5 years ago, Simon Loughran (a different Simon to our current trainer Simon) used to drive his car to Highbury Fields Leisure Centre, and offer to leave Goodgymmers bags in his boot whilst they ran off to complete tasks in the local area (in fact, here is the very first GG Islington run report from the launch event!). This was when the first pack of biscuits were offered to hungry runners, and the tradition lives on today (in our nice warm Emirates Stadium start point).

Excellent turnout last night, with 22 people runners in total (including our new starters Esme, Nikki and Lawrence- Welcome folks!). Our meeting room was full of conversation about race training, a weekend full of community missions and of course, anniversary curry celebrations. On this theme, we used the count-off to ask our runners: "What is their favourite curry/Indian food?"

The results were as follows:

• Anything Saag
• My Dad's strange tangerine slice curry experiment- It was actually really good!
• Naans, for the carbs
• Oh, yeah. Definitely naan. Garlic naan.
• Black Lentil Dhal
• Samosas
• Onion Bhajis
• Lager
• Chicken Tikka Masala- origin Glasgow!

Market Road Gardens

We performed a few warm up exercises on the Emirates slope to raise heart rates and body temperatures before jogging down Benwell Street towards Market Road Gardens. We were met with a very well organised array of tools and wheel barrows all set up and ready to be used! Straight into the task ahead.

A series of large builders merchants bags had been deposited on the sides of the vehicle entrance to Market Road Gardens and Lumpy Adventure Playground. Frequent trampling by coaches and minibuses over time has left the ground really slick and muddy, so our intention was to lay as much rubble onto the edges of the main access route as possible to stop this from happening.

Team 1 set to splitting open these bags and pouring them onto the necessary surfaces, and whilst other runners leveled out stone and gravel with rakes. Sheets of protective tarpaulin had to laid down first, before the contents of the bags were spilled onto the ground, to separate the stone from the mud.

Team 2 picked up the available wheel barrows and shoveled some fine concrete dust into them (this was a continuation of a previous task). This dust was then transported to a pedestrian walkway, and laid out for other Goodgymmers to rake and flatten.

Although our original intention wasn't to open all of the bags (as many as we can in the time we had available), our Goodgym group absolutely smashed it, and we left the site with a completely level vehicle access path. We are planning on having another group run here next week to completely finish the job, but we made an amazing amount of progress in a short amount of time!

Standard Tandoori

We made our way back to the Emirates for a series of stretches and some genuine New Zealand biscuits provided by James Gilbert after his Xmas travels.

To celebrate the 5th Anniversary of GG Islington, a reservation was made at Standard Tandoori on Holloway Road specially for our group runners. We had the restaurant completely to ourselves, and were served some absolutely delicious curries, vegetable sides, poppadoms and naan breads. Definitely worked up a proper appetite after some solid Goodgym work!

Congratulations for 5 years everyone, and see you all next week!

This week we were heading to the brilliant Portico Gallery to help sort some tables out that are used for the West Norwood Feast.

There were 37 people, which is an impressive turn out for a solid 8km round trip. After a nice warm up we headed off up the hills to the Portico. On arrival, there were some issues with the outdoor lights but those of us with headtorches got them on and we were able to get to work.

The tables needed to be graded on a scale of 1-4 from Good to BAD. The BAD ones needed fixing by John ahead of the first Feast in a few weeks time. Ruth, Vix and Lucy were the X Factor Table Judges and the rest of the runners worked in pairs to take their table for judgement before adding it to the correct pile. It was a beautiful circle of table judging excellence and in no time everything had been grouped and was ready to be put back on the metal crates ready for fixing or not.

A slightly more downhill run back to base was followed by stretches and a trip to the pub for our monthly social visit. Nice!

Thanks to Tom Hunter for the inspiration behind the title and this jazzy number by Feist.