Not even the coldest day of the year and actual snow on the ground could stop 11 GoodGym runners turning up to do good in Ealing.

*News Roundup

The GG Ealing team is doing very well in the January challenge with 91 good deeds and 1007 kms clocked up so far - keep up the hard work!

GoodGym has some £10 community entry places for the Big Half happening in London on Sunday 10th March. If you're interested please email bighalf@goodgym.org. Deadline for applications is Wednesday 30th January. Names will be drawn at random from those who want a place. It's a great race, and very well organised, so if you're after a good half marathon, whether it be your first or if you're chasing that PB, then why not give it a go.

Snow stopping us

After delaying the inevitable as long as we could, we braved the cold and stepped outside to warm up with some dynamic exercises including power skips, side steps and heel flicks, doing our best to ignore the white stuff falling from the sky. Instead, with our heart rates up, we talked about our fave things to spread on toast. Top of the rankings was an undisputed winner - peanut butter - but other contenders included butter, jam and, love it or hate it, marmite.

With the prospect of hot toast to look forward to, we set off in the direction of St Mary's Church, where Steve was waiting for us with a big shed to empty. Tentatively we braved the icy streets, a little like Bambi in trainers. Thankfully we all made it without any slips or trips to find Michael and Chris there waiting for us to get started with the job. There was a little wrong turn taken (blame the newbie...me) but we eventually found the shed in question.

Our job was to remove all the rubbish there so that Steve could get access to the blower. Don't know what a blower is? You're not alone. But at GoodGym, every day is a school day! Turns out that the massive bit of kit used to be used to blow air into the organ in the church. So there you go. Unfortunately, there was so much stuff cluttering up the shed that it was inaccessible, so we got stuck straight into moving everything into the garage round the corner.

After 20 minutes of hard work the place was looking much tidier, the blower was in clear sight, and the shed had been given a very thorough clean. Not only that but the tangled hosepipe had been returned to its former glory, a rather nice St Mary's sign had been uncovered (beautifully modelled in the pics above) and not a single spider had been spotted. This, we were reliably informed, was because they were all hibernating. We also decided to believe this was true.

A quick jog over to the alley next to the church provided us with the perfect place to knock out a few conditioning exercises interspersed with sprints - an effective way to boost endurance, strengthen to prevent injury, and to keep warm!

All that was left was a run back to base, a few stretches, and the prospect of a nice hot cuppa. Great work everybody! Thanks so much for welcoming me in Ealing. Next week Olivia will be back for her considerably warmer-then-here holiday, and you can sign up for the excellent sounding run here!