24 GoodGymers booked a trip to the library at John Betts Primary and made shhhh happen!

That old c word is very much the talk of GoodGym and the World, but it didn't stop 23 GoodGymers from joining me tonight to help out with a range of jobs at Eloise's school, John Betts Primary.

Tonight we welcomed along, Erica, Dan and Katherine to their first H&F group run, hope you enjoyed it! It was also lovely to have David join us and GoodGym tourist, Leticia, from our neighbours GoodGym Hounslow. Thank you all for joining us and lending some extra hands tonight! 🙌

The 'authoritive' red whistle made a return and helped us kick off the night where akin to obedient school children, everyone fell silent and headed outside as instructed. Once settled in our 'glamorous' cordoned off car park spot, we began the intros and news round-up...

Shoutouts 📣

• A big well done to Matt and Eloise for completing the Cambridge Half, with a few bonus miles thrown in at the beginning!
• Thank you to Cookie for backmarking and to Lucy for the additional photos and insta boomerangs!

The book end...a recap of this week's news

1. Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Please read GoodGym's current guidelines here 🦠📝. At the moment, all GoodGym activities are carrying on as normal but will be updated as the situation progresses. REMEMBER...Catch it. Bin it. Kill it! 🗑️

2. Upcoming H&F Community Mission - Last Saturday of the month...help out the Fulham Palace Volunteers, all the details are here.

3. Race volunteers needed 🏁 - Volunteer at adidas City Runs: 1 hour - Sunday 5th April and Hackney Half Aid Station Volunteering - Sunday 17th May.

We began with a pulse raising warm-up which involved some high knees, spotty dogs and inner foot taps, which seemed to more resemble Morris dancing for some...Lucy! With everyone warmed-up and stretched we set off to John Betts Primary School, with Cookie kindly backmarking to ensure no one was lost en route.

Having successfully navigated our way through the busy central streets of Hammersmith, Matt spotted the perfect spot for our weekly wall sit and thus began the most beloved 30 seconds of the session....

Wall sit complete, we sped off towards the front gates of John Betts Primary and tracked down Matt who was inside awaiting our arrival. Katie and Tom were both left in amazement and disappointment when they learnt that the 2 people in the picture they recreated on our last visit to John Betts were in the school last Monday! Both were completely gutted that they'd narrowly missed out on meeting royality!

Another toot of the 'authoritive' red whistle silenced the group and they gathered round in a circle. Matt and his daughter, Emily greeted the team and explained the jobs that they'd be tackling tonight:

*Sticking new labels on the library books 📚 *Moving 2 storage units from one side of the school to the other 🗄 *Helping to sort the school uniform back into the storage units👕

With Eloise being Head of English at the school it was only right she led most of the team to the library to begin the relabelling library book process. On the way into the library, we spotted the wonderful 'Welcome back GoodGym' PowerPoint slide that Matt had made earlier in the day...lovely!

Three weeks ago, the team had helped the PTA with categorising all the library books by genre. But now the fun really began...

Book us up

Each label represented a genre and all the correct coloured labels needed to be stuck on each of the library books, what could go wrong?! Green 📗 = Nature, Blue 📘 = Science and Technology, and 📙 = History, amongst many others!

Booking on gas!

The team spread themselves around the room onto the different tables that had been allocated with a genre and coloured label.

Book in the day!

With everyday being a school day the team learnt some interesting facts and stories, including one about the water cycle! Tom even discovered that many of the books preceded his birth!

Book in business

With a whole heap of books to get labelled, yes there really was A LOT of books in the library, who'd have thought it(?!) the team efficiently got a labelling production line going. GoodGymers labelled the books,then passed them to the PTAs who added the freshly labelled books to the shelves in the library.

While the others tackled the labelling, Cookie, Andrew, Biscuits and Matt headed upstairs to the storage cupboard where they were faced with a tiny room. In the room were two storage units that needed emptying and then moving across to the other side of the school.

Piles of uniforms, boxes and shelving were moved out of the storage room and from inside the cupboard into the adjacent room.

Treat yo' shelf!

With the storage units now empty, Team muscle, who had some extra muscle added with the arrival of Annabel, began to shift and wiggle the units out the room and up the stairs. Matt practiced his escapism and slid between the narrow gap between the doorway and unit.

When push comes to shove

Wth the storage units successful shifted, pushed and shoved (amongst other methods!) across to the other room the first job was to slide the shelves back in to the units.

Biscuits couldn't contain his excitement as he joined Matt, Cookie and Andrew in ferrying across the final few boxes from the storage room.

