LOADSA PROGRESS

8 GoodGymers made their way 5km to help their local community in Hackney.

: Tuesday, 4th of June 2013
: Led by Joel Wiles

Another glorious evening for last night's 7km run to SkyWay's Blue Hut to help build their community growing garden.

We ran and helped out here six weeks ago (on our second group run in Hackney) so it felt great to run back to see all their progress.

It was also excellent to see so many new faces turn up at the starting point - Coffee Is my Cup of Tea by London Fields Station. We've making contact with local hubs of activity - like Netil House - so it was rewarding to see word of mouth about the GoodGym bringing new runners to the team.

The route to our task was lovely - the evening sun paved our way through bustling London Fields, west along Regent's canal and through Shoreditch Park. SkyWay provides essential activities for young people in the area, and they are building a community garden to grow veggies, herbs and even their own tea!

Gabby, the landscape gardener, met us on our arrival and briefed us on their progress (new planters, a greenhouse and tables and benches) and the tasks to be done. Knowing the site a little, we quickly split up into three groups to efficiently tackle them.

One group carried large planks into the garden, another ordered all the pieces of wood left over into orderly piles of similar sizes and another group tackled the weeding in the green house (simply made from pallets and plastic sheeting).

We had all the tasks blitzed in 20 minutes before we said out farewells to Gabby and started our run back to base.

As always, we had a mixed group of runners. For some, it was the furthered they had ever run so it was rewarding to encourage those runners to get into a comfortable pace. For others, as they knew the route home, they ran back at pace - 'looping' back at bridges to the rest of the group.

Back at Coffee is My Cup of Tea, we stretched away achy but well satisfied legs.

We'll be back at Blue Hut soon - to shift 5 tonnes of mulch! It feels so rewarding to see and support a community space from start to finish. I look forward to when I can buy my fresh tea bags from the hut!