Thistle Sting a Little Bit

41 GG Yorkies showed up to do some meadow keeping duties with St Nicks!

We welcomed along one new runner to the gang tonight, so make sure you go and give Stuart a big Yorkie cheer. Fresh from donating a kidney, very good Huw also joined for his second post-surgical good deed as our official photographer (and almost enough good deeds for the cape!). Helen was also fresh, though she would probably say slightly less fresh, from completing the Yorkshire Three Peaks at the weekend, and offered to be our achy-legged back marker.

I literally fell out of my car this morning - Helen

It was an unexpectedly large group and there weren't quite enough scythes and rakes to go around but Jonathan has never let us down on task-finding before and this was no exception. He quickly showed us a "creeping thistle" and asked anyone without a tool to pull all the heads off them, or just pull them out entirely. There was instantly a lot of debate about what was a creeping thistle and what was a regular thistle, but Bev summed it up well.

Pull out them brown things! - Bev

Whilst the thistle gang were busy getting their gloved hands prickled, some seriously hardcore scything was happening, and none of the scythers or rakers were willing to give up their tools. The new rule was that if you completed a mini workout, you could go and claim a tool from someone who didn't complete said workout. The first mini workout on offer was the brilliantly mad Thunderstruck workout, which comprised lots of running, high fives, squat jumps and burpees. As soon as the workout finished, everyone ran over to swap in for some scything or raking.

Our second optional mini workout of the evening was the infamous Cups workout. I suggested that we gather in a circle for this one and make it a slightly more intimate affair.

Intimate workout? Should we keep our gloves on? - Babs

Cups is either a very effective press-up and sit-up workout, or basically just rolling around on the floor - enjoyable either way and people seemed happy with rolling around as an alternative to pulling out thistles.

There were a few more tool swaps and it pretty much ended up with just Aidan on thistle duty whilst everyone else either eagerly anticipated the next workout, or tried to look busy with some bag holding or something. Emily always managed to end up with a new tool at the end of every workout and none of us knew how she did it.

The third workout was the quad-burner that is Sally Squats. Leanne and I were trying to explain to people that if you dance a bit with the upper body, it makes you feel better about all the squatting. Leanne was demonstrating some pretty serious armography it has to be said. Some people were so gutted they missed the workout that we had to do it a second time. Kudos to the Pauls, John and Becky who all boshed through a Sally Squats double.

There was just enough time to finish raking up all the grass and take what might just be our last group photo in full light of 2018. Time to start bringing the headtorches along!

Leanne's the boss of GoodGym now until October, when I'm back from my holidays. Do what she says, even if it's dancing!

This week's pun credit goes to Aidan