Keep Palm and Carry a Ton

Defying bitterly cold winds, 23 tough types took to the streets of Lewisham, covering 5km and helping at both GRACE and the Albany Garden.

Excellent title pun work this week from Caireen!

How lovely to welcome three new people into the GoodGym Lewisham family this week! Lewisham Love goes out to Volodymyr, George and Katharine, who deserve ALL THE CHEERS for making this, possibly the coldest night of the year, their first ever run with GoodGym!

You might have noticed by now, that I like to talk about The Weather in these run reports, well it's really important to me. We have battled on through the dark, wet, cold, windy months and were shown a hint of spring on Friday, as the sun shone, daffodils bloomed and flip-flops could be spotted in Lewisham Centre (really). Then came the Mini-Beast from the East II. Gee-whizz. A few of our runners felt under the weather, were recovering from long runs or helping their children with particularly challenging homework projects, but out came the hardy few, determined to do good and not let our task-owners down.

Before we embarked on an attempt at getting warm (knee-tag, shark-attack), we congratulated all our amazing athletes who were out there, in ALL THAT SNOW, racing, volunteering and long running. Massive well dones go to:

• Amber, for running her longest run yet, in training for the London Marathon
• Chris and Mary, for taking on the Hampton Court Half-Marathon (one of the few races that wasn't cancelled)
• Emma, for running not just a half-marathon, but a trail half-marathon, in sideways snow!!! AND she was back-marker tonight!
• Nykolette for popping out on a Thursday morning to smash the Vertical Rush, sprinting up 42 floors - 932 steps - in just over ten minutes!!

I need a little lie down after just typing all that.

To the tasks!

A big thank you this evening to Conroy for leading a smaller group over to GRACE, where they were sorting through donated clothing. Over to Chloe, who has written about their experience in Lee (and also back-marked this group, thank you!).

SORTED!

We braved the b-easterley winds as we ran up past Nandos (yum) and Lidl (yum) and Sainsburys (yum) and round Leegate before we arrived at GRACE. We were met by the friendly GRACE people and some Goodgymers who weren’t able to run there but were still keen to help out. We got our instructions and started sorting the massive mountain of donations from the local community for refugees currently in camps in Syria. Skirts, socks, pants, t-shirts, jumpers, gilets, ties, gloves, hats, shorts, cardigans, scarves, you name it, we sorted it.

Nykolette wins for bizarre finds - first it was a witches hat, then clothing packaged in sandwich bags (for freshness).

TIME TO LEE-VE

After our time was up we posed for a photo and scampered back to the leisure centre where (very impressively) some of us did a time trial around the square while we waited for the rest of the runners to return from the Albany.

HATS OFF TO US!

Meanwhile, over at the Albany Garden, we gathered tools: wheelbarrows, spades, forks and brushes (but we couldn't locate the trug of gardening gloves, sadly, so our poor little hands were fffffffffrrrrreeezing! In the rear garden, a crack team of Bradley, Chris and Volod were demonstrating their immense strength by lifting incredibly heavy logs from a pile at one end of the garden, to the old chicken coop at the other end >insert muscle-arms emoji here< In another area we had teams working with forks, lifting green waste (largely palm leaves - ouch, spiky!) onto wheelbarrows, which were transported around the front and tipped into the newly constructed raised bed. Once the green waste was exhausted, the action moved to the pile of wood-chip, creating another layer in the bed. As you can see from the photos, this was quite a transformation and I think we'll be back to continue the good work when the top-soil arrives.

Four candles

This is for Vic, who showed her impeccable taste in vintage comedy sketches, but was met with some blank stares. Tuck in to this classic Two Ronnies and you'll see what she meant.

TT

As always our run back was spent mostly talking about food and what we were going to have for dinner (it's hungry work, this doing good). When our Albany group arrived back at Glass Mill, little did we know but the GRACE group were outside pushing themselves through a time trial! Yikes, good work you lot! We 'took it easy' with some glute-focused planking and bridging, before having a nice old stretch. Next week sees our first Monday night visit of the year to the wonderful Wildcat Wilderness. Sigh. This means a slightly longer run of 7km, a great task, which involves filling a skip and running up and down a path (and maybe a social to celebrate and 50th good deed and a birthday). Sign up and bring a head-torch if you have one.

See you then!