It was a busy night at Stepney Bank Stables as 12 Newcastle University students, from a wide variety of places including Buffalo (New York), Nova Scotia, Costa Rica and even Coventry joined us. They joined some of our regulars in painting the fence at Stepney Bank Stables' arena, filling some goody bags for a party and smoothing some walls. Everyone worked hard and some good progress was made!

Sara from Stepney Bank Stables was as welcoming as ever, giving us a tour of the stables, which involved meeting several of the resident horses. GoodGymers new and old always relish meeting the four-legged residents, one or two of whom were a bit grumpy tonight as their evening meal hadn't been served yet.

We'll be back at the stables in two weeks to try to make some more progress with painting the fence.

Five GoodGymers visited The Lighthouse Project in Byker for the third time recently, to continue our mission to rid their gardens of weeds.

We welcomed Norb to GoodGym Newcastle for the first time. He really enjoyed the run to The Lighthouse Project up the hills and steps!

We removed a large amount of weeds across quite a large area, the biggest issue being finding bags big enough to put them in. For the first time in quite some time on a Monday night, we got absolutely soaked as the rain came pouring down towards the end. We got particularly wet on the run back to Stepney Bank Stables!

Another successful evening though and we'll be back at The Lighthouse Project next week. Please join us if you can!

I was run director at Whitley bay junior parkrun on Sunday. It was busy week with over 200 young runners completing the run. It's also lovely to get involved with junior parkrun!

GoodGym Newcastle branched out and headed south of the Tyne again to deliver more Dunston Fair leaflets tonight. It was a very pleasant evening for a stroll around the mostly terraced streets we targeted.

In the course of our leafleting we stumbled upon Gateshead Central Baptist Church, which we now know has cycle racks outside it. Then we unexpectedly came across an Eritrean church which we didn't know was there. An interesting route for a walk tonight and many hundreds of leaflets delivered!

We'll be delivering Dunston Fair leaflets for the final Monday next week. Please come and join us, but please read the listing carefully!

This was the third of an as yet unknown number of sessions delivering leaflets to support Love Dunston and getting the word out about their summer fair later this month. Five (yes - five - on a Wednesday afternoon!) GoodGymers walked 5.5km and delivered another few hundred leaflets.

We discovered:

1. Dunston is very hilly in places.
   
2. Some houses on hills in Dunston have lots of steep steps up to their letterboxes.
3. Lots of houses in Dunston have animal themed ornaments in their gardens!

I've included our Strava map for your admiration - it turned out to be quite an efficient coverage of streets quite close to where the fair is going to be held. Plus, as some of you know, I love a leaflet delivery Strava map!

We have at least one more session with these leaflets at our group run on Monday, and possibly more to come. Check out the website!