If anyone tells me that burdock removal tasks throughout the summer can ever get boring, I'll ask them to think twice! Last Tuesday evening's session started like an action film, with three runners: Sevan, Steph Ducat and Kash, galloping at race pace and adding an extra kilometre and a half to retrieve a mission-critical item for the evening: the tool store keys that Kash had forgotten at home. What this extreme heat does to our brains!

Fortunately, the legs coped better with the heat than some of the brains. The racing trio arrived only two minutes late, while cyclists Amy and Scott and walkers Yonas, Harvey and Richard were already waiting at the task. The action-film atmosphere continued as Kash navigated the site's complicated security system and finally liberated the tools.

Eight GoodGymers grabbed a pair of wheelbarrows, a couple of spades and a collection of loppers, then set off to face all the burdock in Elthorne Park they hadn't tackled at last month's session and which had had time to grow. Many of the plants had already started producing sticky burrs. Amy and Kash, with hair a bit longer than the rest of the group, could testify to that.

"Actually, those burrs don't stick to my hair. It's my hair that sticks to them." – Amy.

Hitching a ride in people's hair and clothes or dogs' fur is burdock's prime strategy for travelling long distances and colonising new territory. And that's not its only trick. A single plant can produce thousands of seeds, allowing it to spread rapidly and outcompete surrounding plants for sunlight, water and nutrients. That's why GoodGymers regularly visit Elthorne Park in the summer to keep its expansion in check.

This time, the ranger asked us to focus on the outliers - not the dense patches where burdock was already established, but the lone plants and small clusters threatening to spread across the fields and along the paths.

After clearing the path on the way to the main burdock patch, the team spread into smaller groups across the large field, venturing almost as far as the Bambi statue. Everyone did a tremendous job, greatly reducing the spread of burdock across the park. A special thanks goes to Yonas and Scott, who tirelessly wheelbarrowed the cut plants to a pile away from the main visitor routes.

It was Scott's very first GoodGym session, but you'd never have guessed it - he tackled burdock like a seasoned pro. Well done, Scott, and welcome to GoodGym! We're hoping to see you again soon.

After another successful evening keeping Elthorne Park's burdock under control, we're already looking ahead to the next adventures. This weekend we'll be back in Hanwell helping HANGOT maintain their community fruit orchards, and next Tuesday Sevan will lead us to Perivale to support Impact Theatre by sanding walls ahead of painting. We are hoping to see you there!

A special run, this one - a magical mystery tour of the locations that made up the first ever group run and the first ever coach run - from over 16 years ago (💾 📼 📟)!

Why? Well, to bid farewell to a special guy. He's tall, he's pale, he's handsome, he has an OBE. It's goodgym's founder Ivo Gormley. Many words were said about this man at the leaving party after the run, at the beautiful Calthorpe Community Garden, so we are not going to attempt to do him justice here. But the fact that a group of otherwise strangers, all wearing their red and black uniforms with pride, were gathered on the steps of York Hall (can you use their toilet? NO) a full sixteen years after the first group of otherwise strangers gathered on the steps of York Hall, to run around and help some people, has to mean something about how powerful and enduring Ivo's idea has been.

Warm up? LEG SWINGS UP THE WAZOO 🦵🏿💨 💨💨 - led masterfully and mindfully by Ade - along with some other limbs and muscles essential for running.

Bags loaded up in the Mechanical Cycling Machine™️ (it's Fast Boi Shaun Dixon on a cargo bike 🚚), we are led off by Euclides Montes who, by his own admission, doesn't actually know the area at all. But who cares?! It's the running that counts! More being lost equals more running! For the relatively small Venn diagram of people who were both a) on a goodgym run and b) knowledgeable about football, Darren performed the role of Roving Reporter (bluetooth speaker) with the GOALS! GOALS! GOALS! from England's match against DR Congo. There were indeed three goals but it wasn't a pretty picture for the 68 minutes between goal 1 and goal 2. We ran past some awfully concerned looking pub goers! But it had a happy ending WAHEEEYYYYY ⚽️.

First stop (probably, can't remember the order because the goals were so compelling) was St Hilda's East Community Centre - the site of the VERY FIRST GOODGYM GROUP TASK. In 2009, Ivo and 13 others emptied a cupboard. And how! St Hilda's is awesome - long-term friend of gg Tower Hamlets, the Centre (led by Lucy) provides bilingual advisory services around employment 🧑🏾‍⚖️, offers activity clubs to combat loneliness 🎯, exercise classes for the elderly 🪑 - it's the kind of place that communities across the country utterly depend upon.

Question, is it possible to belong to goodgym for 12 years and still not know the name of common little yellow flowers 🌼 that come in pots? Answer: Yes! But we planted them on the roof. Those who were particularly confident at differentiating between plants (alive) and plants (dead) also performed a valuable weeding service (let's hear it for weeds 🌱!), leaving things very spruce and cheery up on the terrace for users of the Centre to enjoy.

Next stop, just round the corner off Arnold Circus, where one Ian Drysdale (runs a long way, never looks sad 👨🏻‍🦱) gave us the next bit of the history tour. DID YOU KNOW that Ivo and Ian worked together in a social-enterprise-cum-think-tank in Shoreditch, before goodgym even existed? If you didn't, you could guess. Ian showed us the EXACT SPOT where Ivo first turned to him and said, "Ian I have an idea about a club where people run around and do helpful things instead of just be in the gym" and Ian was like, "WHAT? No Way!" and Ivo was like, "Yes absolutely WAY and I'm doing it, and you're DOING IT WITH ME because you know about computers 🤓 and I only know about films and being kindly." I am fairly confident this is what was said. And so goodgym became a thing with a name and a team.

One! More! Stop! It was only TERRY'S HOUSE wasn't it! "Who's Terry?" - have you been living under a rock? Terry was the clay-pipe-collecting (no, still no idea), amateur-boxing, newspaper-reading, Ivo-appreciating elderly man who became the defacto first-ever goodgym coach. Ivo used to run to his house and there they did have a chat, and that really was it and that was kind of the point. Another goodgym man John Hunter (👋🏻) has also been a long-time coach visit-doer and so said some words about this. Those words were like: "Having been running to my coach Florence 👵🏿 for 6 years, and then Richard 👴🏻 for nearly 2 years now, I have learned a couple of things about what it means to make these visits. It is a friendship, not a service, and it has the potential to be profound for both of you." They were very serious words and I'm not crying, you're crying.

With that, the history had been retold, and it was time to jog on 🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️- to Calthorpe, and a garden full of over..ooh, a hundred? people with love and admiration in their hearts for the phenomenon that is goodgym. Ivo is a very humble man, but let's be honest, it wouldn't exist without him, would it?