Goodgym getting their stickers in a twist!

It was a great turn out as 19 of us huddled into Daveena's cafe at 6.30pm tonight.

It was so lovely to see two new faces join us - Sarah and Ella. So fab to have you along ladies!

Sarah is in the process of setting up a new run group that we will fully support here at Goodgym Poole. It is Run, Talk, Run. The concept is that a group meets for a 5km run (or a 2km walk) to have a chance to chat to others to improve their mental health. It will be on a Monday in Creekmoor so spread the word! We hope we can work together with the group in the future. As we all secretly know - our mental health is really improved by feeling part of the community at Goodgym and even more so when we feel we are making a difference in our community as well as looking after our health. We all have our own 'why' for coming to Goodgym and what it offers us! (What's your why?)

Onto tonight's run - A quick warm up on the forecourt before taking on the mound of opportunity that is Fernside Road! Onwards to Ringwood Road and another opportunity! We found the small path that leads to Dorchester Road and it was a chance for a bit of form coaching. Each person had to think of an area of form they need to work on and run the distance (with acceleration / deceleration) working on that form. So perhaps standing tall or using those arms or just working a bit of head up. After 1 repeat, the scores were in. Either we are all terribly British or not trying hard enough as scores of 5/6 were given to themselves! Well practice makes perfect and after 3 of them the scores were more of an 8 so on the right path.

Onto the school where we have been over the past few months with painting, gardening and even moving a library of books around! Tonights task came with the promise of stickering and in a bizarre way this had been a real draw! We were met again by the dedicated Mrs Armstrong (Head Teacher) and Mr Thomas (Deputy) with a big stack of stickers with labels for books for a new reading programme. Sounds simple enough! However as we all quickly discovered, there was no order on the sheets so each time we had to go through the lists and try and find a book in the entire library with often little idea where it actually was! Well this has got to be our most frustrating task to date - it was a bit of a needle in haystack for some of the books! Elizabeth suggested another way to try it - call out authors on the shelf and like a game of bingo we could match to our sheets. This worked for a few but it was still not moving very fast. In the end we settled for calling out popular authors or books and seeing who could help. Sadly we left the school, with many sheets barely touched as we could not find them! Nicola topped the leader board with 8 books found and stickered! Tim was heard loudly saying he was 'looking for bad girls' which I hope he found before we had to go, whilst in the depths of despair at lack of progress, Richard was looking for a book on euthanasia! Fiona who has hidden knowledge and background - knew a fair bit about how libraries run so was more helpful than many of us wondering aimlessly looking for a random book we had never heard of! Time ticked on and Sarah asked me if we had to stay till they were all done - It would have been a very long night!

We decided to give it a end point and took our lack of satisfaction of not completing out into the fresh air, for a quick run back to base. We left on the promise to return if we can help further! Leaving behind Mrs Armstrong and Mr Thomas scratching their heads at the system that had been created!