With maximum layerage, twenty runners took to the streets of Lewisham to cover 7km and wrap up Christmas at Seniors.

BIG thank you to Caireen for our rather lovely title pun this week. You know one of Caireen's puns won the International Pun of the Month last year, we have high hopes.

Welcome to GoodGym Lewisham!

All our Lewisham Love goes to Katy this week, for being our only first-timer. It was a pleasure though to welcome back a few runners who have been either busy working, travelling or just hibernating for a while, always lovely to invite people back! We also enjoyed celebrating the fact that Caireen, one of our longest running members, did her first ever mission at the weekend! See, you can pick them up at any point in your GoodGym 'career', no problem! It sounds like it was a lot of fun too, with a top team of friends to fend off the spiders. Did you know that we have a GoodGym-wide challenge happening this month? Well, we're doing brilliantly, with dozens of deeds and hundreds of kilometers already covered by Team Lewisham. We do need to catch up with those deed-doing machines in Bristol though, so make sure you link your Strava and GoodGym profiles and make every mile count!

Run for the hills!

Our warm-up had us running around in circles, working out our left from our right and then finding ourselves stuck in the mud. All good fun to warm up our bodies, ready to run. Our run this week was slightly longer than usual, with a total of 7km, thank you to Clare for being tonight's back-marker. We ran it mostly through Ladywell Fields and enjoyed a good hard push to reach the top of the hill, 'Just a bit more hill before we go downwards!' At Seniors, we were met by Cathy, who showed us the various jobs to get on with and a top team of de-decorators busied themselves, while the rest of the group ventured down into the extensive cellars. When I got down there, Stephen and Tom were disappearing into a sliver of space, carrying a heavy roll of carpet. In another area, Conroy was removing the baubles from a tree and others were exploring the warren of little rooms that would have, at some point in the past, been used by the servants. Cathy was telling us about their plans to research the history of the building and the surrounding area, with lots of connections already discovered amongst users of the space.

With our crack team of treemendous tinsel tacklers, the decorations were quickly packed away and a steady stream of people carried the boxes down into the cellar (cue more exploration, this space is fascinating!). Not wanting to stand around, others grabbed cloths and started cleaning sellotape off the windows until Cathy informed us that there was a box of chocolates in the entrance, 'Down tools!' We look forward very much to returning here soon, either to work inside the building, or in the spring when we can once again work in the amazing garden.

Sugar rush

Fuelled by Cadbury's, we drove hard upwards towards Blythe Hill and the stunning view of a sparkly London. Over and down to Ladywell Fields we went, arriving at Glass Mill with flushed cheeks and big smiles. In the foyer, we got down to some good core work, with a Core-athlon, working on all three disciplines of swimming, cycling and running ('But we've already done the running!'). Next week we will be covering as much of Lewisham as possible, sweeping up as many discarded Christmas trees as we can, expect local news stories of 'Lines of Christmas trees spotted flying along Adelaide Avenue!' Why not sign up? Don't forget also to bring your speedy legs for our Monthly Time Trial and to have a think about where we might go for our birthday social on January 22nd. See you soon!