Last night, 10 intrepid GoodGymers traded stories of the fantastic beasts we've discovered on our various travels across the globe, or what we've witnessed vicariously through others 😁 Answers ranged from cheetahs, tigers, a leopard family, a herd of reindeer, to riding elephants, running with bulls and almost being eaten by a crocodile. What a fascinating bunch we are!

We ran and walked the short uphill distance to Glyndon Community Centre where Andy awaited us with an indoor and an outdoor task so we split into two groups and got underway. The indoor group went down to the gym where we apologetically walked through the gym-goers (one recognising Ashton from a Lesnes Abbey task) and got stuck into tidying up the storage room. It was jam packed with a mixture of gym, church and kids equipment and so we spent a happy 20minutes shifting tyres, bikes, drums and having a general sweep up and we left it much clearer with lots more space for extra storage. Then we venutured outside to join the outdoor team who'd been weeding and having a tidy up of the car park and back garden. Sweeping featured in both tasks and earned the session it's name - a clean sweep indeed and lots of time left for chatting and hahem hill runs, aka a short run up the hill to the pub!

We were publicising This Girl Can's 'Let's Lift the Curfew Campaign' to raise awareness of night safety exercising concerns for women now that we've got dark evenings back for a while. Last year GoodGym launched some night safety training for men to support with making people feel safe when out exercising at night. You can read about it and complete the training here: https://www.goodgym.org/v3/stories/women-night-safety - and thanks to Aman for doing the training 😊

Good work everyone! On Saturday we have a group run to Mycenae Gardens: https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/maintenance-at-mycenae-gardens

Next Wednesday we're litter picking by the river: https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/woolwich-river-litter-pick-57deb427-7033-49e5-85fc-c8010e88f8ef

Until next time!

Rachel

Monday saw Good Gym back at Seniors for one of our favourite decorating tasks, namely putting up the decorations for the Halloween party. We were met by the amazing Di who soon put us to work.

This wasn't a task for Arachnophones or Chiroptophobes (yes I had to look that one up) as many of the decorations featured spiders and bats. There was also plenty of ectoplasm to go round, some witches hats to put up in the entrance hall and there were monstrous and bloody sheets to finish the job. Before you knew it the place was looking like something from one of George A Romero's nightmares and Di was suitably amazed that only 5 people put up so many decorations so quickly.

And the real horror is that after all that work we have to go back next week and take everything down again. Only joking, this was a really fun task and our efforts were truly appreciated

Seven GoodGymers showed up in the cold, autumnal weather to join the usual gang, including Otis the dog, at the pet cemetery, and leaves was yet again the key word for the task.

With our usual dumping ground soon to be removed because it’s become a suspected rat residence, we bagged up mountains of leaves and wheeled them away on a trolley. The rats’ days of rent-free living are soon numbered.

The rain had the decency to wait until we left, and before we did, some of us harvested a little thyme, which is now presumably adding flavour to a nice and warm autumn dish while the rain pours down outside. 🍁🍂