The Fantastic Four

Loughborough Junction by John Hunter

FARM-O-RAMA 14 of us headed to a road Rebecca’s ‘special map’, on which she had ‘done a drawing’, in the Loughborough Junction area - our mission, to MOVE SOME TOPSOIL for a Loughborough Farm project. After observing the hell out of the rules of the road and stopping at every red light, we eventually arrived at the Southwell Road resident’s garden (well, it used to be a car park), where Anthea was waiting for us. Her briefing was along these lines: “I have these six wheelbarrows, they are all rubbish, and some spades. Our task today is to go and take the soil from the Jehova’s Witnesses garden over there and lay it out here”. Whether or not the Jehova’s Witnesses had been informed that we were taking the soil is between Anthea and the JWs. The cheeky twist was that the JW’s garden was just over the fence, but as we didn’t have a key to the gate, we had to wheel the soil along three roads and a gravel assault course to go from one garden to another.

The wheelbarrows really were rubbish. There was ‘squeaky’, ‘holey’, ‘rusty’, ‘flatty’ and friends. The soil had trees in it. Almost entire trees. By the end, our trainers had entire trees in them. The weather was beautiful, Anthea was lovely, a neighbour stuck her head out of the window and asked us if we all wanted water, our sprits were high, we worked hard, and we could see the difference we managed to make in about 50 minutes. What a lovely task. Maybe the next mission should be fixing wheelbarrows?

Waterloo Farm by Katie Welford

A small but speedy group took off down the Stockwell Road at a much faster rate than the suggested 10km in 55min pace had us believe. We arrived at the soon to be Waterloo City Farm a sweaty mess, but were greeted by smiles and enthusiasm from the team there, who set us to work moving lots of planks of wood from one place to another. Once finished in good time, we moved some rubbish to their tip outside, then whizzed off again into the summers evening. We were even given a drink of water, so it was all very civilised and our new task masters seemed very impressed with us. And there'll be pigs there next week!

Holland Park by Niamh

Those of us that wanted a slightly longer run but didn't quite feel up to the 6 miles to Waterloo and back headed to Holland Park estate. We set off at a (slightly) slower pace and hung back to watch the youth club lot tearing up the road ahead of us (Alex - 'We could all take them, we just don't want to...') The sea of red t-shirts attracted the attention of a potential new member who asked if we were a local running club. We spread the goodgym word, ending with a cheery 'See you next Tuesday' from Kim... When we arrived, Amena set us to work watering, digging and attempting to slow down the imminent infestation of Brindelweed - that stuff gets everywhere! After a satisfying 40 minutes of gardening in the sunshine we ran back to Pappa's park to do some thigh-shakingly fun circuits!

Brixton Youth Centre byTom Benson

Right a speedy crew of 12 GoodGym Lambeth members headed down to Brixton Youth Centre for an unknown task. As we were on one of the “shorter” tasks, Rebecca told us we were to peg it as fast as we could to our destination. Once we weaved our way out of Brixton High Street we gave it a good go and all bossed the surprising longer than it seems 1.4 km to the Youth Centre. Thankfully we were warmly welcomed with bottles of water, the task in hand was to spruce up the outside area which had become slightly over run with weeds, rubbish and debris from the overhanging trees. Armed with brushes, spades, racks, a leaf blower and even a used pizza box we sent on our way of making the place look much tidier. We had two teams; one working out the front and one tackling the overgrown weeds at the back. Whilst this was going on Rebecca paid us a visit and put each group through some lovely circuits which involved lunge walking in a square a number of times, my legs aren’t thanking me today but as always with these things, ‘no pain no gain’, thanks Rebecca.

All in all we worked for around an hour and it was mission complete, we spruced it up good and proper. So all that was left to do was a sprint back along the 1.4 km stretch to the entrance to Brixton and we all made it in cracking times that varied between 5 and 9:30 minutes. Well done team another cracking Tuesday night.