On this 1st day of spring weather, 6 GG members did a spring clean, where we were tasked to clear up the leaves at the front section of Heatham House Youth Club. We cleared around 10-15 large bin bags filled with leaves and quite a lot of litter which unfortunately gets thrown from the street across the wall. We were very pleased with our completed task and went off for a well earned coffee and enjoyed the lovely sunshine!

3 goodgymers joined forces to help in the evening with finishing a task that the team started at lunch time : getting bags ready for an event at Twickenham tomorrow. Mystery bags...500 of them in crates! What can you find in this mystery bag ? A water bottle, snack bar and some crisps which will be joined by a sandwich tomorrow. Susan Chris Steph Ducat were then assigned an important task!! As nominations tomorrow at the event, winners will get a certificate and a medal. We needed to check that each nominee had a certificate associated to them and we had to assemble medals to the ribbons 🎀. They are all winners 🏆

4 goodgymers including two newbies (welcome Steph and Lisette) headed over to Heatham house to help get them ready for an awards event at Twickenham stadium.

We quickly set to work trying to win our own award for the fastest time to fill lunch bags with water, popcorn and a snack bar. 50 minutes later and we'd smashed through over a 100 bags (surely!).

Fun task. Look forward to doing this again in the evening.

Saturday morning came in cool and crisp, and nine GoodGymmers were out and about to do some good at Heatham House, a local youth centre in Twickenham.

Over the autumn and winter period the fallen leaves had carpeted the outdoor area and Danielle and the team from the Youth centre had asked for our help with clearing leaves in the garden.

We realised there was an unbe-leaf-able amount of foliage that needed to be cleared up, but we are always up for a challenge! Tools out, we got to work. There were a few different methods taken on - Africa, Rosie and Beth adopted the ‘load and dump’ technique, which involved filling wheelbarrows with leaves and then wheeling them over to be disposed of in the compost heap. The Adam, Karla and Sam made neat piles of leaves to be scooped up by Lucy and JP and put in the bin to be sent to green waste (despite the colour of said bin). Finally there was Chris, armed with the leaf blower, making noise and blowing us all away with his leaf clearing skills.

In just over an hour, and many loads of leaves later, the ground was clear. Check out Beth’s fab before and after photos! With our many hands, the job was plain sailing, and Danielle thanked us for our hard work. Also, a big welcome to Karla for coming along to her first good deed with the group - here’s hoping to many more!

Led by Sam (who was excited to flaunt his new run leader responsibilities), a small but select group of four runners head to the Whitton Youth Zone. We took the scenic route, quite literally, crossing fields and winding along the river Crane on a balmy spring evening.

We arrived 6.5km later, and met Adam who had found a more direct route to the task, and Mandy from the youth centre got us set up for the mission. She also kindly provided us with cool water to drink and a selection of snack bars to replenish ourselves after the run there.

Our job for the evening was to help in the garden, and get rid of weeds and creepers that were over growing along the path. We hadn’t been to the Youth Centre since the darkest winter, so there was lots to do.

We got started with filling our big blue sacks, pulling up weeds, tackling giant creepers and hacking back plants. Whilst we worked, topics or discussion for the night included the best shows on the telly right now (recommendations were Beef, Fargo and Richmond’s own Ted Lasso), political parents, Eastern European holidays and where our names came from (we found out Liz was named after the Queen and a coin toss, and not a reptile!).

Forty five minutes of weeding later, we had a made a big difference, and Mandy was very pleased with our hard work, and was already planning our next visit!

The only thing left was to get back home. After a bit of debate about how to get back (do we run, or do we get the train?), we took the more direct route along the less scenic A316. We left the candy floss pink and peachy skies of the west and jogged along to the cool blue of Richmond as the sun set and we finished off a total of 11k and arrived back at the Tap.

Last night we were at the Whitton Youth Zone to help out in their garden with a variety of gardening jobs.

Eleven GoodGymmers came along - we had some on two wheels (Suze on her snazzy new bike) and some on two feet (Maena and Monika walked up from Richmond, Beth, and Chris and Adam who jogged along from their homes). There was a also a gang of us who met at the Tap for a group run along the scenic route that is the A316, made up of Liz, Jack, Sam, Pippa and Lucy.

As we arrived in our own ways, we got to work on the gardening tasks. Beth did a fantastic job cutting down an overgrown tree, and Chris found a new favourite thing to do, having hours (or at least 45 minutes) or fun with the ‘cool weeding tool’.

I have since done some research and in fact the ‘cool weeding tool’ doesn’t have an official name (variants include ‘weeding patio tool’, ‘garden scraper’, ‘weed removal tool’ and ‘patio knife’). I think Chris’s name is the best, though.

Whilst we were outside in the cold, the current users of the Youth Centre were having a karate class. They were inside practising martial arts, and we were outside doing a different kind of chop… Shout out to Suze for doing a great job cutting down big branches to be bagged up.

Shortly after 8, we swept up the final weeds and tied up the last bag before getting ready for our journeys home. There was a karate party in full swing now, with the black belts swapped for singing out belters. We couldn’t help but join in with some Erasure and a cheeky bit of Steps… and on that high note, we started the first steps for our runs, walks and rides home.