Pack It Up, Pack It In, Let Me GoodGym!

Like many of us, Elizabeth House took the opportunity to use these final days of 2020 to press a biiiiig ol’ reset button and look forward to the New Year. GoodGym Islington has been helping out here for a while now, and the food bank provided on the site has been really busy over this festive period. Now a team of GoodGymmers is here to pack things up, sort, organise, re-arrange and of course wipe down everything to stop the spread of the covids.

Welcome and congrats to Maike, here for her very first GoodGym mission - give her a cheer on her page! She was joined by a keen team who got to work packing away the food bank tables, re-arranging the storage rooms, and shifting quite possibly tons of tins of food and essentials.

Many waves of different volunteer groups including GoodGym have been helping this community centre keep going and delivering great work and support, so as the final shift we actually finished 10 minutes early, which gave us plenty of time for a jazz-handed photo shoot.

Best Wishes for 2021, everyone! And as mentioned, here is the link for the January GoodGym Islington Running Bingo Challenge! https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/january-challenge-run-go-goodgym-running-bingo

5 keen Goodgym cyclists visited the Ringcross Community Centre Foodbank on Friday, including Peter, Jade and Lily joining us for the first time! The Pillon Trust (who help with operations at Ringcross) had been really busy this week with additional clients and families needing to self isolate during lockdown 2.0, so pur regular contribution is highly appreciated.

We were able to source a few more bags for the project too, allowing more people to assist with walking deliveries if a bike is not available. We will be back again next Friday at 4pm onwards to continue our work with this valuable enterprise.

There was a nervous atmosphere as we assembled for our weekly group run. England’s match had clashed with our group run time slot. To keep the football lovers informed, Tom had the highlights showing on his phone through the see-through window in his arm band and Bex had notifications on her phone.

After that hubbub was calmed, we celebrated the highlights of H&F’s achievements at the Goodgym Olympics. Firstly, H&F came 3rd overall out of 18 in our category (Hunter-Sidhu Shield). Which is an amazing achievement as we only had 7 people entered.

• Catriona came 2nd in the 100m Women's race - 14:09 secs
• Andrew and Alice came 2nd in the three-legged race
• We won the 4x100m relay and Goodgym Relay!

What a result!

The other bit of news was we’re going for dinner at Wagamama after my last run next week. If you fancy joining us for some grub, RSVP here.

So our task for the evening was to put up posters in shops near Hammersmith tube. This was to promote Fulham Good Neighbours’s Parson’s Green Fair on 7th July. We also, used the opportunity to hand out flyers about Acknowledging Youths - a social enterprise recruitment agency for disadvantaged youths and adults.

Tom lead the poster team down Hammersmith high street and managed to have better success that last week. Justine and Catriona each lead a group handing out flyers at Hammersmith shopping centre. I think it was a relief to the flyering teams when 7.35pm came around as they’d found it pretty hard work trying to give away the flyers.

By 7.40pm all the teams gathered at St Peter’s Church to warm up and go for a nice run. From here we came out passed the Apollo and down to Hammersmith Bridge. From the bridge we turned left down the towpath. After 1.5km we stopped for an out and back exercise.

Splitting the group into two, both groups had to run our and back for a set amount of time. The time went down and up. We did this as a pyramid:

• 30 seconds in 3rd gear (brisk jogging out) and then 30 secs in 4th gear (running now, hard to talk) back.
• 20 seconds - out in 4th gear, back in 5th (sprinting)
• 10 seconds - Same
• 20 second - same
• 30 seconds - out in 3rd, back in 4th

Once everyone had got their breath back after this exercise, we stopped a passer by to take a nice group photo by the river. It was from here that the football manic kicked back in as we ran back to base. We could hear the cheers from people in pubs over the river - cue frantically looking at phones. England had scored. Then again on the bridge cheers erupted once again and vans were honking.

After we arrived back at the gym we went through a cool down stretches and then the runners scattered to watch the last of the match. It’s clear from our WhatsApp group we had a lots of our runners watching the match.

Until next week, happy running.