Tonight 15 runners gathered in Ealing to help the Canal and River Trust clean up our lovely towpaths in Hanwell. And although GoodGym Ealing has been going just 3 years we also celebrated 10 years of GoodGym as an organisation last night! It’s hard to believe that all those years ago one man had the idea to use his run for good and look where we are now!

• Over 166,000 good deeds up and down the country.
• Over 16,000 GoodGym participants.
• Over the past three years in Ealing we’ve had nearly 2000 group run attendances, 60 missions to help older people and nearly 180 attendances at community missions. That’s pretty awesome!

Tonight I was making a special little film about GoodGym Ealing (Coming to a screen near you very soon!) so we started off by warming up and asking everyone why they come to GoodGym. General consensus?

It’s a pretty fun way to do good things, get fit and get to know your community!

After our first flag picture of the night we headed off towards the canal, stopping only briefly for another flag picture pretty quickly outside the wonderful Pitzhanger Manor, an Ealing institution! Soon we arrived at the canal where we met Emilie, our Canal and River Trust superhost who met us with her van full of tricks so we could make a difference to the canal path.

Tonight’s task was all about litter, there’s a lot of it on the approach to the canal which makes in not such a nice place. Not to worry, GoodGym Ealing’s got this!

We split off in teams with head torches glowing in search of anything we could clear. The usual culprits didn’t take long to uncover, lots of spirit bottles, beer cans and our favourite, the discarded poo bag! Everyone took whatever was thrown at them in good spirit and were just glad to be able to make an impact in a short amount of time.

Slim pickings

I must say though, although we filled around 10 bags it was only really the entrance onto the canal that seemed to be bad, walking down the path further there was quite slim pickings which is great news!

After everyone had cleared up and sanitised (crucial in this task!) there was just time for a couple more quick flag photos before the run back to base for a stretch!

But wait the party isn’t over! There’s one more chance to get involved with the 10 year good deeds with this weekends Super Saturday of community missions!

Sign up for our plog with Decathlon at 10:30am on Saturday 21st September right here!