Evan help us

Sweeping leaves from the grounds of a care home was this week's task for the Bath group of GoodGym. A few regulars were missing but numbers were made up by London event regular Dan and John managed to peel himself away from those wine gums. ( that's a Steph n John joke ) . Warm Welcome to Dan . . Steph supplied everyone with gloves and head torches and we were off.

The team ran 3.5kms to the charity Action Against Hearing Loss' residential care home complex in Watery Lane. It's a series of blocks of housing for deaf adults and is provided by the charity that used to be called the RNID. Our run there featured the usual stop offs for added exercise: squats under the oak tree in Kingsmead Square, sprints around a square in Green Park Station and a double dose of star jumps squeezed in for good measure.

At the care home site we were greeted by one of its residents, Evan, who was quickly engaged in a sign language conversation by our own expert Ann. He led us through the well kept front gardens and to a shed where there was a rather terrifying scarecrow slumped on the floor. Having gotten over this fright we armed ourselves with rakes and bin bags. On with the garden gloves and we got down to work.

We spent about 30 minutes sweeping leaves up and scooping them into a huge container. Sam and Ellen took a quick time out to play on the swings. The gardens are fairly substantial and mostly sheltered by trees, so there was a lot of leaves to gather. Everyone seemed to fill their bin bags numerous times and did a great job.

Steph promised a straight run home but couldn't resist administering some standing press ups. Kenta and Jess were with us again and made a plea to their university housemate Charles who's the only one of the house of five yet to give GoodGym a try – despite being a runner!

Dan, who has lived in Bath for four years but works in London, was making his first run with us. He said GoodGym has been going on for nearly five years but thinks it's now struck upon a winning formula and expects to see it rolled out to more and more cities – let's hope this happens.

Our second sign language pro Pascal and Nadja, two highly committed GoodGymmers, were also running. Many thanks to Steph for organising it all again and the Bath Half Marathon training guides.

A big THANK YOU to Sam for writing tonight's run report

Don't forget to sign up for next weeks run .