Saturday dawned chilly but with promise of sunshine, and two intrepid GoodGymers jogged over to Clapham Common to get their hands dirty and blast some leaves. The lovely Ms K showed us round to her garden, which was just waiting to be unearthed from a winter’s worth of leaves. Before we could get sweeping though there was a much more satisfying job at hand – plucking up pesky weeds from the gravel.

With the first task done and dusted, it was time to clear some leaves. Equipped with a flower-speckled broom and a slightly small-scale dustpan this turned out to be a tricky task but some crafty footwork from Graham got us into a good rhythm and we were away!

Before we knew it the garden was spick and span – the delighted Ms K rewarded our efforts with a huge smile and a cup of tea.All that remained was to clear out the fruits of our efforts (five bin bags of weeds and leaves!) and to job off into the sunset… or in Graham’s case, to the next GoodGym mission of the day!

14 epic individuals last night came together to run six kilometres and help out with some well received housekeeping at St Luke’s Church in Hackney.

Our journey started once again on London Fields with a quick and fierce leg blasting warm up of squats and lunges to an orchestra of groans as winter running gear was gradually shed - indicating that the warm-up was working!

Our host Keli, standing in for Betsy who is sadly couldn’t join us (get well soon Betsy), divided the group into two: one half tackling some outdoor work while the rest concentrated their efforts on moving furniture, hanging some lights and generally preparing the inside of the church for the forthcoming Light Party. 30 minutes of lifting, carrying, sticking and digging later, the tasks were all squared away and off we went for a three mile run south to the corner of Victoria Park and back up along Broadway Market to base.

That would have taken her hours all on her own!

We love to see new faces in Hackney and this week was no exception with no less than five new-comers - mostly brought along by friends (or family). Way to spread the word team! I think our recruits were impressed by what 15 individuals in their PE kit can achieve in a small amount of time, work which would have taken Keil hours on her own.

I’m really pleased also to see several of our new recruits interested in getting DBS checked so that they can go on missions to help out elderly or isolated people in their homes, and perhaps even visiting a Good Gym coach regularly. As the cold weather and long nights draw in for winter a visit from a smiling Good Gymer will make all the more difference to our lovely coaches.

I’ll look forward to seeing you all next week and don’t forget your head torches. x

Last night around 40 goodgymers said “no deal” to the cold and dark conditions and made their way to Papa’s park for another Goodgym Lambeth session. The elements didn’t put folks off as we had loads of new faces all wanting to get involved, cracking stuff. Before we set off we gave James a big round of applause for completing over 100 good deeds, James is one of the original members of GoodGym Lambeth and is an all-round top guy and between visiting his Coach Keith and pounding the streets of Lambeth he has amassed many a mile and more importantly contributed loads to local projects and tasks have we done in Lambeth, well played sir, well played.

After the introductions we all ran around 2 km to Myatts field to meet Guy from Streetscape. Streetscape is a great local project that gets young people into employment through learning horticulture skills, as they are busy learning new skills their yard often gets cluttered with bits of woods from jobs they have done and that is where we came in tonight.

As some of us arrived slightly early we did a lap of the park only to be welcomed by the rest of the group forming a human tunnel to welcome us in (I bloody loved that by the way!!). Then split into two groups one with Rebecca and one on the task. The task was simply to get all the off cuts of wood in the yard and load it into the truck. Now a big shout out goes to John Hunter who did his best impression of a lamppost by shining a light on us throughout the task and was vital so we could see what we were picking up and helped loading it in the van. At first the pile of wood looks pretty daunting however in true goodgym style we packed it to the rafters and managed to get it all in there. We even had some time spare to load some bits of fence and even a bench, which was expertly shoved in by Guy at the end.

Half way through the groups swapped and the non-task group were faced with Rebecca’s circuits. Now I don’t know about you but my legs have certainly been feeling it today. This was because we were put through our paces by doing 25 squats and burpees followed by 20 lunges on each side, we did three sets of these reducing each by 5 each time and at the end to mix it up we did another lap of the park. In a word ouch (but a good ouch none the less.

Safe to say by the time we made it back I was spent however Sarah’s homemade millionaire shortbread that welcomed us back was a definite great way to end another cracking Tuesday night.

Tom