What a busy month we have had. Tonight's session was the last of our Monday group sessions in the January Challenge...the challenge where we set ourselves a target number of good deeds to achieve and a target number of km's to run/walk. The only clause - you have to do a good deed in January for your good deeds to count and have your Strava connected to GoodGym for your km's to count - got it?

Sadly I couldn't make tonight's session at Slough Outreach Hub as I was feeling poorly but I knew I had a strong team on who would welcome our fairly new members Adam and Vineet and take plenty of photos for the report (they didn't disappoint).

The task tonight was to shift the toys and clothes around to create more usable space and unpack more donated bags into piles. Thank you to Ruth ,Sutyee, Jen, Sandy, Vineet and Adam for getting stuck in on this task.

So I mentioned our targets...let's see what we were supposed to achieve by end January

55 Good Deeds and 750km's distance covered

Now lets see how our January actually went:-

Reed all about it

We had Jen over at BBWOT on Sunday channelling her inner efforts to create a water way, raking and removing old reeds

Keeping it clean at Salt hill park, we had a litter pick session booked in for every Sunday to help keep our 'adopt a place' clean and tidy. With all our environmental cleans this month at Salt Hill and Black Park we tallied a total of 24 bags of rubbish! Not bad, just sad that each Sunday we kept finding more and more rubbish in the car park!

We had some guaRUNteed fun every Sunday too with the team from Salt Hill junior parkrun as we helped them throughout January with cheerleading, safeguarding, timekeeping, scanning and lets not forget Ricky's most epic Funnel Manager duties. In all my time in supporting parkrun I've never seen anything like it!

We were blinded by colours at Thames Hospice as we helped sort through colour trends...who'd have thought it would be so hard deciding if something is grey, blue or purple!

We had bags of fun as we've helped Slough Outreach on quite a few occasions this month. They have recently set up their new Hub in Cippenham and as much as Shin has been grateful of our help, we have been even more grateful for an indoor task (especially during the stormy cold days).

When a task owners asks for 'lots of volunteers' we do not disappoint! Our biggest turnout this month was at a session helping Not Just A Store with a pet shop area set up and sweep n' mop of the upstairs space. A team of 15 can really get a job done very quickly!

So that's all our tasks this month - we'd like to thank Shin, Alice and Kate, May, Salt Hill Run Directors Team, BBOWT team and our council/grounds teams for all our tasks this month. You've helped us in our challenge more than you know!

How many km's is a MILE-stone?

At the beginning of the month I shared the GoodGym Heroes leaderboard with the team..I think it helped gee everyone on in order to achieve their next half century or century milestone. This is how it went

• Pam reached 350.....soon followed by;

• Sara with 250....next up was;

• Manjit with 750... and last but not least;

• Ricky hit 100!

We are close to a few more big ones! Let's give Jen and Sut Yee a cheer and motivate them to get to their 400th's and Agnia get her 50th!

The Empire Strides Back

So let's talk Strava.. you get people like Ricky, me, Pam, Helen, Jen, Sara and me again who literally log all our runs/walks on Strava (as the saying goes, 'if it's not on Strava then it didn't happen')....then you get people like Nisha, Sandy, Ruth and Sut who always make such an effort over the January Challenge to log all their activities so that their km's count towards our total.

Kudos, Kudos, Kudos

There is no way we can talk about January without giving some shout outs..

Firstly, to Sandy and Ruth - who have literally attended every session listed (that they could physically attend!). Sandy, by the end of the month will have attended 14 sessions and Ruth 12... A round of applause please

Secondly, to our task force team of Jen, Sara and Helen who have not only logged or led sessions but also attended sessions in Windsor and Maidenhead (Jen and Sara)

Thirdly, to all of our new attendees this month (I've never heard my emails ping so much with another notification of new members!, but a special shout out to those who attended a session - Adam, Ryan, Vineet, Theresa and Sheena

Fourthly, to our neighbours (everybody needs good neighbours) Windsor and Maidenhead team for attending sessions in Slough...Juli, Nick, Sheila, Claire and Georgetta

And FINALLY... to each regular member who helped us achieve a certain number of good deeds in January... A huge round of applause to - Mehdi, Nisha, Hamid, Jean, Peter, Maya, Gauri, Pam, Sara, Agnija, Clare, Sara, Sandy, Ruth, Devajani, Ricky, Sut Yee, Harsha, Ciaran, Helen, Jen, Abdulaziz, Ali and of course me!!

Drum Roll Please

At the beginning of this report (hope you are still with me!) I said we had a target of 55 good deeds and 750km's to achieve....well I can now reveal that our current tally as of Monday 29th Jan is

126 Good Deeds and 871 KM's covered

And we still have 2 more days to go!

How absolutely awesome is that?? Doesn't mean we can hibernate now for February...let's keep the momentum going

My absolute thanks to you all. Humbled to have such a great team.