Last night around 40 goodgymers said “no deal” to the cold and dark conditions and made their way to Papa’s park for another Goodgym Lambeth session. The elements didn’t put folks off as we had loads of new faces all wanting to get involved, cracking stuff. Before we set off we gave James a big round of applause for completing over 100 good deeds, James is one of the original members of GoodGym Lambeth and is an all-round top guy and between visiting his Coach Keith and pounding the streets of Lambeth he has amassed many a mile and more importantly contributed loads to local projects and tasks have we done in Lambeth, well played sir, well played.

After the introductions we all ran around 2 km to Myatts field to meet Guy from Streetscape. Streetscape is a great local project that gets young people into employment through learning horticulture skills, as they are busy learning new skills their yard often gets cluttered with bits of woods from jobs they have done and that is where we came in tonight.

As some of us arrived slightly early we did a lap of the park only to be welcomed by the rest of the group forming a human tunnel to welcome us in (I bloody loved that by the way!!). Then split into two groups one with Rebecca and one on the task. The task was simply to get all the off cuts of wood in the yard and load it into the truck. Now a big shout out goes to John Hunter who did his best impression of a lamppost by shining a light on us throughout the task and was vital so we could see what we were picking up and helped loading it in the van. At first the pile of wood looks pretty daunting however in true goodgym style we packed it to the rafters and managed to get it all in there. We even had some time spare to load some bits of fence and even a bench, which was expertly shoved in by Guy at the end.

Half way through the groups swapped and the non-task group were faced with Rebecca’s circuits. Now I don’t know about you but my legs have certainly been feeling it today. This was because we were put through our paces by doing 25 squats and burpees followed by 20 lunges on each side, we did three sets of these reducing each by 5 each time and at the end to mix it up we did another lap of the park. In a word ouch (but a good ouch none the less.

Safe to say by the time we made it back I was spent however Sarah’s homemade millionaire shortbread that welcomed us back was a definite great way to end another cracking Tuesday night.

Tom