Some shelf indulgence

With the units shelved and ready, it was time to sort the uniform into ages and place them neatly on the shelf. Bags and organisation, this was definitely a job made for Sarah! Both Sarah and Erica helped one of the PTA members sort through the mountains of bags and uniform until they were all nicely sorted and organised.

With all the jobs completed the team reconvened in the hall with their eye on the climbing frame. Eloise was first to climb to the top, closely followed by Cookie whilst the rest of the team gathered round for a top team photo

Matt had kindly given out some glow in the dark wristbands leftover from a cycling proficiency course which also provided another excellent group team photo op.

We said our thank yous and goodbyes to Matt and Emily and headed outside for a quick fitness blitz. Upon hearing the word “fitness”, Team Nash waved and exited stage right as quick as a flash!

In front of the school, the team smashed out some frog jumps, pistol squats, snowboard jumps, supermans and partner squats before beginning the short run back to base. En route we had a brief pause that enabled Sarah to complete one of her physio exercises, some side squats - two birds, one stone!

Back at base we book ended the evening with a good stretch off and class was dismissed!

Next week, we'll be flyering for Open Age H&F around White City, please sign up here. Absolutely awesome work tonight team!💪 🙌 Have a lovely rest of your week and weekend 😊.

24 GoodGymers ran 7km to help The Church of St Michael and St George, White City

January and the January Challenge are over, but this didn't stop 23 wonderful GoodGymers from joining me to lend a hand at a BRAND NEW TASK tonight! The evening was decidedly mild for February and many decided to get their legs out and rock the shorts 🩳.

For some reason, here at GoodGym H&F we often seem to have runners with the same name, which both helps and hinders with remembering names and nicknames! - the official term is 'homonymous'.

There was no excuse to forget one name tonight...a big welcome along to Beth who joined us tonight for her first GoodGym H&F group run.

News, news, news

1. January Challenge 2020: H&F's final totals...a whopping 160 good deeds completed and 1897km run. 16th place in the 'Gold' League. Smashed it! Well done team 🙌.

2. Upcoming events: Sat 8th Feb at 10am - Richmond Park 5km & 10km and Sun 9th Feb at 9.30am - Wimbledon's Second Sunday Five.

3. Hackney Half Aid Station Volunteering - Sun 17th May: you'll have a great day out cheering on fellow runners and earn yourself some nice freebies, these include a free entry to a future race and a t-shirt! For all the details, click here.

AND FINALLY....

1. Team Nash are running the London Marathon for the brilliant charity, Barnardo's who do fantastic work to protect and support vulnerable children and young people. Please click here to sponsor them.

Team Nash ran with Daley Thompson at the weekend and is also a fan of my favourite brain and body warm-up which involves different moves for each number...I learnt from the best, we always hang out at weekends 😉

Pray it by ear

Tonight's brand new task was at The Church of St Michael and St George, White City, a nice long run to get our legs turning. Following a quick-warm up which included high knees, jumping jacks, spotty dogs and lunges. Heart rates raised we set off towards White City. All the traffic lights seemed against us, but they handily enabled us to regroup. With lots of pedestrian dodging inside and around Shepherds Bush Green we happily headed onto Wood Lane which was far clearer and wider.

There was also a perfectly placed long wall which allowed for the weekly wall sit to be completed - hooray!

"I know where we're going. It's a left, then a right at QPR's stadium and up" - Tom

With Tom sounding very assured of where we were heading he took the lead. Katie and Andrew had timed their 'running lates' to perfection and met us as we headed up towards the church.

The state of pray

Church located we headed inside through the side entrance and were greeted by the vicar, Ben. Ben welcomed everyone in and explained all the jobs that needed doing tonight:

• Clean the kitchen area
• Clean both sets of toilets
• Clean in the vestibules
• Tidy the crèche area
• Clean all the windows
• Polish the brass plaques
• A garden litter-pick
• Hoover - lots of it with trusty Henry!

The team split into lots of smaller groups to tackle the list of jobs.

Like two pees in a pod

Katie and Catriona did their best Kim and Aggy impression in the toilets and left them sparkling clean!

So crèche & clean

In the crèche area, there was lots of tidying of stuffed animals, books and toys, and cleaning of the windows by Eloise, Sarah, Sophie and Milla.

Alice become very well acquited with Henry as she set to work hoovering the carpets and around the chairs, finding Zanoubia's locker key in the process - a fab find! Analiese was on polishing duty, putting the Brasso to work on the brass plaque so that it would be lovely and shiny again.

Matt stepped up to tackle the window cleaning on the large windows in the hall, with Andrew kindly holding the ladder to provide rock solid support.

