So as the beautiful blue sky and gorgeous sun faded, the rain clouds gathered. We celebrated our GG Yorkie of the month for February: Andrew! We also welcomed two first-timers to the group Lee and Rachel, make sure you give all 3 of them a huge cheer!

We warmed up by practicing our hands-free greetings. Such as ankle tapping and elbow bumping!

We ran through town to Glen Allotments where we met our very enthusiastic task owners who quickly set us on 4 main tasks. The first was skillfully knocked out of the park by Mitchell and Stefan, moving a bunch of metal sheets and large waste to an area in front of a 'No Fly Tipping' sign. A slightly suspect start!

We then split into 3 groups. Squad 1 was set upon a patch of overgrown communal land that they want to plant some wildflowers in. They worked on sifting out rubble and weeds into separate areas. Lizzie wasted no time snapping a fork in an attempt to remove the biggest weed. She quickly jumped on an opportunity to redeploy as a raker when she could.

Squad 2 were on a Goodgym York classic task of loading up wheelbarrows to transport woodchip to a school's allotment and to refresh the layer for a path through the allotment. On the path section a complicated one way system would be required. Leanne made do using a gardening fork to spread the barkchip out.

"Dump it where you are" my inadvertently crude instruction to the wheelbarrowers.

Unfortunately when Lizzie turned up with an actual rake, she found the area was a little tight for two rakers.

Squad 3 was a risk assessment nightmare, finding every hazardous object in the book! They skillfully quarantined the hazardous areas and focused on the areas they could make a difference on. After securing a couple of seceteurs, and rebranding as the Seceteur Squad. They quickly filled a crate with waste brambles and safer waste. One thing is for sure Charlotte, Chloe and Laura definitely had a memorable evening!

As the rain picked up, we collected up our tools, headed off for a quick fitness session. With sprints combined with silly walks. Arriving back Egg was ever so kind to coordinate a Happy Birthday Squat song as unfortunately it happened to be my birthday!

Cheers all for a task well done! And a great birthday to boot!

35 GoodGym Yorkies met on a surprisingly dry and only slightly windy evening to help out at St Nick's

We started by celebrating John who smashed his sub 30min parkrun goal at weekend, as well as Jackie's 100th parkrun and Paul Kelly's new parkrun PB.

At St Nick's we met Jonathan who beautifully demonstrated our tree planting task for the evening.

I can't believe I'm showing GoodGym how to dig a hole!

There were a selection of Bird Cherry, Alder and Goat Willow to plant. Jonathan initially tried to put stakes in the ground to indicate where the trees were to be planted, but after 15 minutes of being followed around like the pied piper, and not quite being able to keep up with demand, he declared that we could plant trees anywhere there was space.

It's a tree for all! (Nick)

Within 30 minutes all of the trees (and some things that looked suspiciously like sticks with roots) were in their new homes.

We assembled in the empty car park for a game of alphabet fitness - a 10 second exercise for every letter of the alphabet. There was one slightly awkward moment when a family walked by during G (Groin thrusts) but other than that, everyone had a jolly good time!

On the final Monday of the January Challenge, our 3rd birthday group run and my last ever night leading GoodGym York, an amazing group of 75 pitched up to do a stonking amount of good!

In that enormous group we had:

• THREE brand new runners - big cheers for Charlee, Thomas and Francisco.
• TEN GoodGym tourists from Newcastle, Ealing, Leeds, Bath and Portsmouth!
• TWO people celebrating their 50th good deed and donning the Cape of Good Deeds Give some hearty Yorkie cheers to Emma (who has been running with us for almost the three whole years but just likes to spread out all her good!), Rich and also to Louise who couldn't make it tonight but also did her 50th last week.
• TWO people celebrating their 100th good deed and swishing the Centurion Cape! (massive cheers please for Debs and Al who got their wings over the last few days.

We split into three running groups and a walking group, on a collective mission to transform the Nunnery Lane residential area.. with this list of mini and not-so-mini tasks to tackle:

1. Digging up topsoil, laying a weed membrane and covering a large border with pea shingle
2. The lamppost task (we'll come back to this)
3. Digging up deep set rubble from a community garden (saving the one young tree), taking all the rubble to a skip and laying a new layer of three tonnes of topsoil
4. Locating all the broken and rusty road signs within the area which need replacing
5. Building three raised beds and filling with 5 tonnes of topsoil
6. Edging the path in Scarcroft Green
7. Digging and raking up weeds and ivy roots from the Scarcroft Green border
8. Litter picking every street and snicket
9. Locate and mark on a map the locations of all graffiti on the estate
10. Levelling the area where we dug up elders last year ready for a spring seed sowing session!

