A group of Good-Gymers jogged two miles up an incline to Cardinal Newman School. Meeting the rest of the group there! After we found the entrance we were met by the care taker Pedro who showed us the school gym which needed cleaning. We welcomed two new members Olivia and Hannah and welcomed back Daniela who quickly got stuck in.

Looking at the school website we were in the St Augustine Building which also has a climbing wall - a nice one to discover next time!

We donned gloves and got to wiping and dusting the pretty dusty gym equipment. Some of us who were good at multi tasking managed to use the running machines and clean! We had fun on the balance board. We were impressed with their moto use your muscles not your mouth although we definitely used both!

After we finished up we jogged up a hill to The Dyke Alehouse to enjoy a drink and some chips. Nice meeting here Lucia too!

This past weekend, Brighton GoodGym-ers have been running or volunteering while engaging their heart with their friends Susan and Joel in Mind.

Four Brighton GoodGm-ers attended Preston Park parkrun on Sunday in order to volunteer at Junior parkrun. The parkrun was lacking volunteers due to many of the core team running the Brighton Half marathon. So four goodgymers attended and assisted today - 2 as Marshalls, 1 as tailwalker and one as barcode scanner.

It was a cold and dreary day but the sight of all the little ones dashing about with rosy cheeks and big smiles brightened the day a great deal.

We then headed to the course of the half marathon to cheer our fellow mates running and faithing the strong wind, and to bring them some homemade muffins. Thanks Rebecca, your delights were much appreciated.

GoodGym sessions, parkruns and races like the Brighton Half are not just great ways to challenge ourselves and support our fitness goals, but also provