15 runners, a lovely cool evening for running and a mission to help The William Hobbayne Centre. What better way to spend a Tuesday evening!?

We started off with a quick warm up whilst chatting about all the great things happening in Ealing at the moment, tons of community missions coming up and with Christmas just around the corner (yes we can't escape it now) we'll have lots of great socials and festive themed tasks too! In fact there's already a big GG xmas party planned by the lovely guys in Barnet, sign up nice and early!

That's TEAm work...

So onto the task and team work was essential this evening as we had a very small window to move a lot of stuff from one area to another. Trying not to disturb the zen, we had 5 minutes in between yoga classes to clear the balcony of the community hall into another space next door so we could help sort all the christmas decorations for the aforementioned upcoming festive season as well as cleaning and preparing a large selection of fancy tea party plates and cups. We clearly formed a passing line and got everything out of the hall in super quick time and left the yogis in peace!

Then it was a case of sorting the riff from the raff and we were told be be ruthless!

Lots of old and no longer needed clutter was set aside for the bin and we sorted and cleaned up everything else before neatly stacking it into a better storage space. We tested lights, washed up hundreds of tea cups and saucers and sorted tinsels and trees. What a jam packed evening!

Cool fact of the day: The William Hobbayne Charity is the oldest charity in the whole country, founded in 1484!

Great work tonight everyone, we ran around 4 miles and shifted a lot of stuff. Nice one!

19 turned out to be the perfect number of people for last night’s task to help St. Mary’s get their ivy under control!

In honour of The Great British Bake off returning to our screens we did a quick warm up with a chat about our favourite cakes whilst welcoming four new runners into the fold. Great to have Chris, Lizzy, Zoe and Sonam with us for their first GoodGym run! Now about those cakes, sticky toffee pudding (is it a cake or a pudding?!) and lemon drizzle were clear favourites which was good news as Alex had baked a lemon cake for the group to enjoy after after the run. Something to work for!

The long or short of it

We had two route options last night, Chris led a lovely longer park route and Jenni led the direct route to the task. Thanks to Harvey for back marking the longer route while I led a walk run on the shorter option. Tell your friends, we have options for everyone!

Arriving at the task we were met by Vicar Steve who was all set up for us to get straight to it and the task today was all about battling the ivy to the front of the building.

What lies beneath...

Many hands make light work and we were soon uncovering grave stones that hadn’t seen day light for some time, along with pulling back ivy from the walls and trees in the garden. It’s a tough job as ivy really does like to hang on for dear life but by the time we had left the difference was amazing!

Raking it in

The last job was to scoop up all the ivy and deposit it for composting, after initially struggling to collect it all by hand the magic rake appeared to make the job a whole lot easier!

’That would have taken me 10 hours worth of work on my own!’

As Steve pointed out that’s a lot of time and an overwhelming job for one person but with us there it’s all mopped up in one night. Go team!

We finished up by using the church gardens for our fitness session where we worked in pairs to practice some good high knee form with resistance bands and some partner core exercises too.

After all the hard work we had definitely earned a trip to the pub so after a jog back we headed to one of our favourite Ealing pubs and shared some baked treats. We also toasted to Alex’s 100 good deed and Michelle’s 50 good deed achievements from last month!

See you all next time!