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.

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.

One, Two, Tree Go

There were so many tree puns tonight that they will have to be scattered through the report...

We welcomed Jen to GoodGym tonight for her first run with us. Another medic to add to our collection, but hopefully we won't need to make use of her skills any time soon! Thanks to Amanda for bringing her along.

We started outside with a quick warm up of "over and under". Team A were mega quick at passing the gloves down the line - very impressive. Team B must've just been taking it treesy!

Treesy does it

We then headed off to Baffins Pond to meet up with 2 members of the Baffins Pond Association. They had lots and lots of trees planted 2 years ago and needed help exposing the soil around the trees and then adding bark / mulch around the bottom of them to help them grow. Mulch ado about nothing? Vikki named her first tree Frank, Jo called hers Olive. By the time we'd finished there were many named trees, more with their bark added and some who had been freed from their corsets / gastric bands.

There is more to be done with the trees and plenty more mulch to be spread so we will be back again soon.

GG Portsmouth News

• Tim got a parkrun PB last weekend
• Maura and Judy ran their fastest 5ks at Great Run Local on Sunday
• Laura is off to the Houses of Parliament next Wednesday to sit on a select committee for active travel and maybe sort out Brexit while she's there.
• The GoodGym Portsmouth 1st birthday party has been booked.

Another great night and good deed done with lots of enthusiasm. Well done everyone! See you on Saturday or next week, don't forget there's the option to leave a little earlier as it's a longer run!

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!