Also in the hall area, Zanoubia cleaned all the fingerprints from the doors, while Lucy hoovered, Chi tidied and Biscuits cleaned in the other toilets...there definitely wasn't any childish behaviour involving hoovers here....

Mary, Luis and Beth set to work cleaning the kitchen area, with Luis ensuring the basin was the cleanest one you'd ever set eyes upon! Mary and Beth also ensured all the plants in the church had their thirst quinched with a good watering.

A litter pick of this, and a litter pick of that

While the others were hard at work inside, 'team bags' - Cookie, Helen, Marissa, Tom and Maddie (sorry for the name team!) - were working hard outside to clear-up all the litter and a bit of a "Brucie Bonus", a quick weed in the garden area....how to pray your cards right!

No altaring this photo!

Amazingly, in just half an hour all the jobs were completed! All that was left to do was to pose for Chi as he took this week's team photo. Boom! Task complete.

We said our goodbyes and thankyous to Ben and headed outside. Despite it feeling that no one was heading back to base with me when asked who was heading or peeling off on the way, many of the group ran the quicker and more direct 3km run back. Here we were treated to a stretch off led by Tom, in the words of Mo, "that's lovely that!".

Thank you all for coming along and for all your terrific efforts tonight team. Have a great rest of your week! Sign up for next week's run here. Don't forget it's the monthly social following the run!

Shoutouts 📣

• Thank you to Matt for tonight's pun, Chi for his photography skills, Helen for backmarking and to Tom for leading the cool down!
• Well done to those who did the wonderfully muddy 'Splash & Dash' on Wimbledon Common and the Regents Park 10km!
• Good luck to those parkrunning and racing this weekend.

23 GoodGymers did some school running as they went back to school to lend a hand at John Betts Primary

It was a deceptively chilly night but this didn't stop 22 warm and hardy souls from joining me tonight to help out with a whole heap of jobs in Eloise's school, John Betts Primary.

Tonight we welcomed along, Mary, Venny, Sophie and Dan to their first H&F group run, thank you all for coming along and lending some extra hands tonight, hope you enjoyed it! 🙌

With everyone layered up and eager to get started we headed outside to our lovely and 'glamorous' cordoned off car park spot for the intros and news round-up...

Ain't it school news

1. January Challenge 2020 - we're into the last few days! We've completed 157 good deeds and run/walked 1,725kms, which smashes our 2019 totals of 107 good deeds and 1,627 kms. Check out the GoodGym leagues here.

2. Upcoming races - there's some great upcoming events that other H&F GoodGym'ers are getting involved with: Sunday 2nd February at 9.30am - Wimbledon Common 'Dash for the Splash' 10km and Saturday 8th February at 10am - Richmond Park 5km & 10km.

3. Cheer everyone! - there's a new '📢 Cheer all' button that enables you to cheer everyone who attended the session...although in a slight 'faux pas' tech error, it appears that you'll also give yourself a cheer too 😳.

4. 'Humans of H&F Exhibition' - a wonderful exhibition presented by United in Hammersmith & Fulham, on at the Lyric Theatre until 22nd February. Our very own H&F GoodGymer, Katie (K-A-T-H-R-Y-N 😉) Hodges is one of those 'humans' featured, see if you can spot her!

And....a big WELL DONE to Eloise who achieved TWO PBs at the weekend, one at parkrun and one at the Farnborough Half! 🥳🙌🏅

As a school of thumb

Following a pulse raising warm-up which involved some high knees, lunges, fast feet and a favourite of mine at the moment, the 'number exercise' challenge (great for warming-up both the body and brain!), we set off to John Betts Primary School with Cookie kindly backmarking, to ensure no one was lost en route.

Having successfully navigated our way around pedestrians and the streets of Hammersmith, we paused briefly to allow everyone to regroup, and much to everyone's delight had enough time to fit in a quick wall sit. Despite being a real 'quad burner' 🦵🔥, this exercise is great for runners as it not only builds isometric strength and endurance in the quadriceps muscle group, glutes, and calves, but also prevents runner's knee. I promise I don't torture you every week without good reason 😄!

Wall sit completed we continued on our run. It wasn't long before we all arrived at the front gates of the school and entered through the large main...well all aside from Cookie, who I may have forgotten to inform which door it was we had all disappeared through 🙈. The team were greeted in the main school hall by the school caretaker, Matt and his daughter, Emily. Matt explained that like many schools, due to constant funding cuts, any money available to schools goes directly into education rather than into general school maintenance and upkeep, so was very appreciative for all the helping hands tonight.

