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

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.

We had a relatively simple task today of leafleting for Antz Kids Activity Club, Beat the Boat 10k race and of course GoodGym

Our meet up point was Salt Hill Activity Centre with the aim of an easy jog around the park followed by strides before hitting the streets of Slough with a leaflet task. I'm not sure the strides had the same exciting impact on the team as they do on me but when Mehdi says

Yes why not!

Then why not? So off went Mehdi, Ali, Vineet, Keith and I as Jen and Brenda continued with their walking laps of the park.

We always love seeing Brenda, who is Jen's mum and partner in crime! Thanks for coming along Brenda.

So as we left the park towards Baylis Rd I planted the seed of 'hill sprints' on Horlicks Bridge... but I think they thought I was joking!

We split off into smaller teams/pairs to cover as much ground as we could.

Jen and Brenda went down Baylis Rd

Keith and Ali went down Bradley Rd

Whilst Vineet, Mehdi and I took Belgrave Rd

Although it looked like we had a lot of leaflets we all ran out of them within 25 minutes but luckily we had covered most the houses in our subsequent areas.

So hill sprints it is!!!!

Vineet was eager to do 5 reps so that's what we did!

Well done to everyone..

See you next week at Shaggy Calf Lane at 6:30 for a litter pick task at Wexham Park Hospital.

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).

This was our first task helping Kate and Alice from the Not Just a Store shop in Slough. This community initiative was set up last year and has been supporting Slough residents with low cost food/household items as well as a community fridge.

Imagine a charity shop that was not clothes, but food instead!! That’s us.

Here's a bit more about Not Just from their website :-

This is a fundraising community store for our non-profit NotJUST (International) CIC. We work with distributors all over the UK that end up with food and items that are past best before and surplus, and save it from landfill in bulk. The food is then sorted into our food banks, sharing with smaller community groups, and going into stores like this!

This store is a social supermarket that is open to every member of the public: no membership required. A lot of our food is past its best before, and a lot of our food and items are sold at a discounted price. We also have some items ‘available for a donation’, where you can choose how much you wish to donate. It’s entirely up to you, but the more you donate, the more people in crisis we can help. We also run a community fridge, filled with goodies also available for a donation.

'It's a sin' to waste so much food when it is perfectly edible and this is just the type of waste warriors task we like!

I first touched base with the store back in November when I went to have a little nosey at the store and introduce GoodGym to the team. We then went our separate ways until December when we reunited at the Slough CVS Community Network event. The Not Just team were 'Always on my mind' so it was great to go say Hi again and see if they had a task for us. And low and behold they did!

You'll need a big team

Said Alice!

With 19 attendees we did not let her down!

It was great to have Ryan return for his 2nd task. A very warm welcome to Vineet and Sheena on their 1st task, and thank you to Clare from Stoke Park Active for bringing her team members down for this task - their very 1st GoodGym experience (welcome to Salman, Mansoor, Ray and Michelle). We had other important numbers floating around today....Huge congratulations to Sara on her 250th good deed today. Sara has been supporting Slough since we launched in 2018. She was our Queen shopper during Covid, a community missioner with a passion and our mission making possible member (helping older people with one off tasks) and she has always been an integral member of our team - well done on your 250th.

On Sunday Pam knocked out her 350th good deed, very closely followed by her 351st and today her 352nd. Known affectionately as Ninja Pam, Pam again has been a core member since 2018. We wouldn't know what do to without Pam's gardening knowledge and general calmness. Thank you for all our efforts over the years.

Thank you to Claire for coming over from the Windsor and Maidenhead GG Team - great to meet you

The Task:

I popped in to see Kate earlier today to see the areas we would be working on. This helped me work out the run/walk route as well - only question I had was do we Go West or east?...lets go west... I decided on a shorter route today as my lunchtime run left me with frozen ears! I did wonder 'What have I done to deserve this? Then I remembered that I run for pleasure!

At the warm up which Hamid did so very well...we all decided on a walk from Greggs to Costa. Ruth lead the walkers whilst I back marked. Our total time out walking was around 20 minutes. We all just wanted to get back as quick as possible for the warmth of inside where we met Kate and she gave us the lowdown of the tasks.

