Another happy Monday with an army of Goodgymer’s ready to run and walk to do a good deed. As we had a short distance today, we had the option of walking, running or ‘jeffing’ the short 1km to the task location.

Great to have Mabu and Sarah come back for a second visit! And to have Sharara join us on her first Group Run with us.

The briefing done, Run Leader Darren led the warm up and then we headed out. Thank you to Jenni and Ricky for being our walk leaders today and Sara and Pam for leading the jeffing Jeffers (our walk/run option).

A blazer of Glory

This was our first task with Uniform Express. As a parent I love this concept of recycling unwanted clothes and task owner Shannel is doing a great job of helping parents to spend less by offering good quality unwanted uniforms.

Every Tuesday afternoon, she provides local parents with an opportunity to buy grown out off, good quality Slough School uniforms for both Primary and Secondary school children. Just pop along to the Home Slough unit (ex Top Shop) in the Observatory Shopping Centre from 1pm till 4pm.

So for any parent/career out there with attire to retire, a guise to disguise or slacks to axe…then follow suit of others and recycle them with Uniform Express!

Off the rails

So on arrival to the Home Shop, I had the task of opening up the store! Not being the best with a set of keys (as in I loose mine all the time!)…I made sure I knew exactly which pocket these were in and which key opened which lock…though a bit of trial and error was used as I can be keyless sometimes!

Once we were in, we had the whole shop to ourselves. Our task was to collect the items from the store room above the shop unit and bring them down, rail them up ready for tomorrow.

Seen as we all came to improve our fitness, we had one rule and one rule only – DO NOT USE THE LIFT

Leg work was the order of the day….think the team were stumped to hear this, but these guys are all footloose and were hip hip hooraying….until they saw how many stairs were involved!

Step by step we bought down all the clothes and very fashionably displayed them on the rails.

Darren in true Darren style…found the mannequin and made friends with her. A lasting friendship? Probably...

Mabu was on a mission to bring down everything from the store!

Meera, Sara and Nisha got their steps in for sure today. But you know you should never trust stairs...they are always up to something!

Downstairs…we had a couple on the sofa, whilst others busily helped put the rails together and get the uniforms out.

There was some order to the chaos…though don’t ask me what it was as I’m still trying to work out my left leg from my right leg!

Put your left leg in your left leg out…do the hokey pokey and burn it out!

As we finished the task in good time and had the use of a nice warm indoor space, we thought we would do a nice leggy workout. So 1 set on each leg of 8 exercises focusing on the glutes and hip stability with balance thrown in for good measure….the team were well and truly legless!

Task complete we started to head bask to base.

First to leave were the walkers

Followed by the jeffers

Next in line were the runners

And last but not least... Meera and I who had extra responsibility of locking up and safely returning the keys to Slough CVS offices...

En route back from our detour we found the walkers munching on a McDonalds! Meera and I couldnt face the shame of it so we legged it back to base for the (surprise) cakes...

Fresh off the shop floor news this week

Super Smiley Harsha Smashes her Spartan Ultra!

She’s our very own Goodgym Goddess. I’ve known Harsha was a few years now (5 to be precise) and one thing that depicts her is her smile…she actually never stops smiling. Such a happy person all the time and always doing something for the greater good. This weekend gone, Harsha undertook a 30 mile Ultra Spartan Race. Those of you who know about Spartan will know that 30 miles alone will be a piece of cake for Spartans…so they add in extra challenges…like 80 obstacles, mud and water pits just to make sure you have an extra fun race!

Oh and I forget to mention that this race was not in the UK…Harsha flew all the way to Malaysia to undertake this challenge…Well done SuperGirl. Can’t wait to hear all about it.

GG Golden Girl

I can’t compete with running 30 miles or doing 80 obstacles last week, but I did reach my 100 Good Deeds milestone on Wednesday.

So as much as I was going to let this milestone go by relatively unnoticed, Sut and Nisha had other plans. Check out the photos for the special surprise they had planned! Thank you so much #teamGGSlough

Next week we will be visiting another first time task owner at St Anthony’s Church…come and join us?

https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/weeding-the-church-gardens

Thirteen brilliant people joined me for my first session looking after GG Ealing. We ran almost 4km and helped out at Hestia.

So, for the first of two weeks I headed in to the dark depths (only dark because it is Winter) of West London to lead the Ealing GoodGym group. I was met by everyone who were ready and waiting to go. Big thanks to Chris who had the keys ready for people to store their things and to access the gloves we needed for tonight’s task.

