Today, at least five GoodGymmers turned up to volunteer at Highbury Fields new year's parkrun.

Despite jokes about 2020 vision, it was a foggy start to the parkrun (proving that 2020 is going to be the year that enjoys trolling your expectations).

On the volunteering front, three of us were inducted into barcode scanning duty, one (me!) was a marshal about 5 metres from the finish funnel, and the last (an old-hand at volunteering at Highbury Fields) gave the first timer's briefing (potentially did other things as well, but I lost track 😅).

As people ran their five laps to complete the parkrun, we ran through our full gamut of encouraging phrases (If anyone has any particularly good ones they'd like us to shout in future, feel free to leave a comment below, because I, at least, feel that I don't do my best work when ad-libbing 😅)

However, the good thing about a five lap course is that no GoodGymmer could go unspotted by the end. This meant that we got to show our cheering bias to incognito GoodGymmers as they worked their way around the course: if we missed them in the mist once because they weren't wearing the regulation t-shirt, we were bound to catch them eventually 😎👍🏻

Post-race, a mixture of GoodGym runners and volunteers headed to a nearby cafe for breakfast. I would post a picture of that, but the food went too quickly/I was more interested in eating than taking pictures at that time. All-in-all, a great start to the new year 😄👍🏻

22 intrepid runners braved the surprisingly mild evening to take on our two tasks on Wednesday night. The first, just around the corner from our meeting point, was shifting and sorting wood with some litter-picking at the Story Garden, led by the wonderful Louise. The second - slightly further afield - was ripping out some flowerbeds and tidying up garden waste at Saint Pancras Community Assocation, led by myself and Pritesh.

We had not one, not two, but THREE new runners joining us tonight, Elisabetta, Meghan and Bettina it was great to have you with us! Hope you enjoyed yourselves and I'm looking forward to see you on another run with us all soon.

After the introduction and our warm-up stretches, we split up and headed out to our tasks, hoping that it wouldn't rain. It seems that a winning combination of Abi's self-confessed good luck charms and Steve's weather optimism that it wouldn't chuck it down was really all we needed for a rainfree run, so thank you both!

As with many GoodGym runs, several of us pondered 'What really is a weed?" as we were getting through our tasks, but we managed to fill 10 bags up over the 30 minutes we had to get it done. There's more to do so I'm sure we'll be back very soon. Over at the Story Garden, the sorting and stacking of wood went brilliantly. Hats off to all!

Once we'd finished off our tasks for the night, we headed on to Granary Square - with the Story Garden team joining us along the way. Here, we played a game of Rock, Paper and Scissors (fitness edition), with sprints for the winners and planks for the 'losers'; everyone is a winner when it comes to fitness! After a quick two laps of the square later - increasing our speed on every section, we headed back, cooled down and a few of us went on to the pub.

Looking forward to seeing you all next week for what will be my first (eek!) run without the brilliant Pritesh leading us on. You'll be greatly missed, but will always be welcome back whenever you'd like!

Have a great week and see you next time.

Happy running,

Ben

Tonight, seven GoodGymmers met to help clean up Camden Gardens for Camden Highline.

Camden Highline have recently been awarded some funding to help improve Camden Gardens park, which is located beneath the western end of the Highline route. As they plan to showcase some of their project during Open House this weekend, they arranged this clean-up session to get things looking spick and span.

With lots of GoodGymmers arriving at the advertised meeting place with a punctionality similar to that of the Japanese railway system, Adam (our contact at Camden Highline) had a decent-sized crowd to give the requisite health and safety briefing to, in addition to a brief introduction to the project.

Admin done, we got picking! Aside from some circumstantial evidence of someone getting lucky in the bushes (probably the reason why I'm using so many variations of the word "brief" today), a lot of the usual litter suspects were present (think cigarette butts and unknowable bits of plastic). Thankfully there was very little foil confetti around this time, implying both that Camden is no longer a lawless land for the reckless and that we'd done a good job of collecting it all last time.

Perhaps fueled by thoughts of GoodGym Camden's traditional post-task pub visit, it took us less than an hour of litterpicking before we were all turning in our sticks and casually ordering our usuals at a local pub with some of the other volunteers.

Until next time, guys! 😎👍

We had four new people this week - welcome Katie, Oliver, Caroline and Chris!

We returned to a classic GoodGym Camden task last night, with 29 of us rocking up to Kings Cross Orchard/Alara – a few more than Alex had expected!

However, he managed to find jobs for most of us to do – ranging from mulching the trees, shovelling the mulch, wheelbarrowing, litter picking and weeding. We also got to see the range of plants growing, from chillies to chinese pears! With so many of us, we made quick work of it and it wasn’t long before it was time to down tools and pick up a box of cereal.

Then we hot-footed it to Granary Square, where we all ran between 1 and 3 laps – the aim was to do it as a progression run, where you run each lap a bit faster than the last, but some us decided to take it at our own pace.

Then it was time to run home and have a nice stretch!

If you need more of an orchard fix, you can find details of the Camley Road Harvest Festival on 13 September here: https://www.facebook.com/events/579450629228576/

We also have a community mission to help Camden Highline on 19 September - details at https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/help-camden-highline-tidy-up-camden-gardens