There Once Was a Man Called George...

On a fine summer's evening 32 wonderful GoodGym-ers gathered at the Star of Kings, found there way to the upstairs room and had a wonderful evening meeting new runners, hearing about GoodGym and voting for the all important International Pun of the Month!

We were back in North London this month (although apparently South Bank doesn't count as South London - one for Islington to discuss perhaps?) and we had the fun of a room to ourselves. It was a great turn out I'm so grateful to you all for making the effort to come out. Lovely to see some new faces, TWO trainers and recent addition to the GG Central team Neil too :)

I want to say a massive thank to George Bright, our guest speaker for the night - thanks for you sharing your wonderful story and we wish you all the best for your Ironman - 15 days to go! Check out his fantastic blog here and if you wish to donate to his chosen charity the Maytree Foundation you can do here. Thank you also to Vicki McLellan for the delicious cakes and cookies - we raised £68.38 which I'll round up to £70 to go towards George's fundraising.

Not that it needs saying but you are an incredible bunch!

Here's the recap:

HEROES

Full listings can be found here

In the 'Bristol' round (that's cheering to you and me) Pru Comben continued her reign as the cheeriest person in GoodGym and Paul Becker was the most cheered in July.

James Poole of Redbridge topped the distance charts with 627k and we had a flurry of good deed-ers, five tied for third but Frances Powrie did 15 good deeds last month to top the chart that matters!

In the second installment of the 'GG most new runners last month' award we were happy to crown the two week old GG Richmond runners with 44 new runners in July - Congratulations!

Last but by no means least in the heroes section we had the 50s and 100s, a fantastic achievement not only in terms of doing all those deeds but everything that it gives to the community in staying with GoodGym to do so much:

50 - Black T-shirt

• Emily Casstles

• Matt Wrench

• Dave Mansfield

• Benedict Lumley

100 - Wings

• Aidan Padfield

• Richard Giddings

• Frances Powrie

• Megan Fisher

Well done all of you - go give them a cheer everyone!

NEWS

We opened up up in five new areas and have the following to come:

• Ealing - Tuesday 9th August

• Hounslow - Monday 15th August

• Barnet - Tuesday 16th August

• Bournemouth - Wednesday 17th August

Race News

• We hit the New Forest 10 miler - 14 came, 9 ran and 5 poor Bristolians got stuck in traffic!

• We've got the GoodGym 4 x 1600m relay at the Community Games this Sunday 7th August - go along and have a cheer. Some GG Camden folk are leading a bunch of runners at the Regents Park 10k and finally the LAST big race of the year - we're back in Wales for the Cardiff Half Marathon - ONE month left to enter!

International Pun of the Month

Finally, it was super tense this month, it came down to the final vote which came from outside the room! However, with NINE votes, from 32, the International Pun of the Month is...

'Pack it up, pack it in, let me GoodGym' a fantastic individual effort from Steve Lee

So once again thank you all so so much, do keep spreading the word, we've more areas to work in so need more and more people involved to keep doing good, running hard and having fun (and preferably coming to drinks too)!

We'll see you all next month, September 8th in Brixton for the pilot of 'GoodGym Drinks on Tour'!

Pritesh

p.s. Thanks for additional photos to Rebecca and John