Tonight we celebrated Earth Day with a digging task. It was a continuation of what we started last week at St Mary's Farnham Royal Primary School in their learning garden.

Last week we dug up bed 2 and removed as many weeds as we could. This evening we carried on ensuring the bed was weed free and did a little bit more around the strawberry and garlic sections.

We met directly at the task and our task owner Chrissy made sure we were given all the access we needed.

Great to have Firmo and Jason join us on their first task tonight. And Anna on her second task. Hope you enjoyed it and will come back again soon.

It's your bEARTH DAY!

So what exactly is Earth Day?

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics." 2025 will be the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. It includes a wide range of events and activities arranged by Earthday.org. Check out their website for more info - Earth Day: The Official Site | EARTHDAY.ORG

Planets vs Plastics

The theme this year for Eath Day is Planet vs Plastics

Did you know?

• Global plastics has reached an estimated 460 million metric tons in recent years;

• It is estimated that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans;

• One million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide, while up to five trillion plastic bags are used a year;

Earthday.org have a goal to reduce plastics by 60% by 2040 (60X40).

At GoodGym we are very active in litter picks and keeping our outdoor spaces clean and clear, we get involved in helping community groups with restoring their nature areas back to useable spaces as well as supporting conservation groups with their projects....but can we do more?

Check out this toolkit for some ideas -

EarthDay-2024-Toolkit-March-12th-Update.pdf

So after all this information on Earth Day 2024 and completing our task this evening, we did a mini fitness session in the playground - after all it's important to keep ourselves active and fit! The team did really well in the circuits based exercises which consisted of ladder exercises; med ball throws and slams; kettlebell swings; cone to cone running and good old fashioned playground hopping and jumping!

We will be sad to see Hamid leave Slough. We hope you will come and visit us and we are always here to help you Hamid so please keep in touch.

And finally….. huge congratulations to Ricky on his London Marathon race yesterday! He smashed it with a new marathon personal best as well as a huge time off his half marathon timing!! And he looked fresh as a daisy when Harsha and I saw him at mile 23(ish) with the GoodGym cheer squad! We are all so proud you!

Next week we will be meeting at Salt hill activity Centre, in Salthill park, Bath Rd, SL1 3SS. Our task is to help Raggy Rd Allotments with their allotment space. We will be walking or running down to the allotments.

This evening we were doing a spot of gardening for St Mary’s Farnham Royal Primary school. The task was to tidy up bed number 2 and get it ready for the children to do some planting. This area of the playground is used by the children as part of their learning garden and like any other garden it needs a bit of TLC.

There was no run for this task as the location of the school didn’t have an accessible road where we could park then run so we made it a ‘make your own way’ session.

But we did have a fitness session lined up!

Great to have Zoe join us on her first Slough session. Thank you for coming along.

And it’s was so so good to see Mehdi return back to this area. His journey from Slough to the Bibby Stockholm barge and back to Hounslow has been a painful one and we have very much have missed having him at the sessions. In the background we had lots of the Slough members petition our local MP for his help in getting Mehdi taken off the barge plus we started an online petition.

I hope all our efforts somehow triggered Mehdi being taken off the barge and bought back closer to us. For this we are very grateful. We even had a rainbow over us tonight celebrating his return.

Easy-Peas-y

With all the rain we’d had recently the task was a nice easy one. Digging up the weeds and turning over the soil was easy peas-y! Nothing beets a bit of gardening. Lucky Peter had bought some ‘adult’ tools but the kiddy sized spades were just as good for us shorter ones!

Within 35 minutes we had completed the task and made it look totally radishing!

Thyme for some fitness!

With kettlebells, med balls and resistance bands as our kit we had 3 sets of 4 exercises on a rep range of 8. Everyone did very well with the root-ine!

Then we finished off with a best out of 5 basketball shots! Hamid and Peter drew at 2 each and went head to head for a final play off!

Ruth took the photo of the night! I never knew I could have flying feet whilst throwing a ball!

Thank you to everyone for coming down tonight to help.

Next week is Earth Day so we will be back at St Mary’s primary school doing something good for the soil!

Be great to see you there!

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions

Back for its ninth year, the Great British Spring Clean is the nations biggest mass-action environmental campaign.

The Great British Spring Clean and Great Big School Clean 2024 will take place from 15 - 31 March, and tonight was our efforts to help as the Slough #LitterHeroes

For Keep Britain Tidy's 70th year we pledged to pick up 70 items in 70 minutes today...and we might even pledge to collect 70 bags till the 31st! #PlatinumPledge

Waste no time

So as Hamid and I went for a 2 lap run of the park, our Dumpster Divas (Jen, Ruth and Agnija) got started on counting their rubbish!

The good news is we didn't find any Retro Rubbish - (rubbish that is years old and still causing harm to our environment today, releasing greenhouse gases as it slowly breaks down in our soil and water, which contributes to the climate crisis)!

What we did find was nappies!, lottery tickets, fast food trash, beer cans and plenty of wet wipes!

We ended the evening having collected 5 bagfuls of rubbish tallying in at over 1000 pieces

We would like to continue with this effort so I have listed a litter pick community mission till the 31st of March - #GetInvolved!

Tonight's task has a theme going through it...and I'll give you a pew to what it is!

When I checked the sign up list last night and only I was signed up, I did have a momentary panic so I sent a little note on the whatsapp group to see if anyone else could join me...luckily both Peter and Sara were able to come along...pew for that.

I knew Leonie (our task owner would be present), so I wasn't too phased if I did have to do the task alone, however it's always good to have some company.

