Last night temperatures were dropping but thanks to the increasing festivities, a very positive task, and a most exciting milestone, spirits were rising!

Our job for the evening was at a local theatre, Omnibus, a charity which aims to bring the arts to everybody, especially young people and the local community.

We kicked off the evening with a warm up whilst also trying to spot the celebs arriving at the BAC for that evening's comedy. No luck - maybe next week!

Most importantly, we celebrated our very own celeb for the evening, Stephanie who reached that magic milestone - 100 good deeds! Absolutely brilliant, give her a massive cheer! You can check out the star herself quite rightly taking centre stage in the photos above.

After a frosty run to the theatre we were greeted by Marie who told us that they'd finally had permission to create a lovely garden in the space behind the theatre. It is a large area with a beautiful mature apple tree but they haven't been able to take ownership of it before now. Luckily the time has come, so we set about giving it a massive weed and going over. First though there was a question of a number of beautiful Christmas trees which had to be moved. With the scent of pine in the air we made like good stage hands and shifted them all to their rightful place.

Next was clearing the area, transporting wooden fencing, litter picking, tarpaulin straightening and rubbish stacking. After all that the space was starting to look a lot better, and it won't be long until we can head back to spread soil and start planting!

We headed outside for our winter warmer body blast, and, trying to ignore the very warm and toasty looking pub opposite, got stuck in to our workout. For 45 seconds at a time we tackled all the main muscle groups and worked up a sweat.

Next week would you believe it is already our last group run of the year? But don't worry, there will still be plenty going on. We have a great session planned writing Christmas cards for isolated people followed by our festive social next week - don't miss out! Plus there are several great missions going on this weekend including wrapping present sofr refugees and making Ukrainian refugees feel welcome.

Apologies first of all for the terrible title of this run report, but what else can you say when the delivery of horse manure we were expecting to be able to do the task didn't get delivered in time?! Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately (it was up for debate) we had to revise our evening's manure-based session in favour of something slightly more, shall we say, aromatic.

However, we still had plenty of jobs to do at Paradise Cooperative Garden, so we quickly got stuck in to a warm up (after a long discussion about how brilliant Decathlon is and all our fave bits of kit). We also challeneged ourselves to think of an adjective that best describes ourselves starting with the first letter of our name. Between us we decided we were amazing, jovial, shady (or was that sexy?), jolly and aging. What a mix!

We ran through the Christmassy streets of Clapham to Paradise garden where for once we cracked the code first go - its a festive miracle! The jobs for the evening were cutting back stinging nettles, cleaning the polytunnel, sweeping the leaves up and doing a litter sweep. Dividing up into teams we quickly dispersed into the dark garden and tried not to get too spooked by the sketchy lifesize hanging scarecrow.

After a good half an hour of hard work we had completed the tasks so it was over to Wandsworth Common to do a fitness based game of I have Never. The basic idea was that you sprinted if you had done something, and it was interesting to find out who had climbed a mountain, who had never had Covid, who had been in the Channel Tunnel and who had down a day of double missions. We even had a visit from an excellent dog who politely came to say hello to everybody, and spotted another gang of runners (who sadly didn't want to seem to join us!).

Next week we're off to the Omnibus theatre to help sort out their garden and celebrate Steph's 100th good deed! Also don't forget about the south London social happening this Thursday where all the south of the river groups are getting together for some festive fun! You can sign up here. Hopefully see lots of you there for the first of lots of Christmas-shaped fun coming up!

Nevermind the wild weather of the afternoon, a group of hardy GoodGymers met up to tackle a big leaf problem at a local park last night - and despite frosty fingers and dark conditions managed a whopping total number of bags!

Great to see us all meeting up to run down together to Christchurch Gardens - there's no better way to stay warm! Before we set off we did our usual warm up and this week's question involved predicting how many bags of leaves we would collect over the course of the evening. The guesses ranged from 7 and 40, but that was without having yet seen the scale of the issue...

A mile of wet and windy running later we arrived to meet Nigel who provided us with some excellent leaf scoops, rakes and no fewer than four rolls of bags. While Abby and Steph started work on the front area, which was very clogged with wet leaves, the rest of us disappeared to the back of the church where we found even more thanks to several massive trees. Knee deep in fallen leaves, everybody rolled up their sleeves and started on the job. The leaves have proved to be a bit of an issue because not only do they stop the bulbs coming through and the grass growing underneath, they're slippery and creating drainage problems in the car park. So the small group of Friends of Christchurch Garden welcome our help sorting it out.

Half an hour later the group had made a big difference - not an easy job so well done team! As a reward (!) we opted to do a short leg blast, which featured wall sits, lunges, progressive squats and those NFL fast feet.

I can also reveal that it was Jordan who won this week's challenge to predict how many bags we'd collect - the total was a massive 36 bags full of leaves!

Great work everybody. Next week we're going to Paradise Cooperative Garden to help shovel some horse manure. Perhaps not one for your finest footwear but definitely one that will benefit the local community. Hope to see you there!

We have loads of fun stuff coming up over the run up to Christmas, including a festive social, so keep an eye on the website and socials. Have a great week, GoodGym.

Catherine and I attended the Ukrainian Hub at Emmanuel School. We spent the Saturday morning talking to refugees from Ukraine, helping them develop their English and just generally getting to know one another better!