"Thank you, you lovely mad crazy people" - Matt

School's paradise

Matt and Eloise had drawn up a long list of jobs for the team to get stuck into, these included:

• Moving 10kgs of bagged wood chips to the climbing area 💪
• Sorting and labelling of school uniform for the PTA 📋🏷️
• Moving books from one room to another 📚 - with the bonus of stairs workout in-between!
• Moving two filing cabinets 🗄️🗄️ - again, with the bonus of stairs!
• Sorting the top-floor storage room 🗃

There was lots to keep the team busy tonight!

The team split into three groups to tackle the list of jobs. One group headed back outside to the climbing area with Matt, the second group headed up the stairs with Eloise and the third group stayed in the main hall. Within minutes, their were red and black GoodGym shirt both inside and out, and a real hive of activity.

Friends with benechips

Bev, Alice, Speedy, Andrew, Dan, Sophie R, Matt, Annabel, Milla and Cookie all got stuck in to the upper-body workout of wood chip shifting and mulching. Matt gave the first large bags of wood chips a helping hand over to make it easier and quicker for the group to scoop and distribute the wood chips to the 'danger' areas of the climbing area - the areas that needed more wood chips in order to be as 'fall-proof' as possible.

"We're all barking mad" - Bev

Despite the challenge of the cold and darkness, the team worked incredibly hard and efficiently to move the entire 10 kilos of wood chips! Some scooped, some carried and distributed containers full of wood chips, and others spread the piles of wood chips. Boom! One job done!

How much wood could a GoodGymer chip, if a GoodGymer could chip wood?

Book at them go!

Eloise headed up to the library with Marissa, Annabelle, Analiese, Tatty and Sophie C. The group had been tasked with the physical workout of the relocation of many books, where stairs had to be negotiated first up and then down while carrying a finely balanced pile of books. The team completed this with ease and emptied the shelves in super-quick time!

Time to run a file?

Next up was the job of moving two filing cabinets down the stairs. One proved a great deal heavier, thanks to some rather age-old paperwork that was removed then carefully placed back in once the cabinet had been relocated.

Off the cuff

The small but mighty team of Sarah, Lucy, Mary, Venny and Zanoubia set to work sorting crates of school uniform clothing: skirts, shirts, jackets, blouses all into the same age sizes and folded into nicely labelled bags. I jested that by chance, Sarah happened to be involved in the job that had not one but two of her favourites...bags and organising!

Once the wood chip group had completed their job they headed inside to the warmth of the main hall and gave a hand to those sorting and labelling the bags of uniform.

"What do you reckon, do I fit into this jacket?" - Speedy

Check out Alice, Sophie R, Zanoubia and Mary and Venny in the background, focused on sorting and folding!

"I feel like I've had the full GoodGym experience" - Sophie R

The sort end of the stick

Biscuits and Milla were given the challenge of the top-floor storage room which to begin with, which shall we say was a little unorganised. Trays and all kinds of items were everywhere! Milla even discovered a wonderfully crafted internal organ diagram. With some help from Emily, the storage room was now a place you could easily walk into, or in Biscuits' case, take 'Henry' the hoover for a quick spin around.

Check out the transformation!...

After forty minutes of lifting and shifting, organising and moving we called it a night once the final bag of school uniform was bagged up and labelled. There was just one last thing to do...have a team photo in Mrs. Nash's classroom! Much to the delight of many their were some fun coloured building blocks that were made into a lovely 'GG' prop.

With all the jobs completed and a team photo taken we said our goodbyes and thank yous to Matt and Emily, and headed back to base. Sadly, there was no time for a fitness session tonight, but we did manage to get in a few more 'squats' or 'spotty dogs' or as I conjured up 'squatty dogs' (now there's an idea!) on the run back. Once back at base we had a good stretch off back before heading home for warmth and food.

Top work tonight team! 😊

"You've all saved me many hours, if not days of walking back and forth, moving and sorting books which has been on my to do list since September 🙈" - Eloise

Next week we've got a new task up in White City for The Church of St Michael and St George. For all the details and to sign up, click here. Have a great rest of your week and weekend. Hopefully see you next week!

The leafs have leaft the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden thanks to the hard work of GoodGym H&F

Tonight there was the 'great debate' on ITV, at GoodGym H&F however, our great debates tend to be around 'weed or not a weed?' and the big questions in life such as 'what is your favourite pudding and what animal would you rather be?' - I feel we do a good job at putting the world to rights!

Despite the noticeable cooler temperature due to a cold front from the North Pole*, 14 other GoodGym'ers joined me for tonight's task at the Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden.

Big welcome to our new runner tonight, Rosie who joined us for her first GoodGym H&F group run - thank you for coming along, hope you enjoyed it! And great to see Analiese (our new token Kiwi!) back for her second run.

