Hello Lambeth!

THIRTY THREE of you amazing people joined me in Lambeth last night as we helped two organisations, ran a combined 236km, gave out a shit prize and unfortunately failed again to produce cake!

In the news this week:

• A big Lambeth welcome to Hannah who joined us for her first GoodGym run.
• Hearty congratulations to artist extraordinaire Tim for winning shit prize of the month for his dedication in both running and drawing and for generally being an all round awesome bloke.
• Don’t forget the GoodGym-wide social is next Thursday in Angel and if you’re a Libra then this is the social for you!
• Fancy volunteering at a race – check out the Shoreditch 10k on the 14th October – perks included!

And finally a big thank you to the TaskForce and to everyone for helping me out and being such a great crowd to lead and run with! On to the night:

We had two tasks – revisiting the work at Clapham Common for Colour your Common and heading up to St Michael’s Fellowship to sort through some charitable donations.

Thank you to Tom, Nicky and Vix who were in charge of the St Michael's Fellowship group. Words from Tom:

We ran 4km up Streatham Hill to help St. Michael’s Fellowship. An amazing charity who work to break cycles of disadvantage so that children may lead more healthy and confident lives.

We were met by the lovely Hillary and team. Who informed us that our task was to sort donations of all shapes and sizes of baby clothes into seasonably appropriate packages for Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter wear.

This required a great deal of curation and attention to detail from the team. With lots of spirited debate over colour clashes, gendered onesies and whether it’s ever appropriate to wear socks with sandals.

With so many donations to sort through, the scale of the task was too much for one night’s work. But we hope to return soon in some form to help with the great work St. Michael’s are doing.

The rest of us headed up to Clapham Common, a shorter run but a much more physical task. Thanks to Frances, George, Jim and John for guidance and back-marking. Here’s our report:

Wanting to avoid the traffic of Clapham High Street we headed on a slightly different route but ably led by Frances, George and Jim we made our way to the common with no problems. There we were greeted with much darkness and also Adrian and David who were getting out various tools for the task. We split in to two groups, ‘Turfers’ and ‘Turners’. The Turfers worked on a specific area cutting the turf from the soil. A precise and tough job given the ground was still very firm. The Turners worked on an area that had previously been removed of turf and slowly but surely turned and broke up the soil working carefully to ensure that the ground they turned wasn’t trodden on or compacted. With various lights and headtorches being used it made for quite the eerie scene. After 25 minutes hard work it was time to go, I think packing up may have been the hardest part of the night particularly the travails of the wheelbarrow with a flat tyre! In any case all was put away and all that was left was for us to run back to Papa’s!

Thank you to Frances who led the stretch at the end of the evening and thanks again to everyone for a wonderful night in Lambeth - I’ll be sure to come back if I get the chance! Katie is back next week so do sign up here!

Cheers,
Pritesh

We had loads of lovely new runners this evening, giving it a decidedly 'back to school' feel, just without the new pencil cases. If only.

There were two run options, the first group were led by JKB up to the community growing project at Agnes Riley Gardens. he said:

We navigated the dense and cumbersome mesh, mainly there to keep birds out, in order to water KEY VEGETABLES. We trimmed back rose bushes to make them less hazardous, but the thorns proved tricky. Navigating the bush in the dark was not so easy so it's time for a JKB TIP which is BRING HEADTORCHES. Its getting dark!

The rest of us were led to the Portico Gallery in West Norwood by George, who was celebrating his 100th run. After the 4km mainly uphill climb we reached our destination and began sorting gazebo sides into dirty and need cleaning or OK. These are used for the monthly West Norwood Feast, which takes over the town in the summer months.

On running home, we all enjoyed some banana bread from Lavinia as her #GBBO2018 offering and then we went to the pub for some food and a drink. Lovely stuff.