When the (wood) chips are down, we're the ace of spades

A beautiful sunny evening, 13 amazing Goodgymers, one huge pile of woodchip, and countless core exercises....if Carlsberg did Wednesdays!

It all started off with some news...

Huge congratulations to Eloise and Matt who both continued their PB streak last weekend with a cracking performance at the Putney half - brilliant running!

If you haven't already, sign up for the big GG takeover of the 300th Fulham parkrun on 29th June - pacers and loads of other roles available! It's going to be a LOT of fun, and will be followed by brunch. Check out all the details here!

Long run alert! Fancy a training session with various pace groups? And something nice to eat afterwards? Course you do. Here are all the details and sign up page

...before we headed outside for the warm up. After lots of high knees, skips, grapevines(ish), fast feet and a survey on our fav trees and plants (coffee plants, cherry blossom, hyacinth, sweetcorn and, um, grass) we headed off for our Wednesday task.

Cultivate London is an urban farm and social enterprise that is based across multiple derelict sites in West London. They train unemployed young people in landscape gardening and horticulture, and work to engage communities in food growing. They also aim to have a long term impact on the lives of young people and change the way Londoners think about their fresh produce and where it comes from. So after a 2km run there we arrived to find Alex waiting for us, along with Rosie and the other task owners, and a MASSIVE pile of woodchip! Our job was to fill the bags with woodchip so that it could be distributed over the beds at the various Cultivate London sites.

So, with usual GoodGym energy and good cheer, and some rousing singing, we got stuck in, getting through the bags at a rate of knots. We worked so quickly that we used up all the bags, and moved on to the huge sacks, decimating the pile as we went. There was even time for some human chain action, and some amazing dustmask shots! With almost the whole pile sacked up, we waved goodbye to Cultivate and headed back to Turnham Green for some back and core conditioning.

So with absolutely no heckling at all (!) we knocked out a series of exercises aimed at strengthening our lower backs and abs, which works towards injury prevention when we run. There were some particularly amazing dead bugs (and one live bee rescued by Beth), along with supermans, glute bridges and leg raises. Great work team!

After our stretches we headed back to the Town Hall where there was some more singing and other lovely surprises - thanks for being absolutely amazing GoodGym! You make Wednesdays brilliant.

Next week we're back to a local school that we haven't been to in a while to help with lots of jobs - sign up here for more mid week fitness and doing good. Until then, run happy!