Tonight we visited Oasis Farm Waterloo, an urban farm and community resource in Waterloo, a hidden gem just moments from the Southbank, and the closest farm to Parliament. We also managed to run 4km and fit in a quick but tough circuits session.

Joining us for their first ever GoodGym group run, we had the amazing Rajmund, Anna, Georgia, Octavia and Theo (wow so many!) – give them a cheer for coming out in the cold and using their run to do some good. As well as welcoming these fab runners we also heard about the Long Run taking place in South London this weekend for anyone that’s about, and a little reminder of the Thursday running fitness session happening in Vauxhall this week.

As well as braving the cold, here at GoodGym King’s we also had to brave the busy Waterloo Bridge Commute as we couldn’t head out over Blackfriars Bridge as usual due to the location of the task. We practiced our dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge techniques and headed out. With everyone safely over the bridge, we made quick work of the rest of the journey down to the farm and met Roddy outside.

The task: The super organised Roddy split us up into groups when we arrived and showed us each to a planter – we needed to remove all the soil, take out all the bricks, move the planter, and then re-fill it with the bricks and soil – we had a tough 40 minutes ahead of us with a good arm workout! Between us we managed to fully move a couple of planters and make a great start on 2 or 3 more which some volunteers are going to finish off in the morning. I think the sounds of the animals settling down for sleep helped us work hard (especially the pigs from the Pig Palace!).

Roddy kindly let us use the farm's new barn for our fitness session as it started to rain. We went through questions like "are you scared of spiders?", "have you eaten any pancakes already today?" and "do you cycle to work?" - if you answered yes to the question you had a 40 second strength exercise to do, if you answered no then it was a 40 second cardio exercise. After lots of squats, high knees and mountain climbers (great suggestion Sophie!), we were ready to head back to King's. We waved goodbye to Roddy with promises of coming back soon to help with more tasks (hopefully in slightly warmer weather)! We ran back a slightly longer route, with slightly better views, over Westminster Bridge and did some stretches back at the base.

Credit to Gosia for the pun!

Next week is student volunteering week, so join us for our special run to help Rhythm of Life, a superb homeless charity in Covent Garden.

We had so many fresh faces on our run this week - Marina, Stephanie, Glen and Gabriele - give these people a cheer everyone!

Did you know that we have a GoodGym-wide challenge happening this month? We want to get to 5000 good deeds and 50,000kms run across the whole of GoodGym in January. Our run tonight has currently put us in the lead of our division. However to keep our lead we do need to keep racking up the good deeds and those miles, so make sure you link your Strava and GoodGym profiles together and go out for some training runs, or ask me about getting DBS checked so you can get involved in some missions!

After find out what GoodGym is all about, welcoming all our newcomers, and meeting David - our Guest from Bristol - we locked up our bags and went outside for a warm up. We discussed what everyone wants to have made happen by the end of the year and with lots of answers to do with running we headed out into the cold night!

With some excellent back marking from Amy, we headed out over Blackfriars Bridge and made it to Blackfriars Settlement in record time.

The task: We met some of the awesome people working at the Centre and they gave us a brief history about the place - it was originally a women's university settlement, set up in 1887! They then set us to work in three groups - The pine-eers, Fairy's on top and Feeling pine. Each group had their own Christmas tree to take down, and it was a race to see who could get all the decorations off and packed into boxes, plus get the tree wrapped up, first. Fairy's on top were the over-all winners and they even managed to take down all the decorations in the stairwell too.

Once finished we split into two groups for the run back. The sexy and steady group were led by Dom, and the (after much consideration) stupid and speedy group were led back by me. Sexy and steady set off first, and the other group then tried to catch up with them on the run back. We didn't make it however, and so sexy and steady won the race! With a few minutes to spare we did some core work back at base to make sure we have good posture when running.

Great running!

See you next week when we will be sorting donations for the YMCA charity shop.