🦢 Swan rake 🧹

💫30 fantastic GoodGymmers came out on a cool but clear starry night for our final group run of January. Having beaten both our good deeds and distance targets for the January Challenge, we were keen to see if we could get to 500 good deeds, and we’re getting SO close, it’s pretty nail-biting stuff 😬

👋 We were thrilled to welcome Grace and Benjamin for their first GoodGym session. We hope you enjoyed it and would love to see you back if you did 😁

☕️ Our walking group set off for Rowntree Park while we warmed up, lunging/running round the circle while saying our GoodGym highlight of January. Lots of love for all the food and socialising that’s accompanied many of the tasks, and also brilliant to hear from people who have joined (or rejoined!) during January 🙌

➗We split into two groups with Mitch leading half the gang to Back Park. Here’s what he had to say about what they got up to…

🍂 We arrived at Back Park and were tasked with clearing the grounds of all the leaves. With a wide assortment of tools (including the leaf scraper which was amazing!) We quickly filled 10 bags 💪

🗯️ Quote of the night from this gang - "I come with a lot of baggage".

🏃‍♀️🚶🚲The rest of us ran/walked/cycled to Rowntree Park where we were met by Jenny and a list of tasks. We split into different teams, doing various tasks all over the park.

🌳 We had tree-moving teams, shifting a very heavy tree in a pot to a different part of the park (and only discovering afterwards that we weren’t using the trolley to its full helpfulness). The other part of Team Tree were digging up a tree. This was quite the manual labour, requiring much muscle and exertion but also skill to work out where the roots were that still needed cutting.

🌊 Meanwhile, we had a couple of groups on path-clearing, making sure the paths were clear and not slippery, following the recent floods. After some discussion of where the debris should go, sensible homes were found for it and it was distributed. There was also some discussion about if/where/how ducks and swans sleep, after seeing a fair few still bobbing along on the water, even at this time 🦢

🌲 The final Rowntree group started off clearing the top path (by the cafe) of debris then moved onto some topiary, cutting back bushes and considering potential shapes to mould them into. They looked great and there was still a hint of an elephant to one of them at the end (if only there was a GoodGym topiary badge…) 🐘

📸 After failing to drag Team Tree from their task, we posed for a (not-quite-complete) group photo. We heard a cheer while heading back to fetch them and were able to see their felled (by digging) tree, alongside some rosy faces and cheery smiles ☺️

🌟 It was time to make our way back to base where we did some celebratory fitness, featuring sprints and star-shaped exercises.

🍻 And then it was time to stretch and part ways, some to the pub and some off home.

👏 Thank you for some brilliant work tonight everyone, we’re SO close to 500 good deeds now so if anyone’s free to join the final task tomorrow evening to help us get there, we’d love to see you 🙏

*Credit to Cara for the pun 🤣