Tonight we covered a longer distance than we normally do followed by a litter pick of Upton Court Park.

We met at 6:30pm in the car park and with a quick warm up for the walkers we set half the team off on their 2.5km journey to the fire station and back, whilst the remaining team held back for a longer warm up before setting off to the Harvester pub for their 5km route.

With having just completed the Wokingham Half Marathon yesterday my legs were screaming at me to be slow and steady so we did a lampost to lampost walk/run route.

En route we found a stone..not just any old stone but a directional stone dated back to 1741!

19 miles to Hyde Park Corner

Is what the stone read with a mile marker to Slough and 2 to Colnbrook.

Back at base meet up the walkers had already picked up the pickers and bags that we had strategically placed before heading out... and had got to work

It was a little dark in the car park (shame the revamp in upton didn't include more lighting) but despite that the team still managed to collect 2 bags of rubbish.

Well done all and thank you for coming out on a cold cold night!

We had a relatively simple task today of leafleting for Antz Kids Activity Club, Beat the Boat 10k race and of course GoodGym

Our meet up point was Salt Hill Activity Centre with the aim of an easy jog around the park followed by strides before hitting the streets of Slough with a leaflet task. I'm not sure the strides had the same exciting impact on the team as they do on me but when Mehdi says

Yes why not!

Then why not? So off went Mehdi, Ali, Vineet, Keith and I as Jen and Brenda continued with their walking laps of the park.

We always love seeing Brenda, who is Jen's mum and partner in crime! Thanks for coming along Brenda.

So as we left the park towards Baylis Rd I planted the seed of 'hill sprints' on Horlicks Bridge... but I think they thought I was joking!

We split off into smaller teams/pairs to cover as much ground as we could.

Jen and Brenda went down Baylis Rd

Keith and Ali went down Bradley Rd

Whilst Vineet, Mehdi and I took Belgrave Rd

Although it looked like we had a lot of leaflets we all ran out of them within 25 minutes but luckily we had covered most the houses in our subsequent areas.

So hill sprints it is!!!!

Vineet was eager to do 5 reps so that's what we did!

Well done to everyone..

See you next week at Shaggy Calf Lane at 6:30 for a litter pick task at Wexham Park Hospital.

What a busy month we have had. Tonight's session was the last of our Monday group sessions in the January Challenge...the challenge where we set ourselves a target number of good deeds to achieve and a target number of km's to run/walk. The only clause - you have to do a good deed in January for your good deeds to count and have your Strava connected to GoodGym for your km's to count - got it?

Sadly I couldn't make tonight's session at Slough Outreach Hub as I was feeling poorly but I knew I had a strong team on who would welcome our fairly new members Adam and Vineet and take plenty of photos for the report (they didn't disappoint).

The task tonight was to shift the toys and clothes around to create more usable space and unpack more donated bags into piles. Thank you to Ruth ,Sutyee, Jen, Sandy, Vineet and Adam for getting stuck in on this task.

So I mentioned our targets...let's see what we were supposed to achieve by end January

55 Good Deeds and 750km's distance covered

Now lets see how our January actually went:-

Reed all about it

We had Jen over at BBWOT on Sunday channelling her inner efforts to create a water way, raking and removing old reeds

Keeping it clean at Salt hill park, we had a litter pick session booked in for every Sunday to help keep our 'adopt a place' clean and tidy. With all our environmental cleans this month at Salt Hill and Black Park we tallied a total of 24 bags of rubbish! Not bad, just sad that each Sunday we kept finding more and more rubbish in the car park!

We had some guaRUNteed fun every Sunday too with the team from Salt Hill junior parkrun as we helped them throughout January with cheerleading, safeguarding, timekeeping, scanning and lets not forget Ricky's most epic Funnel Manager duties. In all my time in supporting parkrun I've never seen anything like it!

We were blinded by colours at Thames Hospice as we helped sort through colour trends...who'd have thought it would be so hard deciding if something is grey, blue or purple!

We had bags of fun as we've helped Slough Outreach on quite a few occasions this month. They have recently set up their new Hub in Cippenham and as much as Shin has been grateful of our help, we have been even more grateful for an indoor task (especially during the stormy cold days).

When a task owners asks for 'lots of volunteers' we do not disappoint! Our biggest turnout this month was at a session helping Not Just A Store with a pet shop area set up and sweep n' mop of the upstairs space. A team of 15 can really get a job done very quickly!

So that's all our tasks this month - we'd like to thank Shin, Alice and Kate, May, Salt Hill Run Directors Team, BBOWT team and our council/grounds teams for all our tasks this month. You've helped us in our challenge more than you know!

How many km's is a MILE-stone?

At the beginning of the month I shared the GoodGym Heroes leaderboard with the team..I think it helped gee everyone on in order to achieve their next half century or century milestone. This is how it went

• Pam reached 350.....soon followed by;

• Sara with 250....next up was;

• Manjit with 750... and last but not least;

• Ricky hit 100!

We are close to a few more big ones! Let's give Jen and Sut Yee a cheer and motivate them to get to their 400th's and Agnia get her 50th!

The Empire Strides Back

So let's talk Strava.. you get people like Ricky, me, Pam, Helen, Jen, Sara and me again who literally log all our runs/walks on Strava (as the saying goes, 'if it's not on Strava then it didn't happen')....then you get people like Nisha, Sandy, Ruth and Sut who always make such an effort over the January Challenge to log all their activities so that their km's count towards our total.

Kudos, Kudos, Kudos

There is no way we can talk about January without giving some shout outs..

