A solo paper round for Ben, similar to Hazel earlier in the week for GoodGym Stockport, for a free local community newspaper, the Manchester Post 🗞

300 newspapers delivered to neighbouring streets in Longsight in just over 2 hours, including the folding. A brief rain shower was no issue, with an array of canvas bags to store the newspapers, safely guarded by Juno, to carry out in two trips. Lots of curious people with filming going on at a local shop too!

Will repeat in June for now, but will re-evaluate in the summer if worth continuing. Lots of folding and heavy lifting to do it alone.

Welcome to Victor for your first GoodGym session! 👏

After clearing the space 2 weeks ago, we now needed to remove the old rotting raised beds to install new ones, allowing the school to use the space as an educational growing area.

Some wooden beds were very rotten and came apart easily, with Ben and Victor carrying the pieces to the waste disposal area a short walk away. Others were less rotten, making the pieces heavy and took a while to saw in half!

Fanette and Hazel saved the strawberries for future use, while the mattock, hammer, and saw got a good workout to pull apart the old beds.

As we were dismantling, Peter from the school started piecing together the pre-cut pieces to produce 1.2 m x 2.4 m beds. With fingers crossed the drill batteries would hold and a spirit level, the beds were made, stabilisers were used to stop bowing, and waterproof sheeting used to try and reduce the speed of the beds rotting down.

With as many shovels as we could fine and lots of elbow grease, we managed to build and fill 2 new raises beds, in the 2 h session, with all the deadwood taken for disposal - the wheelbarrow flat tyre didn't hold up for this and meant we only got a small layer of fresh top soil too.

Top effort to get it done this evening! 💪 Certainly earned some food and the water/biscuits after a heavy workout.

Ben joined the Withington Civic Society for a community litterpick in Withington village. Upwards of 10-15 refuse sacks of rubbish were collected with lots of takeaway trash discarded by passing drivers.

Several councillors in attendance locally. Others were involved in bits of weeding and gardening in the nearby beds.

Likely another litter pick in July.

Ben was Run Director this morning for event number 296.

Well done to all 542 finishers this morning!! Thank you for your patience with the extended finish funnel. Welcome to the 101 first timers at Fletcher Moss including 30 completing their first ever parkrun 👏

🦺 Special THANK YOU to the 19 hi-vis heroes helping out today, especially to Ian and Jackie who helped out post-run with barcode scanning and funnel managing, respectively, as the queues were growing. Kudos to those trying out new roles and stepping up for their first volunteer credit this morning too 👏