Welcome to Lara, Adrienne and Sarah - a triad of new recruits tonight. Give them a cheer on the GG website pages! Nice to see Lucy from Worthing again too - good luck on that burpee challenge.

This week we had a new task at St Faith's Church in Landport which was requested via the GoodGym website - God bless technology. ;) It was a short run or walk there, big thanks to Jo for leading the walking group.

Once there, Sue (the chief organiser) and some friends had made a bit of a start on the very overgrown garden. We set to work pruning, chopping, sweeping, scooping and filling 2 very large hippo type sacks with leaves and branches plus numerous bin bags. Lots of bindweed was tackled, brambles taken out and there was even some tree pruning. Tony, Angela and Adrienne found the gate and attacked it from the other side of the fence.

By the end of the task, the wall and the railings had been revealed and there was a much less obscured view of the lovely stained glass. The tea pot and a packet of bourbons were also brought out by the church team - they know how to keep runners happy!

The running group then got to practice their fast running with arm drive, high knees and running tall all included in their sprints. Plus a bit of agility practice dodging bikes and avoiding slippery leaves.

This was a great task tonight, one we could really get stuck into and see the difference at the end. Photo challenge of the night - which GoodGymer is hiding in the shrubbery? Who is soft focus with a tree bigger than her?

On Saturday we have "dress wild like a child" Parkrun in aid of Ickle Pickles followed by our very own beach clean and next week we are getting our creative sides working with a slightly time adjusted task. Hopefully see you at one or both of those!

Our second visit to Portsmouth Disability Forum saw a return to previous tasks but this time in the proper dark! Due to all the outside bulbs going at once we were lit only by headtorches and one work light. We do love a challenge!

Tony got back into the planter digging whilst small groups cut back the scratchy bushes in the car park, painted the benches and gave the table another coat of blue and harvested the grapes off the vine (you have to look carefully in the dark photo but there's a pile of grapes there!). As no-one in the group had wine making skills we have left them for Lynne to ferment! Jo took the indoor job of shredding and made her way through a good pile of paper. Tracey joined us for her first GoodGym task - hope to see you again soon.

Post-task and group photo we headed to a well lit, quiet area for a game of domes and dishes. Jo refereed and apparently tried to take a video.... let's hope that doesn't become a You Tube viral hit. Well done to team domes for the 11-9 win (woop!). Nice to get the heart rate up with a bit of fun.

Then it was back through the colourful alleyways by Fratton Park (makes a change from the Fratton Road takeaway highway) and homeward bound after lots of discussions about cake to make us hungry. Judy mentioned it's her birthday tomorrow Happy Birthday, enjoy your day out and Charlotte came up with this week's pun thank you!

Next week we are going back to Manor Infants, where it all started back in May. There will also be a walking option, fancy dress, cakes (please feel free to bring your bakes) AND a curry afterwards (please bring cash if you're having curry). Now, that is A LOT of reasons to sign up to next week's group run/walk, hope to see you there!

It's official, we all love a sorting task and today was a great one.

The Foodbank have had lots of generous donations from school harvest festivals and so it was the boxes and boxes of those that we had to sort through today. Tins and packets were sorted into their relevant places and boxes were moved from "sorting" into "stock rotation". We managed to fill 4 "dollies" for stock rotation with around 8 full crates on each.

There were some interesting donations... the oldest tins were dated 2016 (unfortunately they had to be put in the "out of date" tub)! We also found some giant jam (good for bicep curls as well as on toast!), alcoholic fruit and some throw backs to school dinners: Spam, semolina and corned beef.

As usual, no one wanted to leave, especially as there were still boxes on the sort pile. Fortunately the foodbank does have other volunteers who will come in to pick up where we left off.

A few of tonight's runners will be racing 10 miles through the streets of Portsmouth at the weekend - good luck to Laura, Rosie, Tony and to those of you who will be cheering from canoe lake - make sure you have your best voices on. Hope to see as many as possible at the post race tea & cake Watkins & Faux from 2pm.

Apologies for the quality (or lack thereof) of tonight's photos - the automatic / make your pictures better option was convinced it was a "night scene"! Still, we get to admire all the reflective trim on our shirts / leggings!