We had two areas to concentrate on today:

• Creation of the Pet Shop area;
• Sweeping and mopping of the 'football' sized space upstairs

I knew Sara would be great at leading the Pet Shop area as she likes pets! haha...no point having me there! And Sweeping Sandy and Rocking Ruth helped to lead the upstairs task. With so many of us in attendance at times, there was a bit of 'Domino Dancing' going on but both teams did a great job of their respective tasks.

The Pet Shop Boys (and girls) did a smashing job at banging the back panels in place before fitting the shelves. Vineet and Sheena got stuck into this task with excellent guidance from everyone expect me...I'm clueless at coming up with racking suggestions. Agnija (our birthday girl) managed to source a hammer and banged the panels in place. Overall, the team made a shelf-improvement to how it looked at the beginning.

The Va Va Broom team upstairs had mastered a team method at sweeping (put two brushes together and Bob's your uncle...a greater area is covered). They then cracked on with mopping the floor. What a mop-tastic job they did!

The Broom Challenge

Our fitness part of the session tonight was a game of chase the broom. The team stood in a circle each holding a broom stick in their right hand, on the call of 'go', they had to release their broom and as quickly as they could grab the broom of the person on their left. If you didn't get to the broom in time you were out. Well done to Ryan and Hamid for making it to the final. Our eventual winner was Hamid!

The January challenge

Thank you to everyone getting involved in the January challenge. We met our good deeds target on Sunday and have now exceeded it thanks to all our attendees tonight. Well done team #GGSlough. Just got to get that 750km distance target met now (half way there!)

There are still plenty of January sessions to get involved in. See you at one!

We returned to Slough Outreach's community hub shop for another clothes sorting task.

On Friday we made good headway by clearing a mountain of donated bags into 3 piles and we had managed to find the floor again by the end of that task. Tonight we were repeating what we did on Friday however we did not think the mountain could have grown that fast in just 3 days..yet it had!

We met directly outside the shop with the intention of doing a run before we started the task. Did you feel the freeze today?? So did we! With Hamid, Mehdi and Ali arriving super early, I watched them doing football style drills to keep warm! Hamid had created a star shaped warm up which on arrival new member Ryan plus Ruth and Gauri all started doing. With 20 mins still to go before Shin was arriving we decided to get some walking km's in by going for a round robin loop around the shops. We managed to squeeze in 1.6km before starting the task!

Once inside we did a task brief on what went in which bag.

• Bags for rags;

• Bags for the homeless and;

• Table top of shop saleable items

Oh and a bag for summer clothes

Quickly we got to work. We managed to get the hang of deciphering the good from the bad (via the sight test) and the odour to the odourless (via the sniff test).

Great to have Ryan join us on his first session and Ali returning for his second! Thanks for coming along guys.

Slowly yet surely, we watched the mountain melt down to a small hill to a valley of emptiness! You could see the floor again! Superb efforts by everyone.

We are only in week one of our January challenge and so far we have already clocked up 34 good deeds! Keep up the great work...we should totally smash our target this year.

Our last session of the year brings us to Stoke Park Active and an indoor Christmas present wrapping task. A perfect end to the year.

Clare our task owner cum GoodGym member had given us a Christmas cracker of a task - we were pack some treats into little goody bags, wrap them up, tidy up the venue and get it all ready for the panto that Clare and her amazing team are doing for the children that come along to their sessions.

As the weather had made it virtually unsafe to run on the footpaths due to flooding and muddy conditions, we actually missed the run part and cracked in with the task part....but I had a master plan....there was still a fitness session involved that would earn the team their treats.

So after we had done this and done that, shifted that chair and this table we were ready to rumble.. I had prepared a 12 days of Christmas fitness challenge with a reducing time frame.... 1 burpee, 2 push ups, 3 prisoner squats and so on all the way to 12 star jumps. I thought I had demo'd it all really well....but the videos show that VR was needed as some level of cheating did take place...and some level of mis counting..but it was all in the name of fun and both teams did an amazing job!

