24 GoodGymers were out on a wet and windy Wednesday night, doing good in Camden!

We had a new runner join the herd tonight - welcome to Ash! I'm glad you rose to the challenge of finding out the four ways you can get involved in GoodGym while you were out on the run. You're welcome back anytime!

While you're here, why not sign yourself up for next week's double-task extravaganza? We're going back to Cecil Sharp House (outdoors) to help tidy up the gardens, and C4WS (indoors) to help make the beds for the homeless.

It was also a HUGE night of [hundreds] celebrations - not one, not two, but THREE Camdeners reached 100 Good Deeds last night; George, Freya and Hanry! Well done you wonderful trio - let all of those Good Deeds (and cheers!) sink in. GoodGym's only ever going to be as good as the people who keep coming back to help in the community, and it's a brilliant personal achievement that you've all stuck at it so consistently.

Talking about consistency, we have an even bigger Good Deed number - and wonderful human - to cheer; Abi had her 300th last night too! You really are in a lap of the gods now, and firmly in the hall of fame. Well done, well done, well done x 300 for everything you're doing for Camden and for GoodGym - it wouldn't be the same without you.

Before I get to the cake-geddon that seems to be happening more and more lately - something I'm all for by the way - we'd better talk about the tasks too.

C4WS Report (written by John)

John took 10 runners to our weekly winter task to help out at the homeless centre at the American International Church on Tottenham Court Road. The Helpers there are kept busy making meals for the centre's users, so GoodGym's assistance is vital in putting together their beds. We were told that several people whose beds we'd made in recent weeks had gone on to find work or accommodation with the help of the centre.

Afterwards, the GoodGymers headed off through the drizzle and puddles of St Pancras, for a fitness session at Granary Square. The options were either two or three laps around St Martin's College. Hanri did four!

Scope Report

The rest of us hit the pavement and headed up to Camden High Street to see the inimitable Helen and lend a hand sorting out the shop. As ever, she was ready with her written out list of tasks that needed doing and we were all put to work. There was donation tagging and sizing, sorting and prepping, fancy-dress wearing (looking at you Rosie!), jewellry sorting, dusting and cleaning and tidying up the back office. Everyone got stuck in for a good 40 minutes and what a difference we made.

As the clock struck 8, it was time to wrap up and head back to the Living Centre for what can only be described as the blaze of cake. Both Liz and Abi had been baking some vegan cakes for the festivities. There was a delicious ginger and lemon cake, an 'experimental' - according to its baker - lavender cake that melted in the mouth and a rocky road cake covered with strawberry lace wrapped into a big '100'.

In good Camden fashion, a group of us ended up walking over to the Coffee House pub for a few drinks to celebrate all the hundreds. We couldn't even finish all the cake in the end! Madness. Camden, you're great. Keep on coming back and doing what you're doing.

NEXT TIME

AGE UK COMMUNITY MISSION: This Saturday, there'll be a group of us braving the cold (and hopefully not too wet) to help out at the Age UK Great Croft Day Centre garden between 1 - 2:15pm. We're fully booked at the moment, but please comment on the community mission, text or email me if you'd like to come along as well!

NEXT WEEK'S RUN: We're going back to Cecil Sharp House (outdoors) to help tidy up the gardens, and C4WS (indoors) to help make the beds for the homeless - put your name down now if you fancy coming along.

Happy running between now and then.

A whopping 35 runners trooped out of St Pancras & Somers Living Centre on Wednesday night to get out and do some good in Camden.

We had two newbies join the herd - welcome Collette and Katie - as well as TWO big celebrations of the milestone variety:

Becs (as in the Rebecca Clarke, GoodGym Media and Comms extraordinaire) reached her 50 Good Deeds milestone tonight and Laura Lambert hit 100 Good Deeds! Stop reading right now and go and give them a cheer! Well done to you both. Big milestones deserve cake baked by Liz, but more on that later.

As normal, the team split with 10 runners going with John to C4WS and the rest of the rabble coming with me to see Helen in the Camden Scope shop on the high street.

C4WS Report (by John)

A group of 11 threaded their way through the crowded streets of St Pancras and Bloomsbury, avoiding swiftly opened van doors on the way, for our 12th visit this winter to the homeless people's shelter at the American International Church. We knew the routine by now, setting up a human chain to move sheets, mattresses and other bedding from a storage area to the warm area where less fortunate Londoners can spend a night away from the streets and enjoy a hot meal in comfort. In a few minutes we achieved what would have taken an hour for the busy helpers in the church. Afterwards we jogged back to Granary Square for a fitness session: three laps round St Martin's School of Art at a steadily increasing pace, before a relaxing warm-down on the swivel chairs at Coal Drops Yard.

