Just lifting spirits here! Everyone was mulch obliged 👀

It was amazing to see not only Andrada coming back for her second good deed, but to have 21 sign ups! In the end, 20 came, but still this was incredible for GoodGym and reminiscent of the days before the pandemic hit!

We all gathered in the warmth of Old Spike as Sam delivered his GG intro speech and acknowledging that Maria hit and has exceeded her yearly target of 25 good deeds within 3 weeks of joining! There will be a gift at Xmas social.

They proceed to do their warm-up on the Green as this week, Sam had to be filmed by Paulin, so that he could complete his Run Leader training. A two minute clip showing a decent warm-up.

After the warm-up on the Green, Sam's ice-breaker for tonight was a two-parter: Tomorrow, is International Teacher Day, so who is your favourite teacher and what did they teach you? or the second question was: On Friday is World Smile Day, so what made you smile today?

With 15 people present on the Green, it's hard to remember and put all their answers on here, but we acknowledged, smiled and thanked Clare and Mikhail as they are teachers / teaching assistants.

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Fire fighting

We split our ways on the Green, with those going to Elmington Gardens followed Sam leading the 3k run whilst Mikhail was backmarking. Lindy and Maria took Andrada, Clare, David, John and Nelly on a shorter 1.5k run to Salvation Army in Nunhead.

An incline run from Peckham up Grove Vale to the other side of Camberwell took the team just over 15 minutes as they arrived at Elmington Community Garden to meet Zulieka and her girls as well as Tam and Jessie, who cycled and ran over to the task, respectively. The task was to weed the herbs bed, but we also had a team consisting of Clare, Isaac and Paulin moving mulch from the Wildlife Triangle to the site where the rest were weeding. Mikhail was our photographer for the night as he captured the moments.

Meanwhile at the Salvation Army Nunhead, after running 1.5k with Lindy leading the way and Maria backmarking to ensure no one is left behind, they met Anna, Emma and Steve outside the shop entrance. Polis and Tiziana kindly let them in and they were shown into the new storage room. The task at hand was to move boxes from upstairs in the old storage downstairs. To achieve maximum efficiency, the team created a people chain and they each had their own little section. They moved mostly household items, shoes and children's toys. After this, they had the time to roam the library/book store section to get a book or two as a token of helping out.

The teams in their respective locations called it at 20:00 to head back to Old Spike as it was the first Wednesday of the month, so the team had a social to attend.

Those who stayed for the social went to Market Place in Peckham to check out the establishment. However, only one food stall was still open at 20:30. We all had a drink from the bar and a few of us nibbled on Mexican food!

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Thank You to all the GG-ers

A personal thanks from me to all those who came out tonight! Firstly, a massive thank you to my taskforce team for helping out with a variety of tasks from co-leading the second task to backmarking and from taking photos to being walk leaders too. Thank you to the rest of you for coming along for what is our biggest group run to date since I took over as AA in September 2021 - thank you!

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Thank You to Polis, Tiziana and Zuleika

GoodGym is all about getting fit and doing good! We praise the runners/cyclists/walkers who come to get fit and help out, but we often forget about our task owner. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Polis and Tiziana for bringing their task a week earlier, so we could accommodate for the large group. We will be back at the Salvation Army in Nunhead on the 22nd of November and again, on the 13th of December. As for Zuleika, thank you for having us and showing what we needed to do as we moved almost all the mulch over and weeded the communal garden. We are always up for doing sessions on the weekends to help out with any weeding but for Wednesday evenings, we're full until the new year, so we'll be back in 2024!