Plog standard gardening? Litter-ally never

A fantastic crowd of 26 GoodGym'ers turned out for two task Tuesday in H&F!

With two tasks lined up this evening it was great to see such a huge team of GoodGym'ers gathered ready to run and do good in their local community. It was lovely to welcome along Phoebe and Lizzie for their first GoodGym H&F run - thank you for coming along, hope you enjoyed it!

With the scaffolding still up in our regular warm-up spot we once again headed to our rather cosy makeshift warm-up spot. Before we got our pulses raised and blood pumping we had a quick run down of this week's news...

Have I got news for you...📰

1. There are a limited number of £10 community entries for the Big Half in London on Sunday 1st March 2020. If you are interested in a £10 place, please drop me an email for the details.
2. This Sunday is the monthly Morden Hall 10km and the monthly GoodGym Long Run - Tour of the Docklands.
3. Rough Runner comes to Finsbury Park on Saturday 7th September, you can volunteer on the Saturday for a free place on the Sunday!
4. Would you like to help in the event of an emergency? CAMERA (Coordinating and Mobilising Emergency Response Activists) project are looking for volunteers, all the details here.
5. Ealing Half Marathon 2019 volunteers needed! Sunday 29th September, you'll receive a free bacon butty and race place for next year as a thank you! For all the details, click here.

After a little warm-up involving skips, ankle taps and fast feet we split off into our two groups for the evening...

Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden led by Catriona

A lucky 13 GoodGymmers headed up to the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden, which is a garden for the Centre's visitors who are elderly members of the African, Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities with Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease. The Centre also runs a gardening club for families in Shepherds Bush living in temporary and overcrowded accommodation. Our task tonight was to tidy up ready for this Saturday's gardening club.

A labour of glove

To kick us off, Tom and Katie got very excited about their favourite weed clearing gadgets and set to work on the patio. Catherine and Naveed cleared out the greenhouse, emptying old soil out of pots ready to be re-used again. Sarah was nominated by the group as glove-sorter, Mo as plant waterer, Alice cut down some old signs from the fence outside, and everyone else got to work weeding, sweeping and dead-heading. After 30 minutes the garden looked spick and span, Susannah did some quick calculation about how much time we'd saved her (7.5 hours!), and we took a photo around the giant flower with triple Jo(h)nnies hiding at the back. Then back to base a different way for a stretch off.

Plogging led by Andrew

Andrew led the other 13 GoodGym’ers towards our first litter picking stop of the evening at Lillie Rec Park. When we got caught by the lights there was no-one stood still as we filled the time with jumping jacks and squats, and of course our weekly wall sit. On what I think would be described as the scenic route we arrived at the park and set about our mission to clean-up the park. The group spread out into smaller groups around the park so as to maximise our coverage. Andrew, Lizzie and Phoebe covered the children’s playground and discovered a t-shirt amongst numerous sweet wrappers, while Lucy and Steph claimed they picked up 397 cigarette butts from under the park benches! After 15 minutes there were 6 full bin bags that were responsibly disposed of in the park bins. And one final find by Matt of a dog tag.

A litter pick of this, and a litter pick of that!

Park clean-up complete we set off down and along the river next to the beautiful backdrop of the sunset towards the Crabtree Pub. The Crabtree Wharf is a beautiful inlet on the River Thames where litter-ally all the floating rubbish washes up and accumulates. This evening was the worst we’ve seen it! The team had a BIG challenge here. There were litter-ally hundreds of plastic bottles and bottle tops, about ten tennis balls, some less tasteful finds (the less said about these the better), a stuffed seagull that Maddy tested out for flight potential, and the biggest find of all, a marine radio! It felt like every possible piece of litter was down here with us. As the team filled bag after bag of litter, Chi helpfully handed out more bags from above and acted as a go between to the industrial waste bins by the pub - it very much resembled Rapunzel! We posed for a quick team photo with our loot (bags filled with litter!) and the stunning sunset before we called it a night. The transformation the team achieved in just 20 minutes was striking! I lost count of just how many bags that were filled but it must’ve been at least 30!

Litter picks completed we began our short run back to base along the river. With Chi ‘Mr Abs on Tour’ in our presence we were treated to a 2 minute abs blast of push-ups, tricep dips and a plank by Hammersmith Bridge. We pushed the pace for the final few metres before we had our stretch off back at base.

Great work tonight everyone. Thank you for coming along and for all your hard work.

Special shout outs to...📢🙌🏼

• Everyone who raced at the Two Tunnels festival at the weekend - brilliant running and support by all and SO many PBs!!🥳. AND, a big well done to GoodGym H&F's running joke relay team...who are definitely not a running joke but in fact super speedy as they came 1st in the mixed 50km relay! 🏆
• Maddy and Rob who were superhero sidekicks at the Superhero Tri (the one and only disability sports series) on Saturday in Windsor 🦸.

Phew!! What a week! Well done all. Next week we're flyering for the wonderful charity Family Friends. Sign up here. Have a lovely bank holiday weekend. Hopefully see you next week!