As well as the 12 days exercises we had a moves based Chinese whisper type of game! Less said about this the better! And the finale was a strict game of instructions! Fail the instruction - you got kicked out - I had final sleigh on it!

Oh and we had a bit of karaoke!

Thank you to our amazing 14 volunteers for coming along to our last session of 2023! and a very warm welcome to Ali

Let's review our tree-mendous 2023

January

We had double deeds galore as we kick started the January challenge and spent some time guarding the iconic knife angel, and not forgetting a whole load of parkrunning

February

All you seed is love as we helped Artful Hub on numerous tasks this month helping to get them set up in their new unit

March

We made a sweeping statement as we continued to help the Ujala Foundation with their community garden and lets not forget Jean obtaining her 100th Good Deed

April

We had a Ra-leigh good time as launched our partnership with Raleigh and enjoyed some Easter treats.. Jen and Gauri will remember the shed sort out for Shin! We really did like to 'move it move it'

May

We saw some fashion items that were a blast from the past as we continued to help Thames Hospicecare. New tasks were starting to pile up as we started helping some local churches like St Paul's and St Mary's

June

The plot thickened allot this month as the weeds just kept on growing on our allotments task with Home Start. Lucky we had some keen gardeners in the team with Pam, Peter and Jen...plus a handy app to decipher a weed from a plant! This is the month that we built a stronger relationship with Slough Refugee Support and Mehdi, Hamid, Mohammed and Eshan joined us.

July

Hi Five to us all as we celebrated our 5th birthday! Our first group race at Beat the Boat was knot too shabby!

August

Pew..we did it! Plenty of outdoor tasks as we basked in the summer sunshine helping St Mary's Primary school with painting and gardening as we well as plenty of gardening tasks at St Paul's

September

More swede times as our gardening skills grew!

October

Our GhoulGym was out in full force with our Hallo-clean tasks

November

Didn't we win an award (or two??).... Group of the Year...lets just leave it there

December

Wrapping it up now with our networking natters, keeping the rein(deer) as bay and getting some indoor tasks with Shin and Clare

We clocked up a huge 498 tasks in 2023 by 51 members

So what's going on in 2024? PLENTY!

Yule be sorry if you don't attend our January sessions to get your good deeds and km's logged. Our target for January is 55 good deeds and 750km's. I've kept it realistic this year as we do have a natural drop in our good deeds overs the years so hopefully this target feels more achievable.

This is our first community mission on Friday 5th January 10.30 - 11.30 at Slough Outreach shop

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/sorting-out-clothes

We then have a double deed Sunday with volunteering at Salt Hill junior parkrun and then a litter pick (we will actually be doing this every Sunday in January, so plenty of good deeds to be had)

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/parkrun-volunteer-f8984433-06c5-488b-ba7c-6d295b22be77

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/community-litter-pick-740a7a7f-0aaa-47d6-870f-9af261ddf7f2

Then our first Monday eve group session is on Monday 8th January helping Slough Outreach again with a clothes sort out

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/helping-slough-outreach-at-new-unit-in-cippenham-b336979c-bdeb-49f9-9f5d-888cb2290ff5

The following Monday we have a task that requires LOTs of volunteers, so if there is only one Monday that you can do please do this one. Its helping the Not Just a Store - waste warriors shop on the Bath Rd with setting up the Pet Food area.

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/waste-warriors-helping-at-the-new-community-fridge-and-landfill-reduction-shop

So that's all folks...time to Ho Ho Home

Enjoy your rein-beers and have a great festive break.

What do you do when you need your outdoor space swept of leaves - you leaf it to GoodGym of course!

We love coming to Parvaaz Project to help with their outdoor space. They were our second ever task owner back in 2018 and we always try to come back to help them whenever we can.

With a very wet night, we wanted a good run at getting the task completed in good time. So we rolled up our s-leaf-s and got to work. We worked together as a team in the back garden first, making sure we all worked safely and with enough lights so we could see our way round. Luckily for us we had Pam as our 'Lady of the lamp' as at one point she had 3 lights on her giving us the light we needed.

All in all we collected 9 bags of wet leaves! What a re-leaf!

A short but sweet task tonight all completed in a super quick time.