7 Westminster GoodGymers ran 5.5k from to St Andrew’s Youth Club to get it ready for 2020!

New Start Location Next Week!!!!! We will be running out of Marshal Street Leisure Centre only about 300 metres from the New Balance Store, just off Carnaby Street. I will be waiting outside to meet you!!

Running South running past the posh shops and through St James park working out what the bronze domes were for!

We made it 2.5k to St Andrews Youth Club, with a VIP visit the club was even busier than normal and the huge range of activities for Westminsters young people again blows my mind every time!! Our bellies started to rumble as the smell of the cookery club making Chinese New Year celebratory food drifted over.

Prepared for the craziest garage in London we entered the main store room in the club and after a month gap it was in big time need of some TLC!! Looking like my bedroom back in 95 there was hardly a piece of floor without something random placed not neatly on it. So we emptied the garage and put the jigsaw back together! Creating a walkway and order not seen in the garage this year!! Allowing for things no matter how random to be found and the youth club to function seamlessly as usual!

With the garage looking great it was time to head back to scout out our new Start location!! Working out (getting wrong) the routes to Marshal street hopefully it will be smooth sailing next week!!

5.5k complete we said goodbye to New Balance which has been our home for the last 3 years!

See you next week

Joel

9 GoodGym Westminster runners ran 7k to Little Venice to pick up 8 buckets full of recycling along the canal to celebrate GoodGym’s 10th Birthday!! #GG10

A lovely evening in London Town for our Wednesday adventures as we glided down 3.5k on Little Venice with a couple of stops to fly the GG flag along the way.

Big shout out to Elena for her first GG run and a massive congratulations to Tom for reaching to Magical 50 GoodDeed milestone.

Arriving at the Canal and River Trust HQ where we grabbed our kit and headed out to rid the canal of as much recycling as possible for the evening! We limited the rubbish collection as the bins were way over flowing and really focused our efforts on recyclables as there was a handy line of recycling bins we could use.

Working our way West we found plenty of plastics, bottles and cans and even managed to do a on the grab sort of the recycling.

Great to be on the canal path as the sun set on a lovely September day doing our bit to help this beautiful stretch of water looking at its best!

35 minutes of grabbing, sorting and recycling away had us ready for the off. With the hands sanitised and kit put away we runoff as the darkness fell.

Getting back to base with a good workout complete and a top task in the bag we stretched out and head off into the night!

Thanks for coming along and hope to see you next week for our visit to St Andrews youth Club!!

Joel

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.

Last night we had 16 runners embrace the light evenings and join us for a clean up down on the canal on behalf of the Canal & River Trust. This included Danny from Brent who visited us on his GoodGym tourism trail and one brand new GoodGymer Georgia, who despite claiming not be be a runner at all smashed it and kept up right at the front all evening!

We started our run by utilising the parks on the way to the canal in Hanwell and performing some group sprint intervals in file formation through the beautiful Walpole and Lammas parks. After that I found the group were feeling pretty speedy last night but I encouraged everyone to go at their own pace with regular regroups along the way so we didn't loose anyone en route. I think everyone had a great workout on the way down as we were all pretty warm by the time we arrived which with all the recent cold whether felt pretty nice for a change!

We were welcomed by Jack and his van full of tricks and this time he had some more litter picking tasks for us to complete. His pre task check along the stretch we work on had unfortunately confirmed that the loch we spruced up on our last visit had once again been subject to a party or two and needed some serious attention! He also had the infamous bat detector to hand to see if we could find any activity this time round after failing to find anything last year.

Loched and loaded...

Loaded with our equipment we headed for the loch a little further down from our meeting point and with the towpath being a little muddy from all the recent rain we stuck to the path inside the park on the way there, keeping everyones feet relatively dry for now...

Special mention this week to Ronan who joined us back at GoodGym after being injured for a little while! It was great to see him back and as a treat he was on bat patrol while the rest of the group split up to cover as much ground and litter picking opportunities as possible.

The evening proved to be not very fruitful in bat activity although Ronan thinks he heard a few maybes, but what we lacked in bats we more than made up for in litter picking! A huge pile of bags collected between us and this stretch of canal and the loch looks a much nicer place for a spring stroll!

The walk on the towpath back to our starting point proved to be a little muddier so apologies to those wearing shiny new trainers on the run (sorry Jenni!) but everyone did amazingly well so a big thank you for coming out last night!

After the run we all headed to the pub for our monthly social and this week we also celebrated my 50th GoodGym deed with cake and a couple of drinks!

It's been an amazing journey and I can't wait to complete the next 50!

Happy Running!

A last minute change of plan won't stop us!

Last night's task was a very last minute call around to all the previous places we'd had the pleasure of helping in hope there was something we could do! Unfortunately our task for Cultivate London that was scheduled for last night was curtailed by our contact being very unwell, get well soon Rosie! Luckily we have a few more dates booked in to help her at the DIG site in April ( sign up nice and early here! ) so we'll still get to go and help later on!

With a welcome shift in weather from last weeks Narnia like run we had a HUGE 21 runners out last night with two new members joining us for the first time. A Big welcome to Harriet and Victoria

This week we were back to two tasks as we sent a small sub team off again to help at The Ealing Churches Winter Night Shelter. This week taskforce member Jenni led Michelle, Tony and Clare down, so thank you guys for volunteering to be on the smaller run!

We started off with a quick group huddle to discuss to route and to come clean about the fact I wouldn't in fact be running this evening... I felt incredibly guilty but a few niggles meant I didn't want to risk a run last night so instead I was lead bike for proceedings! A few warm up drills saw us nicely warmed up and we were off!

With Michael C backmarking for us we all arrived safely to Hanwell Community Centre with Shan & Michael K ready in waiting for us to get started. The team at the centre were sure they had some bits we would help with when we were left without a task at the last minute, so thanks to them for accommodating us with short notice last night!

We were working across the site doing a bit of cleaning, sweeping and tidying. There was a good mix of things to do, window cleaning and prop sorting were the key tasks, everyone was particularly excited about the group picture that would come of all the great props in the basement we were helping to organise.

What a PROPosition!

With it being the first Tuesday of the month (our dedicated social night!) minds soon turned to the pub so we wrapped things up and headed back to base and complete the run/cycle back to meet the other team. Finishing up nicely with a little leg busting round of exercises we were finished for the evening. Lovely to see so many in the pub afterwards and Jenni and I were happy to be able to share some biscuits we were gifted from a mission a few weeks ago!

Next week the lovely Ana of GoodGym Hounslow and Wandsworth will be covering while I am taking care of some business in Barcelona... it's a lovely spring cleaning task at a local church and it's a new venue we've not visited before so let's show them what we're made of and get stuck in, sign up here!

See you in a couple of weeks!