Painting by planters

It seems winter doesn't want to fade away as the dark clouds and chilly winds rolled in, five GoodGymers met at Old Spike Roastery ahead of schedule.

It was great to see Rebecca come for her first group run in a long time and Hannah making a delightful appearance after spending the last few Wednesday's training for the Ride London at the end of May. The group run was completed with Daryl and Nelly as Emma was going to meet us at the task. After a quick warm-up on the green and not the alleyway anymore, our ice-breaker question tonight was in line with International Day of Dancing, which is this coming Friday and Sam asked: What type of dance do you like, want to learn or bust out a dancing move for us?

Hannah got us going with her telling that she is learning "Swing" and a bit of "Charleston", Rebecca did ballet when she was six and Nelly likes to get going on the dancefloor with a bit of hand movements - she needs everyone to clear the dancefloor!

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Insecticide by paint

Our gentle 2k run took us down the back routes of Peckham as we arrived at the end of Bellenden Road, crossed over to Peckham Library before making our way to Bells Community Centre and Gardens. Ellie was pleased to see us as we arrived slight early. There were two tasks at hand. Prepare and fill the planters or paint the walls.

Without hesitation, Nelly, Hannah and Rebecca took on the more therapeutic task of painting the outdoor graffiti wall. They had to slowly mix the paint so that the paint turned into a light green/blue-ish colour before they could apply it to the wall. Slowly and gently, they applied the paint to the wall even though one or two insects were killed in the process.

Earlier, Ellie had constructed a few more planters, so all Daryl and Emma needed to do was cut plastic sheets and staple them to the inside of the planter to make an inner lining, so it could hold the soil. As they were finishing off with the first planter (out of four), Sam decided to start filling the first wheelbarrow with the moss that we scrapped a few weeks' ago that had composted down. This acted as a base layer before adding a few wheelbarrows of top soil and then finally, one wheelbarrow load of compost. Ellie took the lead in getting all the other planters lined up as Emma and Sam continued to work in shifts to fill the planters with moss, soil and compost mixture. Daryl, at this point, had moved onto sweeping the area before helping out the girls with painting as time seemed to evaporate.

Sensing that we were so close to the end, but only had five minutes unless we didn't want to do the HIIT session, Sam chose to finish the task at hand. With an extra 10-15 minutes (and 45-50 minutes since arriving), we completed painting all the walls and filled all four planters with the soil mixture.

We were rewarded with biscuits, group photos and smiles all around before taking on the most direct route back to Old Spike Roastery to finish exactly on time - 20:30!

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Thank You to all the GG-ers

A personal thanks from me to all those who came and ran tonight! We might have missed out on a 10 minute HIIT session, but at least we completed the task at hand, so thank you for bearing with me.

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Thank You Ellie

GoodGym is all about getting fit and doing good! We praise the runners/cyclists/walkers who come to get fit and help out, but we often forget about our task owner. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ellie for giving us such a great task and the opportunity to see the community garden again as it's progresses slowly! Looking forward to helping out at Dawson's Heights!