With the weather much kinder than of late, last night 13 GoodGymers met to help Cultivate London with some woodwork tasks down at their site in Acton!

Two new runners in the mix last night with Tom and Annamaria joining us for the first time, big welcome to them!

A pallet-able task indeed!

Our task last night was to help the wonderful West London social enterprise, Cultivate London, break down, de-nail and sand pallets to be used in their community gardens sites. They will be used for loads of great projects including creating a fruit & veg stall, potting benches, recycling stations and vertical salad walls! As this is a task we love to help with regularly, we thought it would be fun for us to start tallying the slats we process so that we have a target to aim for each time we visit.

Free therapy!

With the task set, everyone got to work hammering away trying to get out the pesky nails, some of which were very stubborn to remove! Once we had a good hoard we set a team to work to start sanding them down to be used in the final product. We all agreed it was an excellent upper body workout and a great way to come a de-stress if you've had a hard day, free therapy for all! Time for the final count and we managed to get 103 pallets de-nailed and made a good start on the sanding process too, now the number to beat for next time is set!

All the single leg squats, all the single leg squats...

Once back at base we did a but of focusing on the ABC's of running, that's agility, balance and co-ordination. Even those who have been running for a long time (myself very much included!) sometimes lack strength in this area so I went through a few exercises you can sneak into your everyday life or tag onto the beginning or end of a run. Completing just a few of these whenever you can could make a big difference to your running! Running is very much a single leg sport, so to really target these exercises for running just do everything on one leg, it's much harder but forces you to really work on the balance and co-ordination instead of just strength!

• Single leg squats
• Single leg calf raises
• Single leg dead lifts
• Single leg clams

With that we were done and dusted and headed to the pub to celebrate a super successful January Challenge where we completed 132 good deeds, had 2 members join the 100 club, one member join the 50 club and ran nearly 1500km between us in Ealing alone! Special mention to Jenni who completed 16 good deeds in January and Michael who completed 13, that's a lot of extra GoodGyming! But overall a MASSIVE thank you to everyone who got involved in any way over the past month, we couldn't make all these amazing things happen without you! If you're keen to see all the heroes leader boards and see how you're doing in the mix, you can check it out here.

21 of us weren’t fazed by the weather (well maybe a little bit!) and came out to run and help at Ealing Foodbank!

2 new runners in our ranks this week, welcome to Sophie and Bernice! I hope that next time you come the weather is kinder to us but major kudos for not letting it put you off last night!

Lots of news this week:

It’s the last few days of the January challenge! Last nights incredible turnout sees us up to 126 good deeds and 1340km, so it’s the last push now! Get out and run as much as you can before Thursday and if you’re free come along to an extra session this week. Make sure you’re Strava is linked to your GoodGym profile for it all to count, do this in your account settings on your GoodGym login!

• Plog tonight with Jenni in Ealing Broadway! 6-7pm from the normal starting place, details and sign up here.

• Plog tomorrow morning at with Michael, 10am-11am from the normal starting place, details and sign up here.

Right now for the main event! After huddling inside for as long as possible we ventured out into the cold/sleet/rain/snow and got straight down to business, just a quick head count and name check and we were off, as quickly as we could to try and get warm!

Once at The Food Bank we were met by Hillary who had lots of jobs that needed doing. We quickly distributed ourselves around the building taking on whatever we could to help.

Not a shred of doubt

Adam (the most inappropriately dressed person for this weather I have ever seen!) and Chris took particular pleasure in getting to work shredding a load of unneeded paperwork, whilst others took to sorting food in the main centre. Shan and Bernice were team clean and a few of us took it in turns to brave (the now worsening weather) to litter pick nearby to the site.

Once we’d done all we could, Hilary explained a little bit more about how it all works and how they distribute the food out to collection points were those who need it can collect. It was great to hear more about this invaluable resource and help us understand how our input and the generosity of others really helps.

We normally like to finish up with a fitness session but I wasn’t subjecting anyone to that in those conditions! Just a run back and straight home to warm up. I hope you can all feel your fingers and toes again!

Next week we do it all again, same time and place with a different task! Take a look at that and all the other upcoming group runs in Ealing here!

15 runners met on an oddly mild January evening to run and help St. Peter's Church spruce up after the busy festive period!

Lots of returning faces and regulars last night but we also had 3 brand new members join us. Welcome Basia, Elena and Dagmara!

Getting into the swing of things!

We kicked things off with a warm up focusing on opening up the hips and getting us ready for some good running form. It's really important to prepare your body for exercise especially in the winter when everything is cold and stiff or if you have a sedentary job and haven't moved a lot during the day. We did lots of leg swing drills, similar to these, as well as lots of high knees to raise our pulses! We also discussed our favourite pre-run food, it turns out lots of us are nuts about well... nut butter! It would appear a lot of the group are partial to a spoonful (or two!) before heading out the door on our runs!

We had a short commute to the church on the cards but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get a good run in, so we planned a route taking in a nice steady hill climb to start us off before arriving at the lovely warm St. Peter’s. We were met by church volunteer Moira who was on hand to show us all the tasks that needed doing.

Giving January blues the brush off!

We all quickly donned tools and got to work around the building, dusting, scrubbing and brushing everything we could! Lots of happy faces and people chatting their way through the jobs on hand showed that January needn’t be blue if you come to GoodGym!

Jenni (who was our lovely backmarker tonight, thank you!) was on hand to help everyone with some good RE refresher knowledge pointing out lots of things around the church and explaining what they were, hopefully useful for Sarb when helping with the kids homework!

Run for the hills!

With lots of us on hand to chip in, the cleaning was done in no time leaving us plenty of time for a great hill based fitness session on our way back. We visited the infamous West Walk for some speedy reps up and recoveries down. Everyone pushed to their own ability and although it’s a tough session I think everyone really enjoyed the challenge and embraced the hills and the training benefit it will have! We finished things off with a one minute wall sit where everyone really felt the burn!

Just a short jog back to base where myself and Chris hashed out the pun, then we finished by stretching out our well worked legs and it was home time!

What a fantastic way to spend a dark January evening!

Don't forget the January Challenge!

Lots of talk at the moment of the January challenge! This is a bit of (friendly!) competition between GoodGym areas to see who can rack up the most good deeds and distance in what is easily the hardest month of the year in terms of motivation to go outside in the dark and cold evenings - this is where GoodGym comes in! This year in Ealing our goal is to reach 140 good deeds between us and to try and run 1450 kilometres as a team. To count just make sure you're on Strava/Runkeeper and connect it up to your GoodGym account, that way all your training miles are counted. Then just come along to as many group runs and missions as you can squeeze in - everything counts towards our target even if you visit a different GoodGym area, if you are registered with Ealing it all counts for us! Read all about it and see our progress here.