A very warm welcome to our first-timers this evening, Michael, Sophie and Nick. It was lovely to have you all with us, and we hope to see you again soon! A warm welcome too to Julian who joined us this evening from Greenwich.

We had a slightly different task lined up for us this evening, with a spot of plogging around Lewisham to tidy up our local streets and green spaces. It soon became apparent that the slow pace of plogging was no match for a cold dark evening in February, so everyone formed pairs for some impromptu...

• Sprinting and press ups
• Sprinting and squats
• Sprinting and lunges
• And just plain sprinting!

"Something fruity in the park..." I'll say anything to make speedwork sound fun!

Despite Lewisham looking relatively tidy this evening, we still managed to collect up an impressive 5 bin bags of litter in a little over an hour, great work everyone! Today's top find had to be the crisp £10 note found by Michael! And a big thanks to Chloe for sweeping up as backmarker this evening.

Check out the link for next week's group run and task here; it will be a much warmer affair helping out at GRACE in Lee. See you there!

On a chilly January evening, 25 runners and walkers covered 5km to help out at Crofton Books

It’s our birthday! We are four! That’s four years of making a big difference in Lewisham. We have helped numerous community groups, rain or shine, our runners have visited older people in their homes to help change a light bulb, tidy up a garden or move some heavy furniture and we have visited isolated people for a weekly chat.

Just take a look at the stats:

Good deeds: 6,816

Coach visits: 1,478

Missions: 352

The amazing thing that happens over time, is that we not only help others deal with isolation, we help ourselves feel less isolated, building up this incredible community and making what will probably be lifelong friends. Our runners have joined us sometimes as beginners and have gone on to build up their distance, strength and confidence, some smashing goals they didn’t think they could reach. Well done to everyone who has come along over those four years, you’re amazing.

Talking of amazing, two of our runners have completed 200 of those good deeds between them! Congratulations to Clare and Rebecca, who have both earned their wings this week.

On Saturday we had a starter session after parkrun in Hilly Fields, picking litter and keeping the park looking lovely. You can read all about this here. This coming Saturday there is another opportunity to join in during the day, with a community mission in Luxmore Gardens - if you have never visited this space, it’s well worth joining in, it’s pretty special.

Tonight saw our annual birthday visit to Crofton Books, with Emma kindly leading the runners after a little warm-up (and my, did we need it, it’s certainly turned a bit colder!). Thank you also to Caireen (who has been with us since day one, as has Jacqueline!) for back-marking and keeping us all together.

On arrival at Crofton Books, Jason talked us through the various jobs, with some more physically challenging than others. We had:

• shelf shifting
• book lifting
• poetry writing
• shelf shining
• book sorting
• love seeking (searching out books for the Valentine's shelf)

As always, time slipped by at pace and we found ourselves gathering to hear the beautiful words of John and Stephen (sadly, I didn't get a copy of all of the haikus and Stephen's poem, but they will no doubt be on display in the shop).

No visit to Crofton Park would be complete without a little run up and down Hilly Fields finest incline. Well done everyone on pushing hard and working on your form!

After our run, some of us headed to Mamma Dough in Ladywell, to tuck in to some delicious pizza and the gorgeous birthday cake they had made for us - a nutella-stuffed doughy number four, with four candles (or fork handles...?). Thank you!

Next week will be business as usual, heading out to continue our good work. Our task is yet to be confirmed, but sign up anyway and take a lucky dip!

See you soon x

It was cold, and raining, and dark but you all made it out, ready for doing good in Lewisham.

There haven't been many races over the Christmas period but there has been a lot of parkrunning, also a huge well done to Jacqueline and Caireen who spoke so wonderfully about everything GoodGym during their TV debut (not a debut for Jacqueline, she's always staring in TV roles such as the Pure Gym advert) at the Community Mission at Hither Green Station over Christmas.

We had a welcome to our new faces this evening and a quick warm up as we had a longer hilly run this evening over to Seniors, we were on our way. After all the hills, and a sprint up one of them for some, we arrived at Seniors and were met by Amber, Sarah and Clare, who were waiting outside for us to arrive.

A third of the group began bringing up the boxes for the Christmas trees and the rest of the group began taking down the decorations on the walls and decorations off the trees, and wrapping the lights around pieces of cardboard so we don’t need to struggle putting them up next year.

It was all rather hectic (in a good way, I hope) with missing boxes and too big Christmas trees for too small boxes, there was so much chatting which was amazing but I couldn’t shout loud enough to get everyone’s attention (I did with Emma’s assistance though).

All decorations and trees down and packed in boxes with instructions for next year and the master instructions safely with the decorations, it was time for a (many) group photo.

The hills are straight out of the way on the return journey and then you know it’s all downhill back to Glassmill. I might’ve took a slight unplanned detour which nobody questioned, not like when we went to put the decorations up and everyone shouted that I’d gone the wrong way!

We made it back to Glassmill, a slightly smaller group than we started with, for a stretch and chat about next weeks Christmas trees task which is my 5th favourite task, maybe because my group collected the most trees last year (I’m still deciding on the order of the top 4).

Well done to everyone for tackling those hills wonderfully and for everyone whose first GoodGym run it was, I hope you enjoyed it!

A couple of things coming up in the next few weeks: - Community mission litter picking after Hilly Fields Parkrun (11am) on 18th January - The Big Half - 1st March - The January Challenge, to do as many good deeds and run/walk as far as possible in January, we made a good start last night and all km recorded on Strava will be added to our total