Wow….what a weekend! Incase you went on a weekend trip to Mars and didn’t see any of our social media feeds over the weekend….we WON the Get Berkshire Active 'Physical Activity for Health Award' at the awards night on Friday!

It was a truly memorable evening and I will tell you all about that in a minute…but first…lets talk about what we did tonight!

We were back at Sewak Housing to put on a second layer of paint to the skirting and frames. In the main we had the same team as last week, so each pair knew exactly what they had to do.

All formalities and warm up done at base location, we headed out for the 3.5km run to the task with me on back marking (let’s just say it was the heavy legs from yesterday’s Big Half race rather than gin-toxication from Friday night).

Warhol in it to help

On arrival, we got our gloves on, collected our brushes and pots (by a stroke of luck everything was still where we left it last week…or maybe it was a pigment of my ima-gin-ation!

When it comes to indoor paint jobs…I can’t say that we are we are picture perfect however we really do Turner it around and make the areas look all nice and gleamy – way to Gogh team!

As long as we don’t leave the task owners with The Scream…we know we’ve done a half decent job.

• With Ricky and Meera awol tonight it was down to Sutyee and Emily to take the mantel and finish the job…luckily they both been to the task location before so Rembrandt the fun and games they had last time with the small space and tools!

• Jen, who has an ability to get into any space any size!...was painting and yoga’ing at the same time…

• Chris was back to his antics of Dali-ing around

• Jean was in the hallway framing it

• Kam and Kate had the stairs again because I knew they could handle the job!

• Jenny and Lucy took over the upstairs hallway

Second layer of paint on and we were done. Time for clean up! (which can sometimes take as long as the painting itself). All jobs completed …we took the obligatory group photo (with Chris in it this time) and headed back to base.

So….if you want to find out what happened on Friday …then read on!

Let the Evening Be-Gin

With 13 of us traveling up to Reading for the posh awards night, suffice to say we were a little bit excited…Ricky was sooo excited that he actually turned up early!

Being our only GG bloke…every lady wanted to sit with him in the car…but he thought it was only fair he sat on one butt cheek in the boot so that we all had proper seats – what a gent!

Looking all glam and fabulous and not a sports item in sight (well maybe one of us was still keeping it real!)…we had our pre drinks at Nisha’s house and set off on the road trip to Reading.

The awards night was being held at The Hilton in Reading with sports groups, councils from all over Berkshire and of course all the nominees with their friends, colleagues and family members.

After the drinks at the bar, we headed into the drinks reception area where we took every opportunity we could to …take photo’s! Including a red carpet moment..

It was all rather posh Spice and maybe Get Berkshire Active had an inkling of how gin-tastic we were going to be as they put us in the naughty corner…Table 26 (all I kept thinking was…if we win…that’s a long walk to the stage!)

There were 12 award categories in total and we were around 8th on the pecking list to be announced. With that in mind our partners in wine – Meera, Ricky and Sandy were in a right giggling state as they watched Nisha…impatiently wait for our category to be announced…

Goodgym Slough or Goodgym Loud?

Nothing like self-appreciation to make you feel good! During the night, each nominee had a video (mainly of photo’s of their club) playing in the background and most of theirs were 30 seconds long..

Then our clip came on….and the decibels in the venue went up tenfold as each one of our members photo’s or video clips were played…even I had to hang my head in shame at how long we were up on the screen for! We went on and on and on…for all of 2 minutes and 18 seconds…the longest 2 mins and 18 seconds of my life and the loudest!

During the break the CEO of Get Berkshire Active come over to find out who this extremely lively table were…clearly we left an impression…We Sloug’d it tonight!

When our category was called up and they announced Goodgym Slough as the winners of the Physical Activity for Health Award…the ruckus of roars was so loud that I couldn’t even hear the background song they chose for us! It was phenomenal to win! The team were upstanding (luckily so was I)…the joy of happiness from the team filled the venue and I still haven’t stopped smiling yet..(other than maybe at mile 11 of yesterday’s Big Half!)

What a brilliant night we had…and to come home with a lovely award just topped it all off.

International Women’s Day

This year’s IWD is on Sunday 8th March and the theme is #EachforEqual …an equal world is an enabled world.

At Black Park parkrun they will be holding a IWD event by encouraging more females to participate in the event and asking everyone to wear something purple…one of our newest members Jenny will be on Run Director duty on Saturday, so please go and join in.

On Saturday will be doing a bramble cut back task on Farm Lane on Saturday to allow access for a local Church via that alleyway. Details of this Community Mission are listed here - https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/cutting-back-brambles

Have a great week everyone