Thankfully the rain had cleared from earlier in the day so we were able to do the intro and warm up outside. The main news this week is the GG-wide Christmas party in Barnet – you can find all the details and sign up here. We also welcome Mark for his GoodGym run and Sarah for her second ever GoodGym run and first time in Ealing!

Chris was in charge of being the frontrunner and leading the way, Harvey mid-marked and I was at the back. We would our way up the hill for the short run to Hestia. Once there we said hello to Sandra and she outlined the tasks:

• A clear up in the garden collecting leave and any litter that we could find
• A clear up of leaves in the front garden and drive
• A cupboard sort and the moving of a bunch of lever-arch files from the downstairs office to the cupboard all the way upstairs

We split the group to each task and everyone went about their way. Before we knew it all was done and it was time to say our goodbyes. We posed for a group photo and then headed off for some more running.

Chris again led the way and we took a longer route home with a hill rep thrown in for good measure too. Before we knew it we were back at base and we stretched before heading home.

A job well done everyone, see you next week!

This was our first task with Slough Museum and we were helping them to sort through some historic items. These items had recently been moved to an empty unit in the Trading Estate so that volunteers could help to put them into some kind of order to allow the Museum to seek accreditation.

Game of Thrones?

With a 6km round run to fit in we swiftly got on with the welcome brief, task overview and safety brief. Run Leader Sut had a musical chairs warm up lined up for everyone! And what do you think happens when 11 adults play this game? Each man to himself! That throne was never going to be won fairly and Antonio and Ciaran showed their competitive streak…

Great to have newbies Sarah and Mabu join us on their first group runs. Mabu spotted us in Wexham last week and got chatting to Jen and Ricky and hey presto! Here he was today with a GG T-shirt en all….

Thank you to Sut Yee and Ciaran for back marking today.

Night at the Museum

The museum houses over 4000 objects and over 8000 photos in its unique collection with an aim to

inspire, engage and educate

The main pods located at The Curve have information from the origins of Slough to Industrious Slough to Slough in the 1930’s…there is plenty to learn about and Slough is certainly no Temple of Doom! But the items we were cataloguing today were part of the mass store of historical pieces that needed sorting in order for the museum to apply for formal accreditation and funding.

On arrival we met our task owner Anna and she gave us an overview of the task at hand and many interesting facts on the history of the Museum.

We had 3 tasks to do

• Photograph filing
• Object checking
• List creation of non-accessioned items

So we got into 2’s or 3’s and started to get it all sorted

Fax’inating technology

Sandy, Kam and Pam were on the non-accessioned items list. Both Pam and Kam came without their glasses today so Sandy had the task of listing the items on the laptop (nice change from the day job…or maybe not!).

Within their treasure trove of finds were a WW2 first aid box, a WW2 wardens jacket, an ancient pair of glasses (there you go Pam and Kam – a pair just your style!), Anti-gas Eyesheilds and work permits dating back to the 1940’s.

Lets find a dark room and see what develops?

Well…it wasn’t quite that type of photography!

But the crew on this part of the task – Antonio, Ciaran and Jen definitely had the most amount of fun! They were tasked to file old photographs into filing sleeves. Some brilliant old photos in this collection. We even found a photo of some runners in Slough Half Marathon from the 1980’s.

I think if we had longer on the task these guys would have looked through each photo! All 8k of them!

A thingamajig and a whatchamacallit

And our remaining team of Naomi, Mabu and Sarah had the task of checking through boxes of items against a spreadsheet of listed items and ticking off what they found.

They found beards, school charters from the 1880’s and a toy Captain Scarlet!

Slough at War

On the 11th of the 11th it only seems fitting to tell you how Slough helped in the war efforts:

Modern Slough was shaped by the two world wars. The First World War directly led to the creation and development of the Slough Trading Estate and this in turn led to the expansion of the town. This meant that the town needed a much larger workforce and became attractive to people from around Britain.

In the Second World War the town took on evacuees from the London Blitz and the Trading Estate turned to the production of items vitally needed for the war effort.

So there you go….

This was a great task – we hope to work with Slough Museum again when they have their volunteer days.

Next week we will be working with another first time task owner – Uniform Express at Home Shop Slough, so it’s a nice short distance with an indoor task. https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/slough-group-run-2019-11-18

See you next week