Another fun packed night at GoodGym Portsmouth!

Tonight, we welcomed Chrissy to her first run (give her a cheer!) and welcomed back Laura who has been on maternity leave. She also brought Jack along to meet us, sporting his lovely GoodGym vest (I think this should be your GG profile pic)! We look forward to welcoming him as a member in about 18 years!

After the joy of the evolution game last week we just had to play again so that was our warm up while the walking group put in the curry order then headed for the Rec.

We met up with Anna and a few others from the Friends of Kingston Rec group to pick litter, mostly in the play area but also around the fences and hedges in the park. Interesting finds tonight included a teddy (zebra / horse?), some false teeth (ewww) and a bugging device (as decided by Vicki at least!)

Durante el trabajo Adam, Kat y Maura hablaron en Espanol por 20 minutos! Muy bien, muy inteligente! Prometí algo de español en el informe. Gracias Google Translate!!!

Connie from the Package Free Larder was out walking her dog and picking up a few bottles on the way round, she was very impressed with what we were up to and stopped to tell us about their crowdfunding to bring a packaging free shop to Portsmouth. Have a look at their page here - only 7 days left to help make this a reality!

Once we had regrouped and had a few pictures, it was time for the 1km time trial - 2 laps of the park, carefully measured and chalk marked!! Big thank you to my beautiful assistant tonight, Laura, who was chief cheerer and gave out the finishing tokens. This was part of the Nationwide GoodGym Olympics. So, if you're on Strava and fancy entering yourself into the prize draw, check out all the details here - there are various hashtags to include in the description.

As I was working out who was closest to their predicted time, the brave group members were challenged to build a human pyramid. This was for 2 reasons, 1. (most important) in honour of Louisa who is off to represent Team UK in the World Tchouckball Championships in Malaysia. GOOD LUCK LOUISA! We look forward to hearing all about it on your return 2. so we have a photo to enter in the 1km time trial competition!

THE GOLDEN TRAINER Last year's winner of the golden trainer, Jo ran 5 seconds quicker than her predicted time and so had to hand on the custody of the golden trainer to another GoodGymer for 2019. As ever, lots of you underestimated how fast you could run 1km, have more faith in yourselves! However, the final result was super close this year, with 2 people running just 2 seconds slower than their predicted times. This meant we had to go down to the milliseconds to decide it and India was victorious. Well done India! Congratulations / commiserations to runner up Angela, SO close (0.45 seconds)!

Also, Happy Birthday / Feliz Compleanos to Maura for tomorrow!!

Dhansak Queen All runners love a good feed and most of us stayed behind afterwards to be treated to the curry pun above from Jo and to sample some more delights from Paanchi, the local takeaway - always a good option!

Upcoming things to get involved in... And finally, there's lots coming up before we meet for our next group run, hope to see you at some of them!

• If you want to do another 1km time trial or try the 1km alphabet challenge, the opportunity is there for one more day!
• Training run in Havant on Friday
• Beach clean at Southsea on Saturday morning
• Litter pick (followed by coffee / brunch) at Great Salterns on Sunday

We also have a team of 5 travelling to Parliament Hill for the GoodGym Olympics on Saturday, we hope to do Portsmouth proud! (I also hope not to break my ankles during the bucket stilt race!)

First of all, welcome to Craig who chose a particularly crazy night to come along to GoodGym as we celebrated our FIRST BIRTHDAY

In other firsts.... Craig & Sarah both ran their first marathons - Craig at London and Sarah at Southampton on Sunday. Top marks for effort! Sarah's top tip for recovering from a marathon is to dance to the finish line bands to ease out the legs - it seemed to work for her.

In celebratory style, there were plenty of party hats to go around (Tony finally got to wear the 50 good deeds cap), a headcount to make sure everyone's brains were working and a short run over to Manor Infant School to work in the very overgrown garden.

• Thanks to Ashley for running with us and having us back to the school.
  

The team set to work quickly, weeding the beds, cleaning the polytunnel and attempting to mow the grass (the enthusiasm of goodgym was not matched by the mower which refused to cut the grass after 2 lengths of the garden).

• Rosie, Angela and Sarah made a new friend in the polytunnel, I'm not sure what that spider will make of the new tidy area but hopefully it will still have plenty of flies to eat!
  
• We managed to make a compost pile as tall as Sam.
• Judy and Vicki were put to work identifying plant vs weed.
  

Everyone worked hard shifting weeds and grasses, picking up rubbish and digging over the planting beds. You could definitely see the difference by the end of the task.