Firstly, to Sandy and Ruth - who have literally attended every session listed (that they could physically attend!). Sandy, by the end of the month will have attended 14 sessions and Ruth 12... A round of applause please

Secondly, to our task force team of Jen, Sara and Helen who have not only logged or led sessions but also attended sessions in Windsor and Maidenhead (Jen and Sara)

Thirdly, to all of our new attendees this month (I've never heard my emails ping so much with another notification of new members!, but a special shout out to those who attended a session - Adam, Ryan, Vineet, Theresa and Sheena

Fourthly, to our neighbours (everybody needs good neighbours) Windsor and Maidenhead team for attending sessions in Slough...Juli, Nick, Sheila, Claire and Georgetta

And FINALLY... to each regular member who helped us achieve a certain number of good deeds in January... A huge round of applause to - Mehdi, Nisha, Hamid, Jean, Peter, Maya, Gauri, Pam, Sara, Agnija, Clare, Sara, Sandy, Ruth, Devajani, Ricky, Sut Yee, Harsha, Ciaran, Helen, Jen, Abdulaziz, Ali and of course me!!

Drum Roll Please

At the beginning of this report (hope you are still with me!) I said we had a target of 55 good deeds and 750km's to achieve....well I can now reveal that our current tally as of Monday 29th Jan is

126 Good Deeds and 871 KM's covered

And we still have 2 more days to go!

How absolutely awesome is that?? Doesn't mean we can hibernate now for February...let's keep the momentum going

My absolute thanks to you all. Humbled to have such a great team.

This was our first task helping Kate and Alice from the Not Just a Store shop in Slough. This community initiative was set up last year and has been supporting Slough residents with low cost food/household items as well as a community fridge.

Imagine a charity shop that was not clothes, but food instead!! That’s us.

Here's a bit more about Not Just from their website :-

This is a fundraising community store for our non-profit NotJUST (International) CIC. We work with distributors all over the UK that end up with food and items that are past best before and surplus, and save it from landfill in bulk. The food is then sorted into our food banks, sharing with smaller community groups, and going into stores like this!

This store is a social supermarket that is open to every member of the public: no membership required. A lot of our food is past its best before, and a lot of our food and items are sold at a discounted price. We also have some items ‘available for a donation’, where you can choose how much you wish to donate. It’s entirely up to you, but the more you donate, the more people in crisis we can help. We also run a community fridge, filled with goodies also available for a donation.

'It's a sin' to waste so much food when it is perfectly edible and this is just the type of waste warriors task we like!

I first touched base with the store back in November when I went to have a little nosey at the store and introduce GoodGym to the team. We then went our separate ways until December when we reunited at the Slough CVS Community Network event. The Not Just team were 'Always on my mind' so it was great to go say Hi again and see if they had a task for us. And low and behold they did!

You'll need a big team

Said Alice!

With 19 attendees we did not let her down!

It was great to have Ryan return for his 2nd task. A very warm welcome to Vineet and Sheena on their 1st task, and thank you to Clare from Stoke Park Active for bringing her team members down for this task - their very 1st GoodGym experience (welcome to Salman, Mansoor, Ray and Michelle). We had other important numbers floating around today....Huge congratulations to Sara on her 250th good deed today. Sara has been supporting Slough since we launched in 2018. She was our Queen shopper during Covid, a community missioner with a passion and our mission making possible member (helping older people with one off tasks) and she has always been an integral member of our team - well done on your 250th.

On Sunday Pam knocked out her 350th good deed, very closely followed by her 351st and today her 352nd. Known affectionately as Ninja Pam, Pam again has been a core member since 2018. We wouldn't know what do to without Pam's gardening knowledge and general calmness. Thank you for all our efforts over the years.

Thank you to Claire for coming over from the Windsor and Maidenhead GG Team - great to meet you

The Task:

I popped in to see Kate earlier today to see the areas we would be working on. This helped me work out the run/walk route as well - only question I had was do we Go West or east?...lets go west... I decided on a shorter route today as my lunchtime run left me with frozen ears! I did wonder 'What have I done to deserve this? Then I remembered that I run for pleasure!

At the warm up which Hamid did so very well...we all decided on a walk from Greggs to Costa. Ruth lead the walkers whilst I back marked. Our total time out walking was around 20 minutes. We all just wanted to get back as quick as possible for the warmth of inside where we met Kate and she gave us the lowdown of the tasks.

We had two areas to concentrate on today:

• Creation of the Pet Shop area;
• Sweeping and mopping of the 'football' sized space upstairs

I knew Sara would be great at leading the Pet Shop area as she likes pets! haha...no point having me there! And Sweeping Sandy and Rocking Ruth helped to lead the upstairs task. With so many of us in attendance at times, there was a bit of 'Domino Dancing' going on but both teams did a great job of their respective tasks.

The Pet Shop Boys (and girls) did a smashing job at banging the back panels in place before fitting the shelves. Vineet and Sheena got stuck into this task with excellent guidance from everyone expect me...I'm clueless at coming up with racking suggestions. Agnija (our birthday girl) managed to source a hammer and banged the panels in place. Overall, the team made a shelf-improvement to how it looked at the beginning.

The Va Va Broom team upstairs had mastered a team method at sweeping (put two brushes together and Bob's your uncle...a greater area is covered). They then cracked on with mopping the floor. What a mop-tastic job they did!

The Broom Challenge

Our fitness part of the session tonight was a game of chase the broom. The team stood in a circle each holding a broom stick in their right hand, on the call of 'go', they had to release their broom and as quickly as they could grab the broom of the person on their left. If you didn't get to the broom in time you were out. Well done to Ryan and Hamid for making it to the final. Our eventual winner was Hamid!

The January challenge

Thank you to everyone getting involved in the January challenge. We met our good deeds target on Sunday and have now exceeded it thanks to all our attendees tonight. Well done team #GGSlough. Just got to get that 750km distance target met now (half way there!)

There are still plenty of January sessions to get involved in. See you at one!