Well, that was something else wasn't it?!

42

Yup 41 of you amazingly wonderful people popped down to Camden on a freezing November evening to run around 5km and help out two wonderful organisations! Give yourself a round of applause!

So where to begin on this wondrous night - well everyone piled into the St Pancras and Somers Town Living Centre and after a far too long intro we split into two groups and so the night began!

The intro:

• We were joined by the lovely Hannah from Red January - she was down to experience a goodgym run first hand and to tell us about the upcoming partnership between RJ and GG. You can read all about Red January here, but Hannah, the founder, told us all about how she wanted to get people to beat the blues in January by using exercise - sounds perfect for us!
• Christmas is coming! Sign up to the Camden pizza party by the 27th Nov here, that's on the 11th December after the run and don't forget to warm up to that by going to the GG-wide xmas party on the 6th December, details here
• Did i say there were 42 of us!? Well a whopping SEVEN of that number were at GoodGym for the first time - a huge GGC welcome to: Alex, Maryam, Layli, Harriet, Laura, Eileen and of course Hannah from Red Jan!
• Finally shout out to Debbie who was indulging in a bit of GG tourism coming all the way from GG Newcastle!

Right, on to the night itself:

• Chris took a total of 16 people to the American International Church to make beds for those needing shelter last night. Whilst we're not pleased with the number it was rather serendipitous that 16 beds needed to be made! Well done to all of you including our walking group of Liz, Rosie and Frances!

• The remainder headed with me to Alara to do various mulch and leaf related tasks. We split into groups and had three teams working to collect leaves at the front of the space and collecting it all into a big pile. Another two teams collecting leaves at the back and transferring those leaves to the compost heap (while avoiding falling into the pond!) and finally we had one team working to wheelbarrow mulch to various parts of the back area. Everyone worked hard and kept themselves warm and before we knew it our time had passed! As ever Alex kindly rewarded everyone with a box of granola and with many thank yous in the air we headed to Granary Square to meet the other team.

G- RUN - ary Square:

• After taking everyone on a sighting run (it is right, right, right and right again) we split everyone into pairs and did a meet and retreat event. It was described with such spectacular levels of poor planning and organisation that it could only work impossibly well and after some initial troubles everyone lined up and shot off in opposite directions and before we knew it everyone was back and warm! Amazing stuff!

With that done it was time for some group photos with Hannah for Red January promotion and then we headed back to base. Once there we bumped into Ivo G, GG's Founder and Top Dog who had sadly missed the entire evening's fun - sad times! He joined us for the stretches and then the evening was done.

It was great to be back and so wonderful to see so many new and old faces - keep on coming and keep Camden great!

Cheers,
Pritesh

p.s. huge shout to Liz for the awesome Stereophonics pun!
p.p.s. apologies my photos are SO bad!