18 dodging GoodGymers ran the busiest 4k ever to Rhythams of Life Homeless Charity and sorted 2 tones of donations.

We welcomed many new faces this evening some GoodGym first timers and others Uber GoodGym travellers!

No easy way to start the run as we had the busiest run in GoodGym history between Oxford Street and Leicester Square. 1.5k of being super alert and dancing around a million people doing their Spring early evening thing!

A few back streets and quieter ally ways while managing to keep a steady rhythm we reached The colossal building that is Rhythams of Life Homeless Charity. We all the staff and charity volunteers out delivering food donations to the homeless of Westminster we had the building to sort out.

We split into groups sorting out huge bags of clothing donations into labelled and ordered piles in the main room up stairs which looks almost unrecognisable from when we started the task last week.

A second group began sorting the catering, electricals and a anything else in the back room while the basement crew got stuck into some serious graft down stairs ordering, sorting the Winter clothing while sorting books, electronics, manakin legs with pained toenails.

With the main room sorting at a great pace we brought anything that was not going to be used down to the basement to make the room as easy to use as possible.

After 50 minutes of serious sorting action we have conquered the double task!! As a reward when we return in May we will sorting out food packages and running them around the borough to help feed the local homeless community.

Bouncing out the door, we altered our route and took in a few sights running through The edge of Leicester Square, the heart of Trafalgar Square, past St James's Palace then powering up the hill to the Ritz hotel. After checking out a few shops on Old Bond Street we had genital run back to base where we stretched out and congratulated ourselves on a top evening of GoodGym action!!

Be great to have you along next week when we visit One Big Family Homeless Charity in Victoria.

A sad goodbye to Annie who is off on her travels and leaving the big smoke. Thank you so much for your energy and enthusiasm at GoodGym!

Smooth Running

Joel

12 GoodGym-ers ran 5k to help C4WS Camden make beds for the homeless or 16 ran 10k to help in the Abbey Community Centre garden!

With regular trainer Paul still in Kenya getting even faster at running, it was Frances’ turn to take the helm at GoodGym Camden this week. We had 28 runners, including Enrica, Heather and Amy who all came along for the first time!

Frances led a group to the American Church in London, helping with our regular task of making the beds for the homeless shelter they provide. We got it done in record time – less than 10 minutes! As it would take around an hour for the staff to do it themselves, they really appreciated the help as always.

Record times!

With the task done, we headed to Granary Square for a fitness session. This week we split into two halves for a group fartlek session, each heading around the square in a different direction. Fartlek is Swedish for speed play, and basically means playing around with different paces – like an interval session but more fun. The twist was that each person in the group got a chance to pick the pace and how long the group did that pace for. Would you give your fellow runners a sprint, or a nice relaxing recovery pace? Both groups did a great job, covering three laps of Granary Square and mixing up the speeds nicely.

Then we headed back to base for a nice stretch and awaited Pritesh’s group, who had been on a 10k run to Abbey Community Centre for some gardening.

Abbey Community Centre

Pritesh and his merry band of 15 GoodGymers went 'long' this week and headed over to Abbey Community Centre in the heart of Kilburn. It was a lovely night for a run and despite the hard slog the view that greeted the runners at the top of Primrose Hill was certainly worth it. The challenge with the trip to Abbey is maximising time, the time it takes to run meant only twenty minutes were available to do the task. Laura from the community centre explained to everyone what Abbey does and then showed us the work that needed to be done in the garden. We split in to two groups, one group taking on the pesky weeds between the paving stones and the other turning over a flower bed so that the community centre members could get some planting done in the next week. Everyone worked super hard and Laura was extremely grateful and impressed with how much we got done. With that we said our goodbyes and then headed back to base before a good stretch after that long run. Great running and tasking everyone and thank you to Rosie who led the run back!

Lovely to see you all, hope to see you back again soon, you can sign up for next week here, Pritesh will be leading in the last week before PB is back!

Don’t forget the next time trial in Regent’s Park on 26th March – in a bit of a twist, it’ll be a handicap race this time!