Every second Wednesday of the month, we venture back to Thorlands Gardens as this food growing community garden needs every inch of support to reach it's ambitions. On top of these monthly visits, GoodGymers often attend the Saturday midday session.

Setting out the Easter eggs to be found quite easily, Sam treated Daryl, Emma and Nelly. Unfortunately, none of the chocolate eggs were vegan, so Katy missed out on a treat! Sorry! With everyone having a sugar fix and listening into Sam's longer speech as he welcomed Emma into the taskforce 🥳 and confirmed that GoodGym Southwark were given community spaces for the Big Half (in September). Thus, wanting to get everyone thinking and committing to running the Big Half this year! Due to the longer speech, it was a shorter quick blast warm-up before the ice-breaker question, which was: What does Easter mean to you?

Many chose eating chocolate, seeing friends/family and using the four day weekend to great use! We also had other unique answers like drinking beer and knowing it's finally Spring 🌱🐇

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Different types of roots/routes

In all sense, tonight was all about roots/routes as Sam had mapped out the same running route for the past month due to the tasks proximity, so this time he decided to take the four other GoodGymers with him on a route going through the backstreets of East Dulwich to the station and up Champion Hill. Everyone felt like champions after reaching the summit as it was all downhill to Thorlands. The 3k route took us 18 minutes. Simon and Rebecca were waiting for us in the "Walled Garden" as our task tonight was to tackle the roots in the "Forest Garden".

Simon is super passionate about Thorlands and as he welcomed everyone back and gave a brief update of recent developments (vertical growing and on-going struggles of accessing the reserves to pay for items), Sam took his opportunity to collect the tools that would be needed for tonight's task.

There were two tasks at hand: one with Simon to tackle the bindweed at its roots by the fence in the Forest Garden as well as shaping shrub and hedges and the other with Sam was a bit of weeding and litter picking on the mound where the stage will eventually be.

Daryl, Emma and Katy joined Simon's team as Daryl helped Simon from the outside to trim and shape the hedges and inside Emma and Katy dug out the bindweed roots near the fence. They made sure to bag the roots as they are considered "litter" as they grow back with a vengeance and are a bit of a pest. Sam and Rebecca took a shade and a fork to dig up the weeds by the roots that were growing on the mound where the stage will be built. Yet Nelly noticed the amount of litter laying around, so she wanted to concentrate on picking this up. It's a mixture of the fox dragging in rubbish and the litter being either dumped or blown in towards the community garden. Still, it needs to be collected!

As the time reached 19:55, Sam called it as he knew there would be some downtime for photos and putting back tools, so he knew we couldn't finish at 20:00 on the dot.

After putting back the tools and a final chat with Simon, everyone ran back apart from Rebecca who cycled in, so she was going to cycle back home. Tight on time, we ran the more direct 3k route back to the Old Spike Roastery to finish off with a 3 minute stretch by the Golden Feet.

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Thank You to all the GG-ers

A personal thanks from me to all those who came and ran tonight! A different route, but still not avoiding the hill 😜 Thank you!

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Thank You Simon

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 Simon for opening up Thorlands after hours to let us continue with the project's vision. Some of us will be back on the Saturdays before our next visit in May (11th)!