With the first warm evening of the year (SEVENTEEN DEGREES PEOPLE), the troops gathered for another evening of doing Good. We were joined by a whopping nine first-timers - welcome Andrew, Georgia, David, Simon, Harry, Liam, Dom, Vicky and Emese, it was great to have you!

Tonight we helped with two different tasks...

Surf and Astroturf

Gary took a group out to get all rubbery at St Werburgh's Community Centre. They are laying astroturf this weekend in their play area so the team had the job of bagging up all of the rubber ready for the new surfacing, leaving an even layer to keep it bouncy. This resulted in a very mucky 10 GoodGymers, but very happy at having spent the evening playing.

A-head of the game

Meanwhile, the rest of us went to help with our regular task, Felix Road Adventure Playground. We were greeted by the team and split into tasks. Tonight we were:

• Litter-picking (following a litter-full half-term)
• Cleaning and tidying the art room
• Moving the compost heap and storage
• Fixing the fencing around the wood storage
• Discussing that Richard's favourite fruit is either an olive or a kumquat and wondering which is more strange
• Being scared by Tom's new friend, a decapitated Barbie head

All of the tasks were completed with our classic speed, but the fence was proving a bit more tricky with its technical-requirements. While the fencing team worked on, the rest of us started a partner chair-hold competition. This soon ended with several GoodGymers lying on the floor and some very bemused task-owners.

We headed back through the ever luck-reliant traffic-light maze of Easton for an impressively quick relay with storming sprinting by all of the teams!

On an unseasonably warm November evening 25 adventure-seeking runners met in Bristol to run a 3 mile round trip to the Children’s Scrapstore in St Werburghs to help them to work through a backlog of scrap sorting jobs.

After meeting at Vivo on the Welsh Back and doing a few farmyard related warm ups we headed off through the brizzle drizzle to our task. Being a large group meant that a few of us got caught at the traffic lights once or twice but this did not mean waiting in the cold, oh no, to keep warm the troops performed press ups, star jumps, and squats.

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the warehouse of wonder. The Scrapstore is an amazing place that takes waste from a wide range of businesses including telecoms companies, breweries and suitcase manufacturers, and turns them into useful items for children to use for arts and crafts, games and whatever else they can think of. After the unwanted items arrive at the Scrapstore they sometimes need to be processed to become useful. That was our task for the evening. The wonderful Kelly and her team had set up various stations for us to get to work cutting nets, burning through ropes, dismantling carpet samples and so much more. Everyone went right to work and stuck at it for a full 25 minutes. Richard was our cloth cutter extraordinaire, Ivo, our guest from London for the evening, took full charge of the heated cuttery thing, and Rachel was boss blade when it came to cutting thread from bobbins. After a lot of scraptivity our time was up, and we had achieved loads. After a cheeky floppy hat group photo we bid adieu to one of our favourite projects and ran on back to Queen Square.

There was still time left for a couple of laps of the square with some sprints to get the blood rushing before we stretched out and called it a night.

Thanks to everyone who came along, I had a great time and hope you did too. Remember there is a social at Kongs of King Street on Thursday from 6:30pm.

Gary

Wowzers! 38 people came along last night to our run to help a local homeless charity improve their garden. One of our biggest runs ever on one of the colder nights of this impending winter... you guys all rock! An especially big welcome to all our new runners (well, the 3 new ones).

We squeezed in to our meeting point at Vivo and warmed up whilst people signed in, and then Gary led the run to Emmaus - it was a very short run though! We grabbed gloves and tools and set to work.

Our tasks were these:

Moving a sofa dumped on some plants we planted last time.

Weeding the beds we literally smashed apart last time (there was cobbled stones before!).

Litter picking

Mulching

Bulb planting

Sweeping

The list goes on but with 38 people we were done in under 20 minutes, so one of our fastest accomplished tasks too!

To get more exercise out of the gang, Gary led a hilly run and Dave led a flatter run back to Queen Square, although I was waiting for Dave's team at the end with a couple of games that were hopefully both fun and fitness boosting too.

We'd just finished the second game (Stuck in the mud) when Gary's team came in to the square and saved the rest of the group from lunges. Phew. So instead we had a big stretch, some announcements, and then quite a few of us went for a pie too!

Top job, ladies and gents!

In life, sometimes you have to accept things don't always go to plan. Last night we were due to meet up and run up some big hills to help a school with a flower bed... this didn't come to pass so the GoodGym task force quickly came up with an alternative plan - a bit of litter picking and a spot of flyering.

We met up as usual at Vivo and strolled over to Queen Square to do a little warm up. We were accompanied by some students from the University of the West of England who are looking at GoodGym as part of a transport project - hopefully some of them will join us next week!

We were lucky with the weather, it was cool and dry so perfect running weather, and about 26 of us ran off to a near by park which (I hoped) needed a tidy up. Once there, Kevin and Kim led about half the group to grab some flyers about a community farm and distribute them, and I dished out gloves and bin bags for the remainder of the gang so we could pick up all the litter that was in the park.

BUT....

It was the cleanest park we'd ever been in! A few people struck litter gold (sadly near a primary school) but most of us were scouting about madly looking for something to pick up. Still, it was a lovely evening for a walk around the park and as this was a #runandtalk session, we all had a chance to have a nice chat to someone too.

At 7.30pm we all met back up and ran back to Queen Square, and as there was a few minutes to spare we did a kick and lunge sequence to strengthen our legs, then a 1 minute plank to improve our core and backs.

Remember gang, we've got a run on Tuesday afternoon as well as Tuesday evening next week, so if you've got a few hours spare come along - the BBC will be there!

The nights are starting to draw in but we still had 32 runners keen to help out a local food bank!

The run started as normal with a warm up and introductions outside of Vivo health club, and then we set off as massive wave of red interspersed with other colours to head to a big yellow storage box off a dual carridgeway in the industrial heartland of Bristol.

We met up with Andy, the co-ordinator of the Bristol Food Bank and our task was to label various cans, pots, tins, packets, and other containers with their expiry date - a task that would take Andy and one of his helpers several hours. The amazing power of Goodgym meant that we did this in 30 minutes! Go team!

Due to the shortage of Sharpies, we split the gang in to two - Chris led half the gang in a massive litter pick and the rest labelled and weighed cans. 15 minutes in, the teams swapped. I have to confess, seeing biscuits and bars of chocolate there made me very peckish. There was also a surprising amount of noodles!

After almost 40 minutes of hard work, we set off back towards the centre of town on the frantic hunt for bins - it seems that the St Philips Marsh area of Bristol is a bit short on them despite it being home to the city's recycling centre (and they would let us in to put our rubbish there! BOO!)

On the way back, a staggered traffic light crossing became the perfect opportunity for a spot of tricep dips, and we eventually got back to Vivo just past 8pm.

Top job any one!