18 of us used our run last night to help St.Mellitus with their church garden

We had one new member with us too, well done to Jodie for joining us and getting stuck in last night!

Breaking news:

• Steph completed the RTTT marathon on Saturday and still made it to the group run last night, what a trooper! We had special guest Kate with us last night, she’s the fab new trainer for Trafford GoodGym which will be launching very soon.
• Next week we have a picnic after the run in honour of The Great Get Together, sign up here and make a note of what you’re going to bring to share with the group.
• Community mission this Saturday to help with St. Mary’s garden work day, get yourself signed up if you can make it.

On with the show...

After a great warm up led by Kate we weaved the back way round to St. Mellitus where Vicar Stu was ready to greet us with lots of tools to get the job done. The church garden is a lovely community space but needs a bit of TLC so while they are waiting on some much needed help from Ealing Council we stepped in to help give it a good trim and tidy up.

Not so slim pickings

We had one team on litter duty and the rest got stuck in with a good strip back of the overgrown shrubbery. Unfortunately the back of the garden attracts a lot of litter from passers by but by the time our litter picking (Charlie’s) angels were done it was looking lovely and clean once more!

Everyone else was given strict instructions to ‘go to town’ on the rest of the garden. Everything needed a good cut back and we certainly delivered filling up over 6 huge bags of garden waste.

With 18 of us on board just a quick half an hour blitz equates to a full days work for someone else!

A quick sweep up of all the trimmings and we were done, great work everyone! We headed back on a slightly different route to make a stop off in Walpole Park where the group were put through their paces with a quick HIIT workout to finish up for the evening.

See you all next time!

Another lovely sunny evening in Ealing saw 16 runners take it to church to help St. Mellitus with a little outdoor maintenance. We were joined by newcomer Amanda and we also had lots of milestones with Harvey completing his 10th good deed and both Michelle and Shan completing number 15!

We were met in the church by vicar Stu who explained a little bit about how the church works in the community not only to bring services but to support lots of local activities. He was really grateful that we could come down to help get on top of some of the overgrown areas outside!

We split ourselves into three teams over the site with a mixture of hacking away at thorny overgrowth, litter picking, wedding and hedge trimming.

Stu gave us his blessing to go to town with the cutting and the group did not hold back, filling three huge garden waste sacks and leaving the site looking much more tamed! As the church is next to a busy road and bus stop unfortunately it tends to gather quite a bit of rubbish but our trusty litter pickers collected it all up filling a good few bin bags!

*The location did mean we got a few looks as we worked, we weren’t sure what people thought of us and did wonder whether they thought we’d been naughty and were on community service! Hopefully the array of GoodGym t-shirts on show last night set them straight though! *

All in all a great nights work!

A jog back to base through the parks left us only 5 minutes to spare for the fitness session, the perfect amount of time for Sally to come out and play! We played the song with the option of sally squats, sally planks or sally tricep dips. Some of us mixed it up with myself and Steph really regretting the decision to switch to planks from squats half way through. Feedback was that the tricep dips were a killer too, a great way to round off the nights events!

Hope to see you all next Tuesday :)