Fay Downing

7 GoodGym Chelmsford runners enjoyed a virtual escape room courtesy of McMillian. We were split into four cells and had to work together to crack the codes and escape the prison we had found ourselves in. Safe to say we did struggle early on, getting completely stumped on the second puzzle and having to use the two clues provided. But once we were out of the cells and Andy had to leave we raced through the remaining 5 puzzles to escape the prison with fantastic teamwork and impressive ease. I’m sure this had nothing to do with Andy's departure. Great work team.

You can still donate to the McMillan cause here if you have not already done so to support people living with Cancer.

This weeks challenge was to find the following things within an hours long walk, run or bike ride:

• A yellow car
• A flower
• Christmas decoration/s
• A flag
• A squirrel
• A number plate with the first two letters being your initials
• Something tasty
• A golden fleece
• Animal tracks
• Something that makes you happy

Fay got her dog Paisley in most of her photos as her something happy, Rich got something a bit cheeky in as his, but most people showed great ingenuity and managed to think outside the box for the more difficult to find items. It was great to see so many of you put in the effort and we've made some wonderful collages of your activities.

When it came to finding a winner we thought a vote might be a good idea. Rich decided to ignore the hour time limit (so was already disqualified) and then embraced his inner Trump when it came to the voting, constantly declaring he was the winner and to STOP THE COUNT, even before it had started. Unlike the American election, there was some quite clear voter fraud going on. And so the ‘winner’ has also been disqualified, leaving the popular vote winner as Andy. It certainly made for an entertaining Sunday evening. Congrats Andy, a copy of Walking Dead Season 2 will be heading its way to you soon!!

I think we can all agree that trying to find your numberplate initials was rather frustrating (well done Laurie, being the only person who managed), they all seem to start with E around here for some reason!! Thankfully they will not be missed in next week’s challenge which you can sign up to here.

The Little Edi Foundation is a small local charity that enables disadvantaged children to fulfil their potential, giving them equal access to food, education and learning development.

One of the many things they do is distributing food donations from Fareshare at Tescos to familes who need it in Chelmsford. They have sturggled to get enough volunteers to help with the food distribution, cue GoodGym to lend a helping hand.

Waiting around the back of the Tescos on Springfield road, we got to have a little catch up before the shutters opened and what looked like quite a few pallets worth of food were given to us. The food mainly consisted of bread with the odd bits of fruit and potatoes, some beef jerky and a rather tasty looking cake. We each grabbed a bag and filled them up with food to be distributed. Josh from the Little Edi Foundation gave us our drop off addresses and we all went off in seperate directions leaving the bags on families doorsteps to enjoy.

Well done everyone for getting stuck in and making quick work of what would otherwise have taken a lot longer.

This is going to be a weekly task every Sunday as well as every Wednesday morning.

Also on Wednesday this week we will be doing a virtual escape room and there will be another challenge to do during the week on a walk, run or bike ride.

Eight GoodGym runners logged on for Chelmsford’s first virtual workout, a 20 minute pilates session, which although described as being for beginners was pretty challenging. If anyone would like to have another go at the session you can find it here.

After we had worked up a sweat and realised we weren’t as stretchy as we thought we were we had a bit of a chin wag and discussed the future of group runs and our upcoming community mission with the Little Edi Project. It was great to see you all during these tough times.

Next Wednesday we will be having a virtual escape room which you can sign up to here courtesy of McMillan.

Whew, what a busy day.

So after three weeks we have finally cleared all around St Johns Church Hall…. Until all the leaves fall off the trees at least.

Before we get into all that though a few things to celebrate. Firstly a very warm welcome to Pam who joined us on her first Community Mission with GoodGym. Great to have you on board and hope to see you at another task in the not too distant future.

We also welcomed back our now regular tourist Charlotte who seems to love getting stuck right into the tasks.

Today also marked Andy's 50th good deed. He now has his own dedicated Instagram post (lucky boy), and will be rocking a well-earned black t-shirt soon.

And lastly, and probably most importantly. A massive congratulations to Laurie and David who having had their wedding put back this year were able to tie the knot last week. The second couple to get married from GoodGym Chelmsford!! You know what they say, those who GoodGym together….

All the above deserve lots of cheers so go ahead and give them a few on their profiles.

So…. On to the actual task. The grim reaper, uh, I mean Stephen, gave us our tools and told us what needed doing which was essentially picking up where we left off last time, breaking down the remaining fallen branches and raking the leaves into the wheelie bins. After not too much time we filled up the four brown wheelie bins to the rim. We’ve achieved so much over the past month here and have left the place in a much better condition than when we first started. A big well done to everyone who has helped out at the church hall over the past few weeks, you’ve made a massive difference. If only someone knew how to take before and after pictures we might have been able to see the whole transformation. Oh well.

This morning we were also featured on Chelmsford Community Radio, a great local radio station that plays some banging tunes and supports local community initiatives, you can listen to the whole show here (but the bit you really want to listen to starts at about 2 hours and 12 minutes.)

Next week we are off to Mencap to help with their redecorating and there will be a litter pick on the Tuesday as well. Not entirely sure where yet so if anyone has any ideas or has seen some particularly litter filled areas drop me a message.

We also have our regular 5km run on Saturday morning in central park to look forward to.

That was a lot to get through. Well done everyone, see you all again soon!