Once the equipment had all been wheeled back out of the way we had a couple of party games involving balloons. As usual, plenty of laughter and a few moves that are designed to improve running speed... stealth plyometrics disguised as a party game! And lots of photos. Thanks Laura for the action photos.

Back at the community centre it was time for cakes, complete with 1 candle and for a good number of us who didn't have crazy early starts, a lovely curry from our friends at Pannchi round the corner.

The celebrations continue on Friday at 7pm in Somerstown Hub. Details are here. More food, a quiz and the raffle draw - not to be missed!

There are also 2 community missions on Saturday. One in the morning at the Bubble Rush in Southsea and one around Southsea in the afternoon

Then next week the party hats will be packed away and we'll be heading up the road to an old favourite.... helping sort donations at Naomi House charity shop.

It was great to go back to where it all started tonight and think about all the good deeds we have done in the space of 52 weeks = 930 of them in total!! Angela was with us at the start and has written a blog for GoodGym about the positive impact being part of GoodGym has had on her mental health - read that here - it's well worth 5 minutes of your time.

Wow what a fabulous atmosphere we experience today at Fratton Park. Five GoodGym runners took their charity buckets to Fratton Park to collect money for the Tom Prince cancer trust before kick-off.

Welcome Hannah, it was great to have you supporting us today on your first community mission and GoodGym experience. We hope you had a great time. We were lucky to have two mini helpers with us today who raised lots of money with their cries of ‘any spare changeeeeee please!’ the fans could not resist popping their change into their buckets.

The fans were very generous with notes being thrown in our buckets alongside coins. We don’t have the total raised yet but we know every penny will help the charity to fund vital cancer research. Shame we didn’t get a win PUP!

Tonight we welcomed Sarah, John and Holly to their first GoodGym experience. Thank you to everyone for making them feel so welcome - don't forget we can spread the love some more by cheering them on the GoodGym website!

*//Cheers *

Now even though it was Johns first time, he stepped up in GoodGym fashion and was back-marker. Thank you John B!

Tonights task took us back to Baffins Pond where we were met by two members of the Baffins Pond Association. The Baffins Pond Association have planted over 100 trees in the last two years and we had the great task of tending to the trees to ensure they grow big and strong. The last time we were there it was so dark it was hard to appreciate how much work we hard done to tend to the new trees. However, the weather this evening was beautiful, and there were lots of smiles which prompted Amanda to introduced us to the word "Biophilia" which is a love of living things and nature.

We did a great job removing the grass and plastic supports from the tress and spreading the mulch to help the tree absorb the rain water and nutrients they provide. We were also shown a pond close to where we were tending to the trees which needs re-lining which could be a job for GoodGym soon! You'll see jazz hands in our group photo and Amanda and Adam doing the wheelbarrow - impressive stuff as we took about 100000 photos trying to get a good one! It was great that it stayed light for the whole task and was still light when we returned to base to do our stretches.

*//GG Portsmouth News *

• Rachel achieved a new PB at ParkRun - good work Rachel!
• There is a Beach Clean this Saturday, meeting at 10am at Southsea Coffee Cup, for more details and to sign up click here. If you are going along the organisers have requested we use buckets instead of plastic sacks, so if you have one please bring it with you.

Thank you all for being so well behaved whilst Katie is away - I only needed to use my teacher voice once!

Looking forward to seeing you soon.

A warm welcome to John, Vicki and Rosy who attended GoodGym for the first time! Hope to see you guys again soon.

At the other end of the scale, Mel completed her 50th good deed, so got to wear the crazy cap! We look forward to her modeling her new black t-shirt soon.

We started the evening with a quick talk from Beth from Parkletics telling us about the new equipment in the park and how she would like to see it well used. I'm on the training tomorrow so if anyone wants to learn more about how to use it or become a trainer as well, let me know!

We warmed up with a quick game of domes and dishes which got quite competitive - I'm not sure whether it was cheating or strategy that meant the dishes team won 11-9. Close!

Breezy does it

Then it was off to the Deaf Centre to help move chairs from the mezzanine to outside for breaking and stacking. Tony picked up a breeze block and used that to break the cushions off the chairs and Adam found his inner karate kid by kicking off the cushions. A good way to take out the day's frustrations! Tracey, Laura, John and Vicki were put to work cleaning the kitchen which was left sparkling and in the final task the orange chairs were taken up to the mezzanine floor, taking up the space that had been cleared. We used the stage space to pose for our #balanceforbetter photo for international women's day on Friday.

After all that, it was still quite early so we went down to Canal walk to do some partner resistance work (cue lots of laughing), got our squats done for the squat challenge and split into walkers, runners and loop runners to all meet back at the community centre for some post-run stretches.

Nice work by all - see you next week for another installment!