With everyone layered up and ready we headed outside for our news round-up and warm-up...

Some pro-leaf-ic running...

We started off the evening by first congratulating our Fulham 10k runners...Lucy, Jonny, Alice and Arba. Well done all and congratulations Alice on the new PB!! 🙌🏼🥳

We also congratulated Tom on his tough Maverick Trail race, one of those 'flat' races with a brutal 217m of elevation!

In other news...

1. H&F Community Mission - Thursday 12th December for Age UK H&F's Christmas Party. Please sign up here if you can lend a hand anytime between 4pm-8.30pm.
2. GoodGym have teamed up with food poverty charity FareShare and Tesco to help people struggling with hunger in a series of community missions. There's one happening in Wimbledon Metro on Saturday 23rd November. For all the details, click [here].
3. GG Training Run - 13 Bridges Battersea - Tower - Sunday 24th November. All the details are here.
4. FoodCycle, East Acton - Volunteer to cook community meals from surplus foods. All the details are here - if interested, speak to Cookie and he can make it a Community Mission!
   

Leaf it out!

Before we headed off on our run we had a quick warm-up comprising of some high knees, jumping jacks, spotty dogs, lunges and some perfectly executed side-to-sides, both clockwise and anti-clockwise! With everyone nicely warmed up we headed off through the busy streets of Hammersmith up towards Shepherd’s Bush, pausing briefly for the beloved wall sit en route.

Matt, Tom and Andrew kindly continued on up the road to distribute about half a dozen leaflets for Open Age H&F, a charity which provides hundreds of weekly activities for local residents aged 50+ to sustain their physical and mental fitness, maintain an active lifestyle and develop new and stimulating interests - the good news is we'll be distrubuting more of these leaflets next week!

As it was a good few degrees colder than of late we had a nice brisk run up and it wasn't long before we'd weaved our way round pedestrians and zig-zagged through the streets to reach the Nubian Life Centre. In perfect synchronisation, we arrived with Matt, Tom and Andrew who appeared in the darkness from the opposite direction.

Read it and sweep!

We entered into the Josiah Briathwaite Community Garden, part of the Nubian Life Centre, and were greeted by the lovely, Susannah. The Nubian Life Centre provides adult day care services for the Afro-Caribbean community with health issues such as Dementia and Alzheimer's and Susannah explained that the garden was used by the elders at weekends to grow organic and medicinal food, and as a safe space for children to explore and find all the bugs!

Susannah went on to give us an interesting gardening lesson around the benefits of green manure and the permaculture principles to restore fertility and nitrogen to the soil, and the Gardeners' World visit last year - check it out here.

Tonight's full list of tasks to be done that Susannah ran through with the group were:

• Planting green manure 🌱
• Sweeping the patio and paths 🧹
• Removing and cutting up the old climbers ✂️
• Raking and collecting all the leaves from the grass 🍂
• Fixing up the new signs for the garden 🔨

Green manure planting that's a cut above the rest

Matt and Marissa got stuck into the garden bed with the assistance of some secateurs to cut the dead plants. Eloise, Tom and Andrew worked together to remove and cut up the dead climbers from the dead garden bed and began the planting of the green manure.

A clean sweep

Opting for the brushes were Rosie, Analiese and Johnny who teamed up to give the paths and patio a good sweep, with Johnny taking on the important role of bag holder in Sarah's absence.

Rake that leaves

Lucy, with her new found love of the rake, systematically raked the garden and formed many a piles of leaves that Andrew and Tom efficiently collected and bagged using the 'handy' hand-scooping tool. Cookie ensured the new signs for the garden were securely put up, while Alice and Sarah got fully stuck into the garden beds, meticulously combing through the plants to remove all the leaves that had fallen, forming yet more piles of leaves!

With the time coming to call it a night, everyone finished up with their jobs, piled up the 5 bags of leaves and garden waste, and branched out for a team photo around the tree. Susannah was incredibly appreciative of the teams hard work and efforts to get the entire list of jobs completed as they have a visited from their funders tomorrow - what good timing for a GoodGym style garden makeover!

Check out the transformation!....

We said our final thankyous and goodbyes and began our run back to base. En route back we bumped into two familar faces in GG tees, Jonny and Mo, who earned their good deed by delivering the final Open Age H&F leaflet. Back at base, Mo kindly led the cool down and stretch off before everyone headed home to the warm! Great job team. Amazing work as always!

Next week we're we're leafleting and postering for two local charities, Open Age H&F and Food2You. Please sign up here. Have a great rest of your week and weekend. Hopefully see you next week!

*according to the Metro, other newspapers are available!