A broom with a view

What a way to kick off National Volunteering Week, with a massive 42 runners meeting up to sprinkle some good over Wandsworth - covering 6k and a knocking out a core blast in the process!

We had some excellent new faces join us for the first time this week. Please put your hands together and give a massive welcome to Tom, Chris, Gaby, Rhoanna, Chris and Katie! Also lovely to see Catriona from Hammersmith doing a nice bit of GG tourism at her first Wandsworth group run.

Well done to all those amazing people, including Beth, Helen, Jessie, Paul and Luke who turned up for their second run of the day, after going to the Mayor's Run to Do Good at City Hall earlier that day. Nice work!

Also don't forget that we have the monthly GoodGym social on Thursday in Farringdon - your chance to catch up on all the GG news, meet up with other GGers and see who won that all important Pun of the Month. And there's no need to wear your kit!

After all that cheering and news, we headed outside to do our warm up, increasing the level of work incrementally until we were breathing more heavily and our heart rates were up. We had a quick discussion on our fav films - Gladiator, Bridget Jones and even the Lion King all got a mention, before setting off to our task with Helen and Emily kindly backmarking.

Three kilometres later we arrived at the Rose Community Clubroom, a lovely community centre for local residents - and with a beaut view of the power station. It hosts music lessons for local kids, is home to a choir and other groups, and even has an outside pizza oven and barbeque which the neighbours can use. Waiting for us with brooms and cleaning equipment was Glenn, who manages the place, and we soon got into cleaning, weeding, sorting and shifting rubbish and outside furniture. Half an hour later the place was looking great, and we were rewarded with chocolate treats and water. Lucky us! Waving goodbye to Glenn we set off for a short run to the beautiful Battersea Park for our workout.

We started our fitness session with a plank race which engaged our cores to the max, before moving on to some tough but effective conditioning exercises including side planks switches, frog jumps, low squats and wide leg jumps. Then Chi took over for a serious abs blast designed to give us a core of steel. It featured scissor kicks, leg holds and ankle touches and put us all through our paces. Thanks Chi!

With a 3k run still ahead of us we set off back to the BAC, taking on that last hill with some real power. Next week we have got a cracking task finishing off the decorating of a lovely community café in a Wandsworth youth centre - you can sign up for it here. Expect more fun, more fitness and a lovely sense of having done some real good. Well done team!