6 goodgymers (Amy, Christina, Sofeen, Ramiz, Morwenna and Iain) joined the friendly team at Dads Lane once again for a “sort out your life” style mission! We welcomed Christina to her first GoodGym mission as well!

We started by clearing an unsafe area of the garden consisting of planks of wood, bricks and general rubbish. We then levelled off this area with some shovelling and raking and weeding the area so we could lay flat paving stones and pallets.

We then formed a human brick chain passing the bricks from the old position to the new - switching every layer so each person moved up the chain! We made sure to turn every so often to even out those standing twist movements!

After a well deserved coffee and biscuit break we went back out and finished putting anything useful back on the pallets in a neat and orderly fashion.

The rest was organised in a pile for Steve to take to the tip. A massive difference was made and a good workout was had! The garden area is now safer for residents and children to play in.

This weekend we were back at Dads Lane Community Association - lured in part by the cookies Steve's wife Jo had baked for us that morning! The renovation of this community space in Stirchley is nearly finished, but that meant lots of rubbish in the back garden that needed to be shifted into a skip*.

Iain, Sofeen, James, Steve (a trustee for the association) and I all pitched in to move a huge pile of damp plasterboard, broken bricks and other rubble into the skip. In doing so we unearthed something of an ecosystem: worms, spiders, woodlice and even a frog*.

We're looking forward to seeing the next phase of the DLCA centre!

*Hence the pun

Tonights run was organised by Laura as we were doing a leaflet drop for Sustrans again. She told us were they leaflets needed going and we all did the delivering.

We ran up towards Edgbaston Reservoir, taking in a bit of the canal, before finding our street for our deliveries. We were all done in super quick time, so we headed back to do our fitness session.

Tonight was a pyramid session....30 secs, 45, 1 minute, 1 minute, 45 secs, 30 secs, all off 30 secs rest. What's more I (Jonny) joined in tonight! A good workout was had by all. Straight after Balal (head of photography operations) got a good selfie in before we headed back to 1000 Trades. Oh and this weeks pun was thought up by Morwenna (head of pun operations).

In total we did a good 7k and on arrival back we were greeted by Miriam (head of social operations). Great task and top workout everyone :)

Tonight our task with the Jewellery Quarter trust had unfortunately been cancelled, due to Covid isolation, but don't worry it has been organised in a few weeks!

We had Mel join us for the first time tonight, it's great to have you on board.

With no task, thats no problem, we headed to our adopted part of the canal to blast a specific troublesome spot we had noticed last week. We were joined by walkers Nadia and Danny and Matt nipped back to his flat to grab some bin bags.

Before all that though, the group did some press ups and wall squats!

We got 4 full bags of rubbish from our litter blast, so we walked up to Aston Lock to drop them off for our friends at the Canal and River Trust before running back.

Once we got to St Paul's Square we hit a good, hard interval session, including four tough reps. Everyone working hard, just check out the pics of the sprint finish on the last rep!

Once done, thankfully the group just had a few minutes of running to do to get back to 1000 Trades!