It's that time of year when the headtorches are back out, ready to plot out the often varied surfaces of Richmond as we run around! But before we switched them on we celebrated Sam hitting 10 GoodGym deeds 🥳

A lovely chatty run along the riverside then back into town to avoid the slippery post-tidal silt brought us to the Buccleuch Arcade in the dark. No time to get cold though as we carried out a bodyweight workout of squats, shadow boxing and lunges before getting equally stuck in to cleaning up the arcade removing debris from the shutter gulleys, sweeping, de-cobwebbing and breaking down the compost heap into smaller pieces. Lovely work all round 🕸️🧹

A little bit eerie, a mysterious warmth in the air, head torch lights bounding along pathways, ten heads poking about, breaking cobwebs and disappearing around corners and popping back out on the main road again... Such was our return trip to litter pick at Petersham Common. So much more had been chucked from cars in the interim that by the end, we had bulging bags that should never, ever have ended up in nature.

What a bustling busy evening at INS for this week's group run! Starting with a longer run than usual, welcoming Khin for the first time as we ran through Twickenham up to the green. On arrival the group had already got going and had taken down a gazebo and almost finished sanding the handrails that needed painting. Donning aprons and gloves, we set to work with a second coat of paint on the ones we did last time, a first coat on the back area and some teamwork holding lights! That left three of us with spare hands so we set about wiping down windowsills, skirting, windows and skylights, getting rid of dead spiders, cobwebs and decorating dust from the gym! It was an amazing example of how much can happen in one session with nine sets of industrious hands at work!

We were at St Christopher's for our Saturday morning community mission, where we were asked to focus on tidying up the front of the building, chopping back the hedges blocking the view from the office window and sweeping up the autumn leaves starting to fall.

We signed in and headed to the back garden where the tools are kept in the shed, happy to find new brooms even if we weren't so lucky with garden shears and the hedge trimmer was missing its battery.

We got to work and made quick progress chopping (Chris and JP) and sweeping (Africa and Manuela) and were soon filling multiple black bags with cuttings and leaves.

At the end of the allotted time we admired our handiwork, took our group selfie and headed off for a well-earned Saturday.