With the threat of SNOW on the horizon, 6 extra special goodgymers met up for some chilly volunteer work and a chance to get active.

We welcomed back into the fold, Katie.

Croeso

And it was another celebration as Dylan made his fifth task

High Five

No walkers in the group tonight, so to keep the group warm Michael led them on a longer route than usual for those extra active points..Just on time, we got to Samye at 7pm ready to meet our two cyclists and the lovely Lorraine. We popped inside to keep warm and top up our water levels, before heading out for the task at hand.

It was time for a general tidy up of the outside space, with weeding and sweeping of old leaves so that it was all spruced up and looking like new.

Time to head inside and warm ourselves again, this time with some delicious SOUP.

Mmmmmmmm, Two Soup Tuesday!

Join us next week as we head to help at Cwtch. Click the link to sign up.

It was great having Harry, Faria, Kerry, Lucy, Liz and Polina join us for their first GoodGyms tonight and to have Rosie join us for her first GoodGym Bristol session! We were also lucky to have Danica with us who was celebrating her birthday (woohoo! 🎉) and Alex and Emma returning from their recent marathons.

With 46 runners and walkers, we got warmed up with a game of Truth Or Lie with - like most of my warm-up games - a questionable level of understanding of what was going on by most of the group and only vague warmth achieved. We then split into two groups, with Dave leading a smaller group to Emmaus and the rest of us going to St Werburgh's Park Nursery.

Scrubbing up nicely

The Emmaus group were tasked by Xanne from the charity to clean the bric-a-brac ready for sale. They channeled their inner domestic gods and goddesses and did a better job than we do in our own houses of scrubbing up. As always at Emmaus, there is an underlying challenge of find the weirdest donation/prop/hat. This week's contenders included some butterflies and a classic lampshade hat.

Purplesfully doing good

Meanwhile, it was time to play one of our other favourite games at St Werburgh's Park Nursery: Who Can Not Get Paint On Themselves During A Painting Task. This week's added challenges: * The dark * The colour purple

We were met by Mandy from the nursery who had invited us there to help with painting the fencing of a reflection garden they have created in memory of one of their colleagues who passed away earlier this year. We were honoured to be able to be a part of this project, so we balanced a variety of spotlights, lights and torches in the dark area and 14 of our handy GoodGymers got straight to work.

The rest of the group weeded an entire planter at the front, and got stuck in with digging out bindweed, chopping back bushes and general tidying.

Soon it was time for us to head back, and we dragged the reluctant painters away from the final touch-ups on the fence to jog our way back to Queen Square. Great work everyone!

Three Tasks, 56 GoodGymers, 15,000 Good Deeds, 10 years of GoodGym and a 200th Good Deed 😲

What a mammoth session we had ahead of us tonight! It was great to be joined by Maddy for the first time - welcome Maddy! After a game of Shona Says (which everyone is getting far too good at), we split into our three groups to get started on our three tasks and mini-tasks we had ahead of us to celebrate. Not only did each group have to complete their task, they had to try and take a creative photo of 15,000 while they were at it and think of a pun which somehow included 15,000 deeds, ten years and Richard's achievements.

Mel's group did a walk/run session to The Southville Centre to give the paintwork a final push to finish it off just in time for the change of seasons. They are now the proud owners of newly protected wooden features as well as painted bathrooms. Great job team!

Richard B took his group to Easton and St Werburgh's to help The Children's Scrapstore advertise their upcoming Community Reuse Festival on the 28th-29th September. They managed to hand out a whopping 350 leaflets in the local area in just 30 minutes.

Atrenchion please

The rest of the group headed up the hill to help Youth Moves at their allotment. This local charity engages young people from the city in community projects, including their allotment. We joined the young people in digging the ground around the polytunnel ready to build a trench to fix the tunnel and to cut back a very overgrown area. It was all hands on deck to get as much as possible done in our 30 minutes, and we managed to make a big dent in it. Matt also spent a long time being the artistic director behind the 15,000 photo, so please do show it sufficient appreciation.

All's Will that ends Will

Once we had all admired the sunset from our respective parts of Bristol, we reconvened at Queen Square to take on 15,000 squats. I think everyone regretted being quite so good over the past few years at this point! 277 squats each (don't do the maths) and we were all very much ready for a sit-down. Luckily, we were getting to co-ordinate all of this squatting with the brilliant achievement of Richard (Will) Breakspear achieving his 200th Good Deed!! Well done Richard, what an amazing number, the last 100 of which he has done in just 14 months! He is also now the proud owner of a t-shirt with him in the 17th Century on it.

