comes from. We've been a few times before and are always to lend our muscle power to help them in their amazing mission!

We were met by Rosie and Flo who pointed us towards a mountainous bag of soil and several spades. The perfect upper body workout! Most of the team got stuck into that, while Will and Emily began moving the enormous bags of pots (they looked as though they would be light. They weren't).

45 minutes later, the soil was all bagged up, the massive bags were moved into their place, and we brushed ourselves off after a job well done.

After a nice steady run back to our starting point which we managed to time perfectly with the trains crossing (for once), we got stuck into our exercise pyramid, which saw us upping the reps of given drills until we reached ten, and then back down again. A nice minute plank challenge finished the night off, before we stretched out those miles (and extra burpees).

Next week we're back for more jobs at Cultivate, so (sign up here) [https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/lend-a-hand] for more soil-based getting fit and doing good!