Firstly a big welcome to Alison who joined us for the first time tonight. Give her a cheer / support on the website as she starts collecting her badges. Top marks for the reflective gear too - it's glowing in the photos.

On World Mental Health Day and #runandtalk week we had our usual good feelings and general chat on the way down to our task. We paused to regroup whilst doing some lunge knee lifts and step ups at various points. Sorry to have not taken a photo of the step ups, it would have been amazing! We also had a guest appearance from Ashley, back to the fold for the run after recently completing his first half marathon.

All this running and doing good is definitely making everyone fitter as we got to St Judes much faster this week. Shout outs to Laura and Angela for recent Parkrun PBs proving my point! The light was already fading when we arrived so we got to make use of the head torches and the amazing work light to help us see what we were doing.

We had a big list of tasks waiting for us when we got to the school (we are always happy to know our task owners have lots for us to do). There was moving of boxes and sorting of exercise books; sweeping up crabapples (100s of them!); weeding; litter picking; putting down a weed membrane and stones to surround a new plant; sorting a paper cupboard and carrying a bookcase from upstairs all the way down and round the school to another room. Wowee! The team did brilliantly and, as ever, the staff were really pleased with what we had achieved in our time.

Next week we are off to the foodbank (feel free to bring donations if you want - longlife tins / juice or even toiletries are always welcome). We also have our additional runandtalk run tomorrow - starting early at 5:30 or just come for the talk/coffee at 6:15 if you're not home early enough.

Oh my goodness, it's AUGUST already, how did that happen?

It was a double celebration this evening: the national milestone of over 100000 good deeds done by GoodGym (please feel free to tweet about it using the hashtag #gg100k) and Sophie's birthday. There's only one thing to do on a double celebration and that is to eat cake... mmm!

It was almost a triple celebration but Maura was celebrating her birthday with her family instead of us! More cake next week maybe?

We had a special visitor this evening, Brad, all the way from GG Norwich. He's the person who's travelled the furthest so far to visit our happy little group! We also welcomed Val as a new recruit to Portsmouth, although she knows what it's all about as she's supermum to the GG York Trainer Egg. Welcome back to Charlotte and Debbie too!

Our run was a short hop up Fratton Road to the old Blockbusters store (remember videos anyone?!), now home to the Naomi House North End Charity Shop. The lovely Debbie set us to work sorting out stock for the winter; tagging and generally emptying out the massive cupboard of donations. There was the standard underwear find (something of a GG Portsmouth tradition now!) but our favourite was definitely the Del Boy sheepskin jacket.

This time next year, we'll be millionaires!

We then headed back south for a mexican plank in the churchyard as well as some other hard core core workouts before a slice of lemon drizzle & a rendition of "Happy Birthday to you" to finish off the evening.

Same time next week for an outdoor task, digging over an allotment space for PARCS. Sign up here.

All the photos taken this evening can be seen on our Facebook page

A very warm GoodGym welcome to our new recruits tonight: Sam, Debbie, Alasdair, Adam, Stacey and Sophie!

Great to see the red T-shirts starting to make an appearance too, they definitely turned some heads on the run down to Old Portsmouth.

We had a slightly longer run to get to our task tonight but everyone stepped up to the challenge and we arrived at St Jude's Primary School right on time. The teacher looked after us well, even providing cold drinks ("thanks Miss") and everyone set to work on getting the Lodge gardens under control. There was sawing of overgrown trees; shearing and pruning of bushes that were trying to be trees and lots of lifting and shifting of paving stones. Awesome efforts by everyone and a special mention to the bin jumpers Stacey and Jo whose efforts meant we could fit most of our cuttings into the bin. The herb garden had been untended for so long that we even found a dinosaur in there...

We are back to finish what we started on 6th June (sign up here) so I hope to see you all then. Next week we have a very local task so you get to have a little session of running drills beforehand - but don't let that put you off!

I also mentioned the shindig in my chat before we left, if you're interested you can register your interest here. It's Friday 20th July (19:30)- Sunday 22nd July (15:00) in YHA Stratford Upon Avon.

Thanks to everyone for all their hard work tonight and top marks to Shakira for this week's pun.

See you all soon, happy running!