Heart and Spades

37 GoodGymers tackled THREE tasks, ran between 5-7km and were in general, awesome!

Great to have some new people along this week, this included Andreea, Diane, Elliot, Adam, Rupert and Sinead.

Also I did an awesome four DBS checks, if you haven't done yours yet then bring your documents along and we can do it next week. A list of documents can be found here.

In the news this week:

1. Amazing stuff from Race to Oxford team on the weekend, they covered between 6.5 and 12.5 miles and had a lovely day out. Thanks to Tom Benson for organising. Read all about it here.
2. Don't forget GoodGym are organising a 5km or 10km time trial in Victoria Park next Sunday (26th February). Would be great to have more runners and marshals! Sign up here.
3. Well done to everyone who has raced and run so far this year. Sign up for the next GoodGym parkrun tour here.

We had three tasks this week:

1. St Lukes Community Centre - a huge amount of gardening work.
2. C4WS - helping this amazing homeless shelter make beds for their guests.
3. St Mary's Flats - a general tidy up, weed and sweep in the public areas.

St Luke’s Community report:

12 of us headed towards St Luke’s Community Centre in, whisper it, Islington to help them shift some soil. We took a slightly winding route through the backstreets, avoiding the main roads, and providing us with a short but sharp hill to practice last week’s ALP (arms, legs, posture) techniques.

Action shots!

The task was simple – St Luke’s are building a community garden and needed us to help move the soil from bags into planters. We made quick work of it, getting the bulk of the task done in half an hour – with some great action shots from photographer Charlie. Then we downed tools ready for the run back.

C4WS report:

PSB headed up a group of 15 that went over to C4WS to make beds for the homeless that night. A really rewarding and worthwhile task that the GG gang blitzed in 10mins. Polly then directed the group over to Granary square with a little tour around St Pancras station.

Rewarding

St Mary's flats gardening report:

10 of us headed just around the corner to St Mary's flats to meet the fantastic Jon who we've been visiting for over three years.

He set us to work sweeping leaves, picking litter (lots of cigarettes), weeding and generally tidying. We split into teams of 2-3 and in 15 minutes we'd packed four bags of rubbish and done an awesome job.

After a group pic we said our goodbyes to Jon and headed to Granary Square to meet the C4WS group for tonight's fitness game.

Meet and Retreat!

The St Mary’s and C4WS groups then combined for our fitness session led by Pritesh - Meet and Retreat. After a 60% effort around Granary Square we were put into pairs based on speed. The idea was for one person to head left and the other right around the Square, meeting somewhere in the middle, high-fiving and then heading back to the starting point. To win the prizes both people in the pair had to be back. We repeated this game twice, it was a good workout!

Sign up for next week here, again we are TRIPLE tasking, helping - Chalk Farm Foodbank and Skip Garden as well as our weekly trip to C4WS.

PB out.