Despite the less than pretty weather, an amazing group of GoodGymers, led by Lorna, headed out to lend a hand at Age UK in Wandsworth.

After a warm up the group ran up to the Gwyneth Morgan Day Centre for older people, a lovely local resource which offers vulnerable and older people physical disability specialist day services and aims to maximise people’s independence by providing support and activities, community-based outreach work and help to become digitally connected.

They have a fleet of buses they use to transport their users to the centre and they asked us to come and help them out by giving them a good wash so they are spick and span for our lovely local residents.

The team got to work with gloves, sponges, buckets and soapy water giving it some proper elbow greaseand bus-ting moves to transform the vehicles. Well done everybody, great work!

Don't forget there is an extra opportunity tomorrow to help out an environmental clothes charity tomorrow, and next Monday we'll be popping up to Paradise to help out this great community space. Until then, have a great week all!

For our first run of February we were back at the lovely Doddington community garden to help prepare the former derelict rooftop site for the arrival of some donated trees.

After our tree-themed warm up question where we all had to name a (you guessed it) type of tree it was lovely to welcome Gary along to his first group run -give him a massive cheer!

We then ran down to the garden and got stuck in to the job at hand, which was to dig over beds ready for a very exotic delivery. Doddington is going to be home to some very exciting fruit trees, including kiwi and pomegranate. Who knew we could grow these delicious varieties in London?!

Beds weeded, turned over and cleared, the areas were transformed. We also tackled some other jobs including compost spreading and pot relocation ahead of a very special visit on Thursday - we're sworn to secrecy but suffice to say it is by royal appointment!

Great work team - we'll be back in two weeks to do some sanding and hopefully some spray painting of the benches, so if you're feeling artistic then this is the task for you. Before then we have a massive plog to kick off next week, sign up here.

It was the first week of our hopefully new regular Monday pub quiz after the run - look out for the next one, all welcome. There was even a tree themed question, so they must have seen us coming! If anybody can link a fig tree to a file format then send in your answers on a postcard!

Have a great week, GoodGym.

As group ones go, this one was pretty special! Read on to find out why this is one session we won't forget in a hurry...

It was our first group session of 2023 - welcome back everybody! To kick off another year of doing good and getting fit, we started with a balance-based warm up and a quick round up of all our New Year's Resolutions. There were some really good ones in there including stretching more, getting stronger, running 500 miles over the year, and going o more holidays. All excellent choices!

It was brilliant to welcome back some faces we hadn't seen in a little while, and to have Sarah join her first group run - give her a cheer!

Our job for the evening was at a new location - and what a location it was! With a beautiful view over Battersea as our backdrop, our task was to empty two huge raised beds at St Mary's School so they could create a climate change garden.

The challenge: the beds were at the top of the terrace, which did mean we had a lovely panorama of the city skyline at night, but also meant carrying soil down a long flight of stairs. The excellent news: there was a slide! Yes, in a GoodGym Wandsworth first we could transport ourselves and our big bags of soil down a massive, winding slide.

Before long we were digging away as quickly as we could to get the bags filled and have our turn. There were many varied techniques, from Steph who managed to cultivate an elegant swoosh to land perfectly, to Tim who somehow managed to make it down seemingly on foot! There were also a couple of incidents of overshooting the end of the slide, but perhaps best not to mention that! We finally discovered we could in fact send the bags down by themselves without them slipping, so next week when we return to finish off the beds, we're prepared for a seamless, efficient task.

Don't forget that we're just kicking off the January challenge. Every January, we challenge ourselves to run, walk and cycle as far as we can and to complete as many good deeds as possible. In January 2022 we managed a huge 4173 good deeds and travelled over 85,000km together, and this year we’ve got even bigger targets in mind - we're aiming for a whopping 5,000 good deeds and 10,000km overall. You can help us get there! So far Wandsworth has racked up 31 good deeds, and 126 kilometres run, but we have set our own area goal at 100 good deeds and 1200 km so we can't afford to rest on our laurels! I can't wait to see what we can achieve.

Next week we're going back to hopefully finish off the job - hope to see you there.

Happy new year GoodGym!