On a wet Monday night, seven GoodGym Redbridge runners took on the challenge of delivering flyers for an ‘Active Together’ initiative and ran more than 8km in the process.

Spurred on by the knowledge that “skin is waterproof”, the magnificent seven met at our usual home – Wanstead House Community Association – for the usual briefing and catch up. Excitingly the group was joined by three Redbridge first timers – Alice, Caitriona and Tim.

With the usual GG news dealt with it was time for Sam from Vision Redbridge Culture and Leisure to talk us through the nights task. She explained that we were flyering for an initiative called “Active Together” which aimed to engage with the residents of local housing estates and find out what would make them get out and be more active. A brilliant task and one well aligned with what we do at GoodGym.

Without further delay, the group headed off up Wanstead High St in the direction of the Hermitage Estate. Armed with bags of flyers and one fire key for accessing the buildings the team set to work distributing the goods. Each building was three of four stories high, which meant the added bonus of a stair workout in each building. With Vision’s Sam and Trainer James, doing relay to open the doors, the group soon made quick work on posting the flyers and within 30 minutes the task was complete.

With 30 minutes left on the clock there was still time for a short 4km run around Snaresbrook before heading back to base for a cool down stretch.

All in all a brilliant task which saw GG Redbridge help make a real difference in the local area, get a little bit sweaty and a lot fitter. And the rain even held off.

Great work everyone. Same time next week?

P.S. Big shout out to Peter for the photo taking!

Welcome

Welcome Alison and Sophie doing their first runs this evening and hello to Becky and Laura who are quite the tourists having visited Peckham, Brixton and Kings Cross . A very warm welcome to GoodGym Highbury.

Well Done

Well done Danica on breaking 2 hours at the Richmond Half Marathon. After a string of bad luck and getting ill on race day she executed perfectly and smashed it. She was also sporting a lovely new haircut.

:) and :'(

And we welcomed back Caitlin! Caitlin recently achieved her 50 good deeds black t-shirt. Most of these have been done by visiting her coach. Give her a big cheer. Unfortunately Caitlin and Ryan are off to Amsterdam now so we won't see them any more :( BUT, there is a certain former GoodGym Camden trainer who is now based over there, so who knows, we may see GG Amsterdam before too long.

FROGG

It's been a while since we visited Grenville Road Gardens. Tonight we were helping FROGG (Friends of Grenville Road Gardens) cut back and bag up some ivy.

Since there were so many of us we split into two groups and each took turns doing 10 minutes of working and 10 minutes of exercising.

Ivy

Yep, the job for the evening was to get rid of ivy which had started to take over a bit. Tugging, pulling, yanking, chopping, lopping. Whatever we did it looked much much much clearer afterwards and Sarah was delighted with our efforts.

Flipping Mad

Meanwhile the group that was exercising played a game of "Heads and Tails".

A list of paired exercises, one easy and one tough, was produced and everybody had to choose Heads or Tails.

Following a coin flip those that guessed correctly got to do the easy one and those that FAILED had to SUFFER with the hard exercise. Ow. There were burpees (GROAN), press ups, alternate squat thrusts, reverse lunge high knee posture drive drill thingies. Mental stuff.

Hop To It

Thoroughly thoroughly warmed up after all that tossing it was competition time. How far can you leapfrog. Using a cone to mark the furthest distance, everybody had a go.

In the first group Will managed the furthest with a massive... erm, we didn't measure it but it was long. In the second group, Graham who jumped first was in the lead UNTIL Hugh equalled his effort. A jump off saw Hugh take the win.

The prize for being such a bounder? What else but a Freddo Frog!

Back to the Pool

For the way home we split into three groups. Caroline and Mel took an easier paced group, Steve led a medium pace and Simon took a gang on a faster run including a lap of letter fartlek around Emirates for good measure.

Double Debate

Back at base we voted on the DOUBLE DEBATE. Yes, that's right, we had two debates tonight. The first: what's better? Frogs or Toads? Frogs won, but a surprisingly large number didn't give a monkey's.

Second debate: is GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) pronounced witha hard or soft G? Well, the inventor says it is a soft G, but it does stand for Graphics which is a hard G, but then We don't pronounce the P in JPEG (Joint Photographics Expert Group) as an F? None of this matters, it went to the vote and the hard G won it. As is often the case at GG Islington everybody was wrong. Will suggested "Zhyff".

Next Week

To celebrate the end of Summer we are going to Sunnyside Community Garden next week. Be there!

Love and hugs,
Simon