This also produced the wonderful news that there was double cake for everyone to have a good sit down and munch while we read the GoodGym stories and spotted several Bristol names and faces in the book.

What a great night of celebration, which will be continued with Super Saturday!

Thanks to Russ who won tonight's three subjects, one pun competition. I am looking forward to your answer on the other competition of how many prime numbers in 15,000

It was another mega edition of new runners at GoodGym Bristol tonight - it was great to have Vicki, Maria, Tom, Rosie, Sophie and David join us for the first time, as well as some of the Team GB GoodGym event runners come and join us for a regular session.

To match this huge number we also had three tasks to complete tonight. We got warmed up with a game of the playground-classic, Toilet Tig, then split into three groups, with Maria and Mel run and walk leading - thank you both!

Toilet humour

The warm-up was fitting to get Mel's group ready for their task, as they were heading on a walk/run group back to the Southville Centre. After we had given their toilets a first lick of paint last week, our crafty walkers and runners got to work putting all hands on deck to give it a second coat. Even though some people were said to be loos-ing the plot (thanks Mel), the bathrooms were soon looking glossier in their sleek gray (the latest colour trend, of course).

Loos-ing the Plot

Meanwhile, Maria led a group of 10 on a longer 9km run to help the Matthew Tree Project at their gardening allotment plot. The group took the hill up there in their stride and arrived ready to tackle the work to be done. Rosa set the team to their tasks of composting, weeding and picking tomatoes. Not only did they get to use wheelbarrows, they also got a great view of Bristol as dusk fell!

Crate burpees

The rest of the group headed off to Easton to help East Bristol Foodbank. They have just had their recent delivery of supermarket collection donations and we were doing our regular task of sorting them into different categories so they can be easily distributed to people in need. Andy from the food bank said that our half an hour session with them had saved their regular volunteers 3-4 hours of work! Wow.

As we were such a big group, we split into two groups, with half working and half doing The Centurion Burpee Challenge at any one time. This was created specially for this evening's centurion, Alice, but she had managed to sneak off into the toilet crew so everyone had to do her burpees for her. The two groups smashed it, with the winning teams making it to the top of Victorious Hill in 5 minutes and 4 minutes respectively.

After all of this, we headed back to Queen Square to reunite the groups and to crown Alice with her celebratory Centurion outfit and the latest addition of the UniHorn, which centurions now have to ride around the circle, while galloping, holding their shield and high-fiving all the rest of the GoodGymers. Some say it is harder than doing all of the 100 deeds put together. Massive well done Alice - you are amazing!

To prove her amazingness to us all even more, Alice had baked DELICIOUS celebratory scones which she militantly guarded until people proved that they were eating them the Cornish way. Stay true to your routes, girl.

Pun credit to Matt and Mel, who are way funnier than me

The lure of frisbee and post-run drinks, brought out a bumper crop of Goodgymers last night. Basking in the sunshine we plotted a scenic route to Iffley Glebe, which turned out to be shorter than the 'direct' route. Note to self: measuring is key.

Iffley Glebe tasks seem to be our lucky charm. Or maybe Goodgym is Rachel from the Oxford Preservation Trust's charm?! Either way, the sun always shines at Iffley Glebe, which made for perfect hay-raking weather.

When we visited the Glebe in June the long grass was head height, but it was cut at the end of July, baled and the hay taken away, leaving the meadow clear and nettle free. (This must be the first time in weeks that there have been no nettle stings on a Goodgym task!)

Our tasks for the evening were to get the Glebe prepped for autumn: raking up the left over bits of hay and bundling them onto the compost pile, giving the stone wall a final summer once-over for weeds, ivy and moss, and protecting the wooden noticeboard with a coat of wood preserver.

Stu and Aoife bagsied the noticeboard, channeling their inner artists with some careful paintbrush action, while the remainder of the group tooled up with rakes gloves and secateurs to tackle those insidious weeds and demonstrate their hay-handling expertise. Kudos to Sarah who wields a rake like a pro (or like she's a little too familiar with a pitchfork?!), and top marks for scarecrow action have to go to Mark - if it's not selfies with scarecrows it's posing as a scarecrow. Vicky and Alison shifted huge quantities of hay with some excellent teamwork, and team wall-weed found that the outside of the wall had done pretty well since our 2 previous weeding visits, so the inside was the place to be this week.

As ever, we managed to get through an impressive amount of work in a relatively short amount of time thanks to everyone getting stuck into the jobs. 30 minutes later, hay pile amassed, weeds eliminated, and noticeboard renewed and ready for the elements, we stopped for some much-appreciated squash and shortbread before a highly competitive game of frisbee.

Apologies to anyone who actually plays Ultimate Frisbee for our very confused and chaotic version of the game, but however much we may have bent the rules we had a lot of fun!

At 1-1 the UN were called in to declare a draw and the game over, and after one last photo we waved goodbye to Rachel and Iffley Glebe until next spring. Appreciating the downhill start to our run back to base we swooped down to Iffley Lock and picked up the Thames Path, dodging geese and bikes along the way, arriving back at East Oxford Community Centre sweaty but happy. Amazingly, the biscuit Bethan stowed away for later survived the sweaty run. Leggings with a snack pocket are clearly the way forward.

Stretches completed, and off to the PUB!

Welcome Alice to your first Group Run. Lovely to have you along.

Feeling all smug that we had missed the torrential downpours of Tuesday we convened outside East Oxford Community Centre to soak up some summer-evening warmth, sunglasses at the ready.

We had lots to celebrate this week:

• Julia's 10th Good Deed - Garland of Glory for you!
  
• Two new Goodgymers Meg and Rachel - welcome!
  
• An invitation to a meetup with Goodgym Swindon to celebrate their 1 year anniversary on 23rd June.
  
• And also, a challenge was issued to come up with a potential weekend task suitable for up to 100 people...and ideas email Anwen.
  

News delivered, a brief warmup undertaken, including some Strictly Come Dancing-inspired Carioca (we weren't trying to delay the inevitable run up the hill, no no) and we were off!

Given Oxford's reputation for flatness it seemed a little unfair that the run to our task was almost entirely up hill, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, so up we went.

Tonight's task was at the Warneford Hospital, which is a hospital providing mental health services in East Oxford. The Warneford has a few gardening projects underway for patients to get involved with, including a vegetable plot, a wildflower meadow, and some new plots for fruit. It is evidenced that having access to green spaces can aid recovery, calm anxiety and evoke memories.

Patients are encouraged to get outside to help with the gardening as part of their treatment and care.

Most of the gardening currently takes place on the Warneford Meadow side of the hospital site, but some new beds have been dug behind one of the wards closer to Warneford Lane. Our task for the evening was to prepare for the next patient gardening session by digging out some good-quality loamy compost (not lonely compost - one of the best mis-hearings so far) and transporting it across the site to the new gardening spot 400m away. Forks, spades and wheelbarrows at the ready, we set to work. The compost pile is under the trees so we raked back the top layer of un-rotted leaves to get at the compost underneath, before getting those arm and back muscles working digging out several barrow-loads of goodness for the patients to spread out on the new plots. It looks like they will have a lovely selection of fruit options by the end of the summer, as we spotted white currants, gooseberries and raspberries amongst the plants.

6 wheelbarrow loads full delivered, and a bit of litter collected on our tos-and-fros between compost pile and fruit beds, we headed back to the shed to return the tools, just as the rain started.....Nooooooooooo! We obviously tempted fate by bringing our sunnies.

At least the run back to base in the rain was all flat and downhill, so we didn't have to suffer the double misery of rain and uphill running.

Plus, running down through South Park instead of along the roads meant the joy of trail running AND a zip wire to play on.

Excellent suggestion Alison. Video evidence on Twitter and Facebook.

NOTE TO GOODGYMERS: If Anwen asks "Are you all soaked already?" The subtext is not 'hmmmm it's raining, lets go home'. The far more likely scenario is that there's a dastardly fitness session about to happen. In the grand scheme of things, a short core session of partner sit-ups wasn't the worst that could happen on a Wednesday evening... You can thank the rain for getting you out of planks and burpees too!

Finally, I'll leave you with this piece of Thursday joy, in keeping with our pun (thank you for this one, I'm sorry I can't recall who came up with it!). Get practicing - we'll be working up to this routine in our warm-ups and partner exercises throughout the summer ;-)