Purple reign

It was great having Harry, Faria, Kerry, Lucy, Liz and Polina join us for their first GoodGyms tonight and to have Rosie join us for her first GoodGym Bristol session! We were also lucky to have Danica with us who was celebrating her birthday (woohoo! 🎉) and Alex and Emma returning from their recent marathons.

With 46 runners and walkers, we got warmed up with a game of Truth Or Lie with - like most of my warm-up games - a questionable level of understanding of what was going on by most of the group and only vague warmth achieved. We then split into two groups, with Dave leading a smaller group to Emmaus and the rest of us going to St Werburgh's Park Nursery.

Scrubbing up nicely

The Emmaus group were tasked by Xanne from the charity to clean the bric-a-brac ready for sale. They channeled their inner domestic gods and goddesses and did a better job than we do in our own houses of scrubbing up. As always at Emmaus, there is an underlying challenge of find the weirdest donation/prop/hat. This week's contenders included some butterflies and a classic lampshade hat.

Purplesfully doing good

Meanwhile, it was time to play one of our other favourite games at St Werburgh's Park Nursery: Who Can Not Get Paint On Themselves During A Painting Task. This week's added challenges: * The dark * The colour purple

We were met by Mandy from the nursery who had invited us there to help with painting the fencing of a reflection garden they have created in memory of one of their colleagues who passed away earlier this year. We were honoured to be able to be a part of this project, so we balanced a variety of spotlights, lights and torches in the dark area and 14 of our handy GoodGymers got straight to work.

The rest of the group weeded an entire planter at the front, and got stuck in with digging out bindweed, chopping back bushes and general tidying.

Soon it was time for us to head back, and we dragged the reluctant painters away from the final touch-ups on the fence to jog our way back to Queen Square. Great work everyone!