🌆We met for our group run at dusk on a lovely Monday, still in a bit of light, which was greatly appreciated.

👋We were thrilled to welcome Martha and Dan for their first GoodGym session.

☘️We had an Irish-themed (for St Patrick's Day) naming and numbering tonight where we found that lots of us enjoy Irish food and beverages, and Irish people too. We then did a quick warm up and walked/ran to Rowntree Park 👍

⚡On arriving at the park, we spotted a GoodGym t shirt running past at lightning speed. On (eventually) catching up with them, I discovered it was Rob, the Area Activator for GoodGym Solihull who's visiting York at the moment. Although he wasn't able to join us tonight, we hope to see him again soon 🥳

🌊We were met at Rowntree by Kristina from the Council (and Michal and Rachel) who explained what we needed to do. Friends of Rowntree Park are hoping to be able to reopen the park on Wednesday but needed some help to be able to do that. We were therefore tasked with clearing the paths that the street sweepers weren't able to get to. Armed with brooms, leaf blowers, shovels and rakes, we quickly set to work, dividing and conquering to tackle all corners of the park 💪

🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️After half an hour, we'd cleared lots of paths and made lots of areas more accessible. Oh, and Antonia found some nice frogs too 🐸

📸 We had a group photo before doing our fitness session on the area of grass by Millennium Bridge. This involved various relays (and some very impressive speed-skipping and hopping).

👌 With everyone just a little bit more tired, we headed back to base to stretch and go to the pub. Some of us were also lucky enough to be collecting some incredibly yummy biscuits baked by Ellie and Ben for their charity fundraising effort 🍪

🙌We've got a task on Friday morning needing a few more pairs of hands and various missions available so do please sign up if you're able to. There are also currently a couple more spaces for tree-planting in Haxby, which not only sounds really fun and worthwhile but also offers the possibility to win a bottle of wine 🍷

👏Thank you for your hard work tonight everyone, and hopefully see you again soon 😁

Area Activator Nicky was away so with No Nicky to meet Nicola from St Nicks Nick was Nearly Nicky for the Night.

After the usual blather and a mash up of everyones favourite warm up exercises (Paul Kelly's Freestyle Dance being the winner) we celebrated Babs's 400th good deed with the ceremonial cape before we trotted over to Millennium Fields where we found.... no one

And then in the distant gloom we spied a woman with a wheelbarrow or maybe a pram - we ran across the grass toward her and must have been a daunting sight appearing with our headtorches blazing - luckily the wheelbarrow woman was Nicola and not a random citizen and she soon set us to our task.

Splitting into two groups we had a team of diggers and a team of treaders to turn the grass over - technical term 'soil inversion' is a way to stop the grass growing so that wildflower seeds can be planted enhancing the nature area. mostly this was turning the turf upside down and then stomping around on top

There was just time for a few rounds of The Vortex where we treated Babs to some extra burpees before we headed back for Barbara's brownies and a trip to the pub

🥳A whopping 31 excellent GoodGymmers gathered on a crisp and chilly January evening to celebrate GoodGym York's 5th birthday with a group run, fitness session and cake - the perfect combination, especially after a mega 5-task 5th birthday weekend 🎉

👋We were thrilled to welcome Antonia to her first group run, after she joined us for a community mission on Saturday.

🌟 We were also delighted to present Izzy with the 50 good deeds cape of glory. What a hero 🦸‍♀️

🏃‍♀️ 🚶‍♂️After a (slightly extended) warm up, we jogged/walked down to Rowntree Park where we met Jenny from the Council Environment team who had brought a van full of tools for various tasks tonight 🚚

💪We split into various teams with each group being assigned a task.

🌿Team Green Waste (catchy) were wheelbarrowing said green waste from a large pile to Team Tree-age. Many frogs were found and rescued during this task 🐸

🌳Team Tree-age (get it?!) were sorting the green waste into different piles, depending on the twiggy-ness of it 🌿

🍃Meanwhile, Team Lop had their work cut out, cutting back a very overgrown area. Huge kudos to Lizzie who did a sterling job holding the light so everyone could see what they were doing 💡

🌺Alongside all of that, Team Flowerbed were digging flowerbed to clear it of everything except trees and one particular plant. Craig and Huw had their work cut out with a particularly stubborn root but very impressively got it out🌱

📷After half an hour of hard work, a lot had been achieved and a sense of satisfaction (hopefully) pervaded all. After a group photo and transporting all the tools back to the van, we said farewell to our walking friends and did a fitness session. We split into teams and did some relays, firstly running and then skipping. Personally, I had a great time seeing the many, many different skipping techniques. Everyone did brilliantly and then it was time to run back to base and eat cake 🤤

🍰With a choice of brownies and caramel shortbread (or maybe both 😏), all the baked goods were quickly finished and it was time to head off.

🙌Thank you everyone for a truly excellent evening and don't forget that we've got plenty of tasks this week to help us to reach our target of 400 good deeds (and 10,000k distance) for the January Challenge. Will we make it?! See all of our upcoming sessions here and sign up to one or many to help us get there ☑️

Credit to Nick for the pun 😅