Flyering without wings on a Plank Holiday

They gave up balmy beer gardens, eschewed the fun of Carnival, and shunned the comfort of the sofa. You can’t keep Wandsworth Goodgymers from doing good and getting fit even on a sunny bank holiday evening.

Our lovely home at the Battersea Arts Centre was closed for the holiday, but our friends at the Calf in Clapham were kind enough to let us use their pub as a starting location. During our warm up we discussed the weekly CoRUNdrum – which underground station does not share any letters with the word ‘mackerel’ – and cheered our Wandsworth heroes. Massive shout out to Sophie and Matthew for topping the good deeds table, and congrats Dany for clocking the greatest distance. Then, knowing we’d be back for our very first official social to celebrate our month birthday after the run, we took ourselves off onto the streets of Clapham to disperse a huge pile of GoodGym flyers.

The team sprinted between houses spreading the GoodGym gospel, managing at once to cover an extraordinary number of letterboxes and avoid the unbearably cute little girls selling homemade lemonade. No easy feat. We ended up on Clapham Common where the South West Four Weekender was in full swing, and with electro and house music as our soundtrack, the group launched into a fun but tough bank holiday fitness session.

We kicked off with a couple of supercharged games of British Bulldog which saw Will as our nippy Bulldog. Our winner was the speedy Hannah, who managed to dodge all attempts at tagging. Then came Rats and Rabbits, which turned out to be beautiful sprinting chaos, before finishing off with relays. Good job Team One, our glorious bank holiday winners (despite some impressive blocking tactics from Cath!). The, of course, came the pain. It may have been a public holiday, but the weekly Plank Challenge is a permanent fixture. Well done David for smashing your previous record of a serious 4 mins and 7 seconds. Same again next Monday, yes?!

A quick jog back to the pub, and we were ready for our holiday social. A round of applause goes to our newest member, the lovely Lucy, for cracking the weekly quiz question. The answer was of course, St John’s Wood. Next week’s CoRUNdrum will come courtesy of Tom, who had some concerns about the potentially decreasing standard of the quiz questions – we’re looking forward to a watertight head scratcher next Monday! ;) Fun was had by all, with conversations ranging from the Bake off to Breixit, from the merits of Brum to Malawi air travel, to why Rupert the Bear had human hands. Well done to everybody that joined us on a lovely bank holiday, you can sign up to the run next week here:

https://www.goodgym.org/group_runs/fitter-and-better-in-wandsworth

We also discussed the Cardiff half marathon which a lot of GoodGymers will be running. Details can be found here:

https://www.goodgym.org/races/cardiff-half