While excited to welcome back their congregation after the easing of covid19 lockdown restrictions, the Abbey needs help to safely sanitise the church in between the church services.

Three Goodgym runners stepped in to aid a speedy turn around armed with masks, gloves and sanitiser sprays to blitz the pews under the beautiful arches of the abbey. So efficient with the sanitising, we finished ahead of time and well before the next service started so back to the weekend sunshine!

Southwark News

• This weekend - run long with us on Sunday morning, 15km starting at Brixton station, one group led by Dom, one by me find out more and sign up here.

• Sunday afternoon - Back by popular demand! Meet up with the smashing Lambeth lot at Tooting Bec track for a track session. Intervals aimed at improving your running technique with pub after. Find out more and sign up here.

• Tuesday 26th Feb Emily is hosting a fundraising pub quiz night in Westminster - help them in their amazing aim to raise £2500 for three fantastic charities. Find out more here.

• Thursday 28th Feb Matt Guy is holding a fundraiser for Westminster House at Batch. It's an evening of short films on running (called 'Running Shorts' oh the pun joy!) - tickets come with a free drink get them here.

• Next week we need ALL HANDS ON DECK for moving a large amount of mulch for Barnaby at Bee Urban. It's an 8k roundtrip and we'll be leaving at 7pm promptly. Sign up for the run here.

That's enough of the business

Last night 17 runners gathered at Batch (Old Spike is having some works done) and immediately were put to work folding leaflets. We had over 200 leaflets to post through letter boxes and stick on lampost/bus stops for Food2You an amazing new service addressing malnutrition and risk of malnutrition amongst older people. Completely volunteer run, it provides a shopping and delivery service for older people and we're helping spread the word!

Last night was special for a few reasons. 1st: Dee, a stalwart Southwark member, left us back in Spring to move (very far) away and came to visit us! 2nd: My first run leading Southwark was 1 whole year ago! The pun was 'Hello, is it me you're leafletting for?' (yep still happy with that). I was blown away by receiving presents and a round of applause. Yes, there was at least one tear.

The runners are GoodGym, without you we are nothing, you are magic

The group split into four groups with different running routes: two 7ish kms, a 3km and a 5km. We all met on Peckham Rye on our favourite corner of Peckham Rye to play games!

Play can add joy to life, relieve stress, supercharge learning, and connect you to others and the world around you.

We played several rounds of Shark Attack, a big game of What's The Time Mr Wolf (once we'd worked out the rules....) and a slippy-slidey round of Squat Squat Goose. You're never too old to play!

We then headed back to Batch where we enjoyed pizza and drinks and I opened my wonderful presents.

What a wonderful evening, you lot are magic.

Lucy J

Twelve awesome GoodGym-ers came down to help the Camden Society!

Lucy was away this week so I stepped in to lead the Southwark group. We had FIVE new runners tonight which was absolutely fantastic - welcome to Alex, George, Lucinda, Mark and Sam!

After a quick intro at Old Spike talking about the three ways in which we do good and get fit with GoodGym (group runs, missions and coach runs) we headed off for our journey to Bermondsey!

It was meant to be 4km but my watched clocked 4.5km! We all stayed together but kept up a decent pace and apart from some traffic light fun trying to get across the road in Peckham it was nice and uneventful.

Arriving at the Riverside centre in Bermondsey we let ourselves into the carpark and found the tools that had been left for us under one of the vans (see pic)!

We then tried to work out where we were supposed to be working... As the report title suggest we're still not sure we got it right but we worked on the area we could best access and hope that it is the right one! It was a fantastic effort from everybody, we cleared way more than I thought we would and despite not having all the right tools you all made it work and we cleared a huge area and filled up all the bin bags we had with detritus and weeds and rubbish!

After everything was done and a group photo taken we headed off with George and James leaving us to head home. The route home went slightly 'igglepiggle' but we rescued it and got back to Old Spike fine. A quick stretch down, a huge round of applause for Deepak on his last GoodGym run before moving to Mumbai (GoodGym India anyone?) and then we all headed off home (or to the pub!).

Thanks for having me, it is always so much fun covering Southwark and sign up here for next week's run!

Cheers, Pritesh