Our meet up point was Upton Court Park at 6.30pm with the option of a walk or run down to the Church. Only Peter met me at the park, the rest of the team made their own way to the Church (on time)...on arrival we did see a few people lingering around the entrance so I personally was very grateful to have Peter and Hamid (who was now with us too) to wait with....a blessing in disguise!

We were soon joined by Devajani so were ready to go inside to see what our task was.

Leonie explained that they had a concert on Sunday and needed some help with sweeping the floors, vacuuming the altar, cleaning the pews and the entrance area....and a little bit of high dusting!

We had a web of laughter as we chatted, caught up on our weekly antics and cracked on with the task in hand.

Peter and Hamid took to the sweeping duties like pro's whilst Sara was on hoovering and Devajani and I took a pew.

It is always amazing how quickly and efficiently we can all work and get the task done. Within 50 minutes we had swept, hoovered and wiped. Then Hamid took the longest duster we have ever seen and cleared away cobwebs that had most likely been hanging around for years! And that's no web of lies! But pew we did it!

I had great eggs-pectations from the team tonight and they didn’t let me down!

We had a nice chilled out task today of filling knitted chicks with eggs for Alexander Devine Hospice and their Big Chick Knit campaign. We needed a nice warm indoor space to do this task and very kindly Clare offered her venue at Stoke Park Trust and as a bonus she invited some of her team to join us.. winner winner chicken dinner!

We are as chick as thieves and wanted to get started on the task as quickly as possible but before we could do that we had to do a warm up of course! So with a nice gentle warm up of walking to lunging to arm swinging we were egg-cited to start.

We had the best table to work on too! One covered in egg like balls also known as a pool table!

Working around the cluck

You better watch your behavior or you’ll get eggs-pelled from the group - actually that would never happen so we worked extra hard to be naughty! Each chick was given a name … egg-stra challenge was that it had to start with D (for duck!… because they looked more like ducks!)

The names started off easily enough… we had a Derek, a Doug and a Dickie… we then went deep to our roots and chose names from our cultures (or near enough)… so we had Punjabi ducks called Davinder and Daljeet, Iranian duck called Darius, Irish duck called Darragh, Bengali ducks called Devajani, Muslim ducks called Daniel and good old British ducks called Dave!

We worked slowly but surely and soon had all the chicks (aka ducks) filled so it was time for the fitness fun to begin.

Best of cluck!

In pairs we worked around the room working on 4 exercises from agility ladder to med ball halos to lat pull downs and overhead raises..

Followed by a good old party game of musical chairs!

Well done to Hamid for being the ‘Champion’

Thank you all for getting involved in tonight’s task.

Next week we are at St Mary’s Church on Church St helping with a spring clean (meet up point is Upton Court park at 6:30pm)

Tonight we covered a longer distance than we normally do followed by a litter pick of Upton Court Park.

We met at 6:30pm in the car park and with a quick warm up for the walkers we set half the team off on their 2.5km journey to the fire station and back, whilst the remaining team held back for a longer warm up before setting off to the Harvester pub for their 5km route.

With having just completed the Wokingham Half Marathon yesterday my legs were screaming at me to be slow and steady so we did a lampost to lampost walk/run route.

En route we found a stone..not just any old stone but a directional stone dated back to 1741!

19 miles to Hyde Park Corner

Is what the stone read with a mile marker to Slough and 2 to Colnbrook.

Back at base meet up the walkers had already picked up the pickers and bags that we had strategically placed before heading out... and had got to work

It was a little dark in the car park (shame the revamp in upton didn't include more lighting) but despite that the team still managed to collect 2 bags of rubbish.

Well done all and thank you for coming out on a cold cold night!

This evening we were back at one of our very original task's - Wexham Park Hospital doing a litter pick task. It was great to have Jean back after a little break.

Also really good to see Rosa, lovely to catch up with you.

We met at the top of Shaggy Calf Lane and I briefed the team of the task, the distance and that we would be doing a litter bit of running

Running? But I like walking said Hamid

That was no problem either as we had Jean on back marking duties so walking is never an issue. But guess who was leading the 'run' pack? Yep... Hamid. He had decided to run instead and what a good runner he is! He's kept that talent a secret.

As we approached the hospital grounds we bagged up the bags onto the litter pick loops, paired up and got to work.

Each pair managed to fill a bag each, just proving the fact that we need to continue supporting the hospital with this type of task.

Thank you for everyone's help tonight.

Next week we will be in Cippenham helping Slough Outreach with getting their storage.

Huge well done to Ricky an original, a run leader, a grafter and party animal for hitting his 100th good deed tonight!

Ricky was hitting it hard with the sessions till Covid hit then he ‘went off the rocks’ for a while before coming back last year and this year for session after session - 100 was his for the taking tonight!

So I could hit you with a tonne of puns on a century but coming up with them is not a breeze anymore!

With the backlash of Storm Isha still blowing her way around we made sure we wore all the correct layers tonight including thunderwear

In tonight’s session I wanted the team to get in a 5km run or walk. Well done to Sandy for putting her head down and getting on with it.

She was definitely Gone with the ‘wind’

Peter and Mehdi also made great progress with their 3 laps of the park whilst running Ricky kept going till his Duracell batteries died down at 7km in!

Although it was Monday, it felt like a Windsday as we tried to tie the black bags into the litter picker rings. Having managed to secure the bags before they flew away, we got to work!

Nappies, penalty charges and a bike helmet were the pick of the night alongside the usual cans, take away containers and wet wipes!!!!

We cleared the back car park of Salt hill in quick time tonight with a haul of 4 full bags!

Our hands were blew by the time we finished.

Great session tonight (with a good run session bagged for the January challenge).