Scope Report

23 of us arrived to Helen's Scope shop in Camden high street, ready to get stuck in. A queue formed and our very drilled taskmaster handed out the jobs to the waiting teams. Jewellery needed sorting and pricing, mannequins needed re-dressing (by the GoodGym visual merchandising team - "Sorry if it's 'Devil Wears Prada' but I think we need a belt here."), shoes needed polishing, donations needed sorted (and steaming) and the upstairs office needed an early spring clean. So many jobs and so little time, but we managed to do them all and boy did that place shine as we left.

By the time both teams got back to base, it was time for blondies and fudge (both made my the inimitable Liz!) to celebrate the two big Good Deed milestones. Liz's recipe for the delicious blondies are at the bottom of the report if you'd like to try at home.

NEXT TIME

COMMUNITY MISSIONS AHOY: There's not one but TWO plogging Community Missions today - one at 1pm at Red Lion Square Gardens and the other is Glebelands Wood Nature Reserve from 4:45-5:20pm! Let's beat Lambeth to be the top scoring London GoodGym in the January Challenge. We can do it!

NEXT GROUP RUN: It's official, we're going back to Alara Wholefoods and there'll be a box of granola in it for every runner after you've helped shift some manure, tidy up the pond and do some weeding. A smaller group of us will be heading back to C4WS to make the beds again. It's going to be a brilliant night whichever task you choose.

Liz's Peanut Butter and White Chocolate Blondies:

Ingredients

125 g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

100 g butter at room temperature, plus extra for greasing

150 g crunchy peanut butter

175 g light brown sugar

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract

100 g white chocolate, chopped

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170C/gas 3. Butter the sides of a 20 x 20cm square cake tin and line the base with greaseproof paper.

2. Sift the flour and baking powder into a small bowl and set aside.

3. In a large bowl, cream the butter and peanut butter together until very soft. Add the sugar, egg and vanilla extract and beat until well combined. Add the flour, baking powder and the chopped chocolate and mix to form a dough.

4. Place the dough into the prepared tin and bake in the oven for 25–30 minutes, or until golden brown and almost firm in the centre.

5. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin, before removing and cutting into squares.

6. Eat!

LET’S EAT PIZZA! So, GoodGym Camden are going to eat pizza at Happy Face on the 11th December after our run. TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY TO SIGN UP, so please get your name down if you want to come!

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37 (!!!) brave and intrepid GoodGymers made it out to GoodGym Camden on a drizzly Wednesday night for another two-task night. We welcomed a shiny new person to the Camden herd - hello Hanna, I hope you enjoyed yourselves tonight.

Next week's run will be to C4WS again as well as back to Cecil Sharp House - sign up here if you want to get ahead of the game!

After a quick intro, we stretched and split up into two groups - C4WS (the Homeless Shelter) was led by our trusty light provider Hanry, the Scope group by me.

Arriving at Scope just before 7:30, we stormed the shop, met Helen and her incredibly organised list of activities for us to get stuck into before we split into teams:

• Team Jewellery
• Team Shoes
• Team Rag or Bag
• Team Shirley
• And finally, what can only be described as Team Fancy Dress.

A monster task - and one that we’ll definitely have to come back to - was to sort and price jewellery for the shop. No special marks for correctly identifying that this was Team Jewellery’s domain!

Also down on the shop floor there was some dusting, cleaning and organising of a shoe rack to be done, efficiently tackled by Team Shoes.

In the back we had Team Rag og Bag running a tight ship, leading the sort through of donations into bags that the shop will keep and sell and one they’ll recycle. Like a little production line of elves, they worked away right until the final minute we were there.

Upstairs were both Team Shirley (the brilliant husband and wife team of John and Jackie and Team Fancy Dress. Team Shirley were in charge with cleaning the upstairs bannisters, kitchen and floors which they did magnificently if I say so myself.

Finally, Team Fancy Dress! De-facto led by Rosie in a jumpsuit/Oompa Loompa dual-purpose item, there was steaming, sorting through, pricing and tagging clothes to go out onto the shop floor. See the photos for some particularly sharp Christmas suits, great wigs and strong Christmas jumpers!

Just gone 8pm, we waved goodbye to Helen and headed back to the Living Centre to meet back up with Hanry’s homeless shelter team for a final stretch and cool down.

Over at C4WS, the team did a fantastic job of making up 16 male beds and 4 female beds for the homeless users of the church. Jonathan was very impressed with what you achieved, so well done everyone! After the task was done there, it was a run over to Granary Square for some laps and fitness before heading back and regrouping.

We had a particularly good turnout at the pub after the run tonight. Everyone is welcome and it’s a great way to carry on chatting to GoodGym folks over a drink. Abi is the de-facto pub leader, and I know she’d love to see you there if you fancy coming along next time.

COMMUNITY MISSION ALERT: David from Russell Square Garden got in touch to say how impressed he was with our work a few weeks ago in the bulb-planting and fence-post-putting-up and asked if we might be able to come and [clear some leaves this Saturday 2:30-4:30.] Please do come along and help out - Liz is bringing cake!

NEXT WEEK: We’re going to be running back to the Home of Folk (Cecil Sharp) and C4WS again next week for some more leaf-clearing and bed-making. Would be great to see you there and you should definitely sign up now!

LET’S EAT PIZZA: So GoodGym Camden are going to eat pizza at Happy Face on the 11th December after our run. TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY TO SIGN UP, so please get your name down if you want to come.

Happy running,

Ben

36 incredible people joined me in Camden, helped Scope in their charity shop, ran over 6km, walked and celebrated TEN years of GoodGym!

Well what an evening that was! We returned to our usual home at the St Pancras & Somers Town Living Centre, we celebrated Kat and Rosie turning three, Rosie hitting 100 good deeds AND GoodGym's 10th birthday... AND we introduced everyone to Ben Hansen-Hicks the shiny new Camden trainer... and breathe!

As part of the #GG10 celebrations we had our lovely GoodGym flag with us and because we just do things better in Camden we had some shiny gold balloons to join our run for both Rosie's 100 and of course the 10th birthday. We also had copies of the wonderful Fit Together the book produced by GoodGym with stories from the first ten years.

After a huge intro with all of the above fitted in and news on #SuperSaturday (A day full of missions for every area this Saturday) and of course the health and safety and info on the task we headed on out and got warmed up!

On a celebratory night like this it was great to have everyone together and whilst it is always hard to manage we all safely walked and ran to the Scope charity shop. Once there Helen had us all queued up and divvied out roles. Tasks tonight:

• Donation collections outside
• Mannequin dressing
• Various cleaning work
• Shoe sorting
• Trouser measuring
• Clothes tagging
• and a whole lot more...

Half an hour of hard work later we were all piling out and getting ready for the next stage of the evening. With our flag with us, ably looked after by Ben, we headed off to various locations to get some fantastic photos for the GG10 celebrations.

• Camden Road Bridge
• Gasholders at King's Cross
• Francis Crick Institute
• Somers Town Coffeehouse

Thanks to George, Liuba, Ben and Steve for co-ordination and direction and phone-lending for all the photos.

Finally we stretched and then we headed to the pub to celebrate with cakes made by Liz and Rosie, some prosecco from the pub and party poppers from Sophie!

All in all a wonderful night of celebration with TEN and ONE HUNDRED being the key numbers!

Cheers,
Pritesh

It was a hot sweaty evening, not ideal for a run, but almost 20 of us rocked up at the Francis Crick Centre for a trip to Scope charity shop in Camden.

After a mercifully short run there we got stuck into our key tasks for the evening - sorting the clothes, cleaning the shops and complaining about the heat.

We had a debate about whether to head straight home or head for a slightly longer run along the canal. Luckily it had cooled slightly by the time we finished so most of us decided to go for the canal, while Liz led a few people on a nice stroll home.

Thanks for coming for everyone - at least we avoided Thursday's record temperatures.

25 Goodgymers ran 4km to help Scope Charity Shop sort donations, price tag, clean and more!

Welcome along to Mary whose first time it was last night - woop woop!

In the news this week:

1. Well done to all the Goodgymers who raced over the bank holiday weekend, at Edinburgh Marathon Festival, London 10k and elsewhere.
2. Particularly well done to Steve Coman who did a 3.49 marathon in Edinburgh and won his Age Category!
3. Night of the PB's - one of the best evenings of free live track running in the country is on Saturday 6th July - go along. We are looking for volunteers on top of spectators - more info here.
4. Well done to Liz who recently hit 100 missions. All in a year - hero!
5. GG Monthly Social next Thursday - in Central London. More details to follow!

After a thorough warm up we headed the 1km to Scope Charity Shop. Helen, the manager, was as organised as ever with a list of tasks to do and the amount of people needed for each task. This included:

• Hiren and Denis did a stock check
• Tom and John measured and labeled trousers
• Katherine and Chris did a thorough job of cleaning the shop
• A big team in the back room sorted new donations and price tagging
• Sorting cubs - Ian was cubeman!
• Pippa did some data protection based ripping and binning
• Another big team in the middle room labeled new clothes and colour disc system
• Catriona and Beth hoovered and cleaned the upstairs, kitchen and toilet

Over 45 minutes everyone did a fantastic job helping the charity shop and making a real impact. We unfortunately discovered an extremely scary doll and Pritesh wore a strange jacket. Equally scary!

After finishing up our jobs we headed to the canal, Granary Square and home to the pub.

Sign up for next week here, task tbc.

PB out