Bikes, Camera, Action: A Spoketacular Evening

As the evenings are getting darker we're resisting the desire to hibernate, and instead we're increasing our ranks of GoodGym runners! This week we welcomed 4 runners new to GoodGym, and 1 runner new to Oxford. Welcome Penny, Anna, Ellie, Meghan, and Stephanie; lovely to meet you all.

This week Ben was the proud wearer of the Garland of Joy - congratulations on getting to your 10th Good Deed in record time Ben!

Be-garlanded, and lit up with head-torches we set out into the night...this week heading West to the Broken Spoke Bike CoOp.

The run though Oxford Centre is beautiful with all the old buildings lit up in the evening, but a bit challenging dodging other pedestrians. We successfully made it through with no collisions and no-one separated from the group, and circling around behind the Oxford Castle we were soon at the door of the workshop.

Broken Spoke Bike Co-op are a community cycling project who teach people how to fix and ride their bikes. They also recycle and refurbish donated second hand bikes. To recycle them as responsibly as they can, they take the bikes apart into their components, reusing whatever they can.

This is where GoodGym come in: dismantling bikes is a time consuming task, and many hands make light work!

Caitlin greeted us at Broken Spoke and explained a bit about their aims for the Co-Op, then dishing out aprons, gloves and tools she put us to work. We had 5 bikes to dismantle, and pile of wheels - these were bikes and wheels which were too damaged to refurbish and get back into use, so instead they get stripped down to become spares or for the metal to be recycled. Although very few of us had ever taken a bike apart before we set to work straight away - after all you can't do much harm to a bike that's being scrapped anyway! In no time at all we had 5 bikes and 15 wheels done, and gained some confidence with bike tools - a WIN-WIN. After cleaning up post-task (top tip: add used coffee grounds to your soap to clean off bike grease) we tip-toed back out into the drizzley night for the run back to base.

Rather than run the exact same way back we took a more circuitous route. Looping round the edge of the city centre we paused at the Ashmolean Museum to use their steps for calf raises and jumping exercises (FITNESS!), then ran the reverse of the Oxford Half finish sprint, before wiggling down Queens Lane and stopping for 1 minute of wall-squatting - don't worry gang - no-one thought we looked odd ;-). Avoiding a collision with the Ghost Tour headed the other way we popped out onto High Street and zoomed back to the Cowley Road.

Broken Spoke Bike Co-Op would like to make our visits a regular thing, so keep an eye on the website for the next Good Deed there.