The walking group were split into three sub groups to tackle tasks 2, 4 and 9. It took a while to figure out who was going to go with who due to lack of reading glasses. The lamppost task was absolutely the most complicated as appropriate lampposts needed to be identified according to a strict set of criteria, and marked as to whether or not they'd be suitable to display a neighbourhood watch sign.

So we're looking for dark lampposts that are approximately 2.2m tall?? - Paul

Leanne's group arrived at the Task 1 location (actually Task 5: raised beds) and Max was delighted to be able to use the IMPACT DRIVER, imagine a nail gun but for giant bolts and you won't be far off.

Then Mitch's team arrived and were split up to litter picking, community garden rubble clearing and adding extra people power for the raised beds.

Jenny, one of the three task owners, did more running than most of the GoodGymers as she went back and forth between the zones retreiving various tools from the van.

I need a boltcutter! Jenny

Then pea shingle team finished and moved onto Scarcroft Green, they were shortly joined by the litter picking squad and eventually the community garden team (though a few of those went up to help the raised bed team too).

We had a crazy ten minutes of raking, edging, digging, standing around having a chat, and frantically attempting to put all the tools back into the van. Then we only had five minutes remaining for the biggest, fastest game of Cones of Joy, ever.

It's a two lane motorway of circular running!!! Katie

There was just enough time for a gigantic group photo before the short run back to base. That truly was an enormous amount we achieved in about an hour.

Massive thanks to everyone who showed up tonight, or has showed up any time over the last three years. It really has been eggcellent and I think you're all the best.

Don't forget to do your lunges.

See the morning report for the first part of our mega task! https://www.goodgym.org/reports/twiggy-sawdust

After a lunch kindly retrieved by Paul, Mitch, Lizzie, Louise and Laura (breathing a sigh of relief that we hadn't had to walk back up the hill after fetching it), we cracked on with our controlled destruction.

Fortunately any material that didn't fit into our exacting trailer system didn't have to travel far up the ever-widening path to the alternative disposal route. Take three corrugated sheets, a small pile of twigs and a team of GG'ers including an over-excited Leanne, and you have the perfect recipe for a bonfire.

Coaxed into life by the lovely Tristan recently returned from the far side of the world, with no shortage of material being supplied from down the hill, whilst lovely Al, visiting from his new life slightly less far south, wielded a pitchfork with abandon.

Back at the bottom, Egg had interpreted the suggestion to "take back a little more on this side" as "completely remove all vegetative and organic matter to expose solid rock that hadn't seen the light of day for centuries"... Dragged along by her implacable enthusiasm we acquiesced, and got properly stuck in with the old "shovel 'n' roll" technique. Scraping along the rock, the humus carpet was gradually peeled back, with roots chopped or lopped as needed, and more than one GG'er going bottom-first into the undergrowth as their section gave way. Progress increased rapidly with the suggestion of using the handsaws to cut through the base layers at rock level, and then to slice off pieces of carpet that Ed tried (and failed) to hammer-throw into the woods. With a last gargantuan effort we'd more than doubled the exposed rock, and Nick and an out-of-control wheelbarrow deposited our last soily bundle in it's new home.

Team bonfire had reduced a small forest into a glowing pile of embers, and that meant only one thing - marshmallows. Sticks were chosen, and people vied for the position where you got the least hot face. Those trusty pitchforks came in handy once again, and soon there were sticky fingers all round. All done it was time to tidy up, and Rich and Max were let loose with a pair of leaf-blowers to clear the remaining detritus, prompting the rest of the crew to back away rapidly.

Job finished we split into runners, fast walkers and amblers, and wended our separate ways through the magnificent grounds back towards home. Let's just say that some folks took a lot longer to escape the rhodedenron labyrinth than others, but Mitch saved his group in the end - surprising given his known success at running extra unnecessary laps at parkrun... A quick play on the trim trail, then down the windy steps back to the bunkhouse for some well-earned dinner.