Today five Goodgymmers went to help out at Surrey Docks farm. As usual, lovely Pat met us at the gates and quickly put us to work! This time, we needed to move a few tonne bags of soil. The soil was due to be moved into new raised beds but unfortunately they hadn't been built in time. Meanwhile the soil was in the outside classroom, but that space was needed for a corporate event in a few days time. Our task was to move the soil to another space that was not in the way, and closer to the eventual location of the raised beds.

In 90 minutes, between the 5 of us, we managed to move 4 tonnes of soil. We used 3 wheelbarrows, 5 shovels and an uncountable number of muscles - this was definitely a full body workout!

With half an hour left at the end, Pat treated us to the task to picking up windfall apples then feeding the pigs, as well as feeding the goats and cows with oats.

We were back to the Water Tower at Crystal Palace this week after getting rid of many of the new weeds last Monday.

We met at Bridge House and gave our opinions on the best barbecue and other summer foods. From halloumi to aubergine to sardines, we had a great diversity of choices! After a quick warm up at the base of Crystal Palace Park, we ran up 🏃 and around the edge of the inside of the park 🏞️, which was nicely populated with locals enjoying the summer evening ☀️. Tackling the serious hills of the winding paths, the team arrived at the Museum and Water Tower ready to start work.

Clare and Cat tackled cleaning out the delicate pipework around the edge of the tower to get rid of the soil so that it can hopefully be restored. The rest of the group continued weeding, clearing loads of unwanted greenery in the 40 minutes we were there.

As we neared 8 o clock, we finished up and took the remaining waste out to the recycling pile before heading back down through the centre of the park back to Penge.

Brilliant work over the last 2 weeks, everyone! It looked like a jungle in there 10 days ago and now it's maintainable again 🙂

Tonight's group run was going to be different. Why? It wasn't going to be Sam leading the run, but Maria. She did her Run Leader webinar the previous Thursday and wanted to apply her newly found knowledge straight away.

Before we could all get going with the group run, we needed people. Sam and Maria waited in Old Spike Peckham for Rosalind, John, David, Emma, Daryl, Nelly, Mikhail, Benjamin, Cecilia, Laura, Louise, Fi, James and Paulin to arrive.

As 18:45 arrived, Sam asked Maria to start proceedings before he went through his usual GG intro speech highlighting a few sessions happening over the weekend. Maria asked the ice-breaker question, which was a poll on whether people liked the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics or not?

It was a "Non" from most of the runners with about five saying Yes...the rain didn't help nor did the athletes parade on the Seine.

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Litter Pick Bingo - Peckham Rye Park edition

With Maria leading the run, she took all the runners onto the Green to get started on the warm-up, which Sam normally does. She asked assistance from Emma to back-mark the run whilst she led from the front heading towards and around Peckham Rye Park to end the 2.5k at The Round Cafe where we met: Isaac, Folarin and Vic. However, we said our goodbyes to Mikhail as he was still jet-lagged from his trip from Malaysia.

Sam split the group into four groups of 4/5 and each group had at least one litter picker, a litter pick bingo card of 25 items, a black bin liner and someone recording their distance as the Litter Pick Bingo began! 30 minutes to find as many items on the litter pick bingo card as possible.

It was a tight contest as after 30 minutes all the teams came back in time....meaning no points deductions:

• In 4th place, we had Team "No Vapes" with 22.5 points (18 items found and covered 1.25km)
• In 3rd place, we had Team "R.E.A.M." with 23.1 points (22 items found and covered 1.05km)
• In 2nd place, we had Team "Trois3" with 25.5 points (17 items found and covered 1.5km)
• However, in 1st place, we had Team "Milibae's" with a staggering 35.68 points (23 items found and covered 1.55km)

With that, we had our winners: Team Milibae's who went into the lawn bowls social competition with confidence.

A few of us ran back to Old Spike Peckham to collect our items whilst the rest walked to Peckham Bowls to get setup for the inaugural GoodGym Southwark Bowls Championship. With two rinks booked, we split the semis into the two teams with five people against the two teams with four. Team "No Vapes" and Team "R.E.A.M." plus Sam took to Rink 6 whilst Team "Trios3" and Team "Milibae's" claimed Rink 5. It was a tight game on Rink 5, but on Rink 6, Team "R.E.A.M" took the first end, 4 - 0, but struggled to finish off their opponents quickly. After a few more ends and a pizza break, Team "R.E.A.M." took the game 8 - 3, whilst Team "Trois3" got their revenge on the litter pick bingo second place and book their place in the final.

Battling time and the light conditions, we played two more ends to determine the gold and bronze medal matches. Team "R.E.A.M" plus Sam took the Gold over Team "Trois3" with a 2 - 0 scoreline and Team "Milibae's" had to settle for Bronze as Team "No Vapes" came last in both competitions.

A great way to end July and I am glad we had two summer socials.

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Thank You to all the GG-ers

A personal thanks from me to all those who came out last night! We did good and we had fun! A massive thank you to Maria for leading the run and can't wait to have you as an official Run Leader. Kudos to Emma for backmarking and to everyone for getting stuck in with the litter picking and social!

Well it was an hedgucation for me tonight as it was my first time leading a group run without Mark's supervision but luckily I had 12 awesome GoodGymmers to rely on for moral support. After a run down of our favourite ice creams (why do other countries always have cooler flavours than the UK?!) we made our way to Alexandra Recreation Ground to meet Linda and the other Friends of the Parks volunteers.

Big shout out to Hannah for leading the walking group, Stephen for backmarking the runners and Jing who was attending her first session and bravely accepted the challenge of running the long way round up the hill to the task!

Once we got to the park, Gill and Linda had us pulling out weeds that were diverting nutrients from the hedge saplings planted earlier in the year. Many hands made light work of this task and we had cleared most of the bed within 40 minutes before taking the shorter route back to the Bridge House for some post-run stretches.

Nice work team!