After a day of fairly atrocious weather, the skies finally took pity on us and cleared just in time for our Tuesday evening mission to the Lighthouse & Gardens, hidden away behind the fences near Stratford International. If you’ve walked past without realising what’s there — trust us, it’s a brilliant little community space.

It was great to welcome Fuad and Eugene back after a few busy weeks at work, and the team set off on a scenic jog through the Olympic Park towards the gardens. A tube strike delay meant our host Sharon was running a little behind schedule, but GoodGymmers are nothing if not adaptable, so we filled the gap with an impromptu football skills session that definitely featured more enthusiasm than technical ability (speaking for myself at least).

Once Sharon had arrived and given us some directions, we got on with dismantling some rotten wooden planters that had seen better days. This turned out to be a satisfyingly varied task: digging out the soil, then deciding which demolition technique to deploy. Some sections responded nicely to careful unscrewing, while others required the much more cathartic “smash it apart and hope for the best” approach.

By the end of the evening we’d cleared quite a few planters, making a real difference for the small number of regular volunteers here, who wouldn’t have been able to tackle such a structural job themselves. It’s always rewarding knowing that our evening’s effort can make life easier for the volunteers who dedicate so much time to maintaining this valuable community space.

A lovely evening, a hidden oasis, and just enough dry weather to get the job done — we’ll hopefully be back in a couple of months to help again!

Check out all our upcoming sessions — including a bonus Saturday morning mission at Little Ilford Community Garden this weekend!

This Sunday morning, we headed to Epping Forest (home to 55,000 ancient trees!) where we were met by the brilliant Robyn, Conservation Officer at Epping Forest Heritage Trust. This was no usual gardening task. Instead of shovels, trowels, and rakes, modern gardening equipment was forgone and we went back to basics. The weapons, I mean tools, of choice, were big sticks. As we made our way to the task site - a large open area dense with bracken - we kept an eye out for the best ones. Robyn advised they needed to be reasonably long, and sturdy, but not too wide, so that they could be wielded in a whip like fashion. Where bracken grows, not much else does, so our task was to bash as much as we could to give other plants a chance.

Big sticks acquired, we set about, in a somewhat zig zag direction, clearing all the bracken we could. Many different bracken beating techniques were employed - everyone seemed to have their own unique style:

• Hilary found a back-hand most effective
• Chloe put her golf skills to use and struck the ferns as if on the tee.
• Fiona aka Fiona Woods
  
• Emily entered a flow state - the stick became an extension of self
• John employed a choppy, efficient technique
  
• Anna held the stick like a sword, comfortably swiping from multiple angles
• Jack's moves were really a sight to behold, resembling a Wu Shu martial artist at times
  

This was such a fun, (and cathartic!) task - a lot of bracken was successfully bashed, and no-one got hit by errant stick swipes.

Post task, Robyn led us to Ambresbury banks, an Iron Age hill fort, thought to be constructed in 700 BC. Legend has it that this might be where Queen Boadicea fought her last battle in the uprising against the Romans...We stopped to have a picnic lunch here before setting off through the woods towards Chingford.

Shout out to Emily for completing her first Goodgym task!

parkrun (the junior version or otherwise) is most certainly not a race, but occasionally you do have to doff your cap to one of our Sunday morning runners who clearly had more than one weetabix for breakfast this morning. Our first finisher, on a first time visit from his usual course at Leyton, crossed the line in an awe inspiring 6:56, more than a minute clear of his closest "pursuer" - chapeau m'sieur, as they say in bike racing. The maths is easy to work out his per km splits!!

Thanks as ever to our very helpful GoodGym volunteers who arrived at the big tree this morning and made sure everything ran smoothly - Hilary, John and Harvey were deployed as Course Marshals at key spots around the course, whilst Sooz and Nick kept it all largely under control at the start/finish line by barcode scanning, marshalling, encouraging and run directing, and all of our 40 finishers, including 1 absolute first timer, and 2 who received their half-marathon wristbands for each having completed 11 runs, crossed the line smiling (if a little red faced and out of breath), although a few needed to be guided towards the finish funnel...

More of the same under the big tree next week (super speedy times not guaranteed...) - join us if you can!