👻 Ghostdusters*

😁 20 brilliant GoodGymmers met on an unexpectedly warm Monday evening for our group run ☀️

🎉 We celebrated the epic getting fit by doing good achieved over the weekend through the parkrun, three community missions and the York 10k (with plenty of socialising in between). Good work everyone 💪

🥳 We also celebrated Vicky's brilliant 250th good deed 👏

🏋️ We did some wall squats while naming and numbering off. In honour of the Commonwealth Games, we also heard about people's favourite sporting event to watch, including lots of Wimbledon and Athletics with the odd Crufts event thrown in for good measure 🐕

👻 We then headed off for an exciting new task, at York Cemetery. We were greeted by Clive who gave us an introduction to the cemetery (plus our health and safety briefing). We set to work on our first task, clearing bindweed off a yew hedge in the Soldiers' Field (where many First World War soldiers from the local military hospital at Fulford were buried) 🏥

🎈 We also saw a big hot air balloon, which was quite cool, and sparked quite the chat about the various anxieties/perils of said mode of transport 🤔

🌱 This mission was swiftly accomplished and we moved on to our second area, which was particularly overgrown. We set to work clearing this area and were able to reveal four rows of graves that had been almost hidden by the undergrowth 🙈

🌿 Max (aka "the Maxchete") developed a particularly effective technique for cutting back whilst others were raking and bagging all the cuttings, or clearing ivy from the headstones and/or trees 🌳

(🐝 Cue an interesting lesson from the incredibly knowledgeable Clive about how to "work with nature" when it comes to ivy and when/when not to clear it vs leave it for the butterflies and other wildlife 🦋)

👀 It was very satisfactory being able to see a big difference from our tool, so much so that we just couldn't stop and some people had to be (almost) physically dragged away from it when our time was up. When we did manage to extract everyone, we dragged our laden bags to the compost area and headed to an open patch for our fitness aka many squats 😳

🎶 James (and his phone) provided the soundtrack for an (honestly not extended) version of Flower by Moby aka Sally Squats. There were some (many) moans as our legs struggled to hold the squats but some people got to the end of the song, which is an impressive achievement 🙌

*We didn't actually do any dusting but we were definitely sprucing up the area, so near enough 🤷🏼‍♀️