Tonight was night of firsts

• We had Thomas and Priya join us for the first GoodGym session - great to have you both join us tonight.

• We were doing our first group run session to Raggy Rd Allotments

• My first night of trying to speak Spanish, Parsi and English all at the same time!

We met at Salt Hill Activity Centre and as each member joined us we did a round robin of introductions. Firmo, Jason and Zoe were all recent returnees and it was great to have them back.

With a task overview and route overview loosely given, we were ready to do a warm up. My favorite warm up game of head, shoulders, knees, toes and cone followed by mirror image of exercises! Keith and Firmo looked like they had a dance routine going on! Bravo to you all!

Thyme to grow…

Even though Keith has only been with us since September he did a great job of leading the runners to the task location which I back marked. Keith has actually helped out a few times at this task at the weekends so he actually knew it better than I did. Thank you Keith for being a great help tonight.

On arrival at the task location, we met task owner Anita who gave us an overview of what she’d like done.

• Cutting back of brambles;

• Removal of rubbish;

• Removal of pallets and tyres;

• General cut back of trees;

• Removal of wood;

The bramble bashing was quickly taken on by Keith, Firmo and Jason and they did a remarkable job of getting so much of it cut back

Zoe didn’t tyre of the tasks she was assigned! Lifting and shifting items including two large tyres - who needs bootcamp when you have GoodGym

Priya did a fab job of clearing one plot of all plastic rubbish - nothing beets a bit of gardening prep!

Tom was just the man for the pallets! Carried like a true expert he easily transported them from the plot to the tip! Top job! I hope they all stacked up ok?

Mehdi and Jean did a bit of this and a bit of that! Mehdi was making sure everyone had the necessary wheelbarrow license and Jean was on wood duty! Moving it around into piles for burning and tipping.

In our alloted time slot we managed to do allot

With a quick tidy up and group photo taken we headed back to our meet up location.

Next week we are meeting on a Tuesday night as its a bank holiday on the Monday.

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions

Thank you all for your efforts tonight.

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

Thursday at 6:15pm is GoodGym Windsor night 👑🏃‍♂️🏃🏻‍♀️ and tonight we were at Vale Road Cemetery doing its first tidy up of the spring.

This was a community mission so Adam, Zoe, Helen and Mandy made our way with a social run the long way round from the meeting point at The Binoy and Sue met us there. Huge welcome to Zoe who was attending her very first GoodGym session 👏🏻♥️

The task owner Paul had left tunny bags for us and given Mandy instructions. Sue is also a regular volunteer there so we had an expert on hand.

We split the team with Sue and Adam attacking the Ivy on the fences, trees and gravestones on the far side they were not ghouling around 👻 . While Helen, Zoe and Mandy stayed nearer the entrance collecting leaves bending, squatting and pulling the tunny bag as we went and Helen had a good go at pulling down the tallest bramble ever known but sadly failed but lots of effort was put in trying 🤣 Mandy also found a bone 🦴…. Don’t worry it wasn’t human we didn’t do any digging!

Lots of chats and looking at how much difference we made lifted our spirits 👻

We left the two full bags for collection by the council tomorrow and the rubbish in the bins.

After the task Sue and Helen made their way back but Zoe, Adam and Mandy decided to get RIP- ped 🪦and used some fitness playing cards for a quick extra fun workout followed by the Windsor 👑 curtsy/bow before we made back to the meeting point.

Thank you all for coming. ♥️🏃🏻‍♀️🏃‍♂️👏🏻

Photos by Mandy (although I forgot to take one of the two full tunny bags at the end 😬 sorry)

Title of report - Adam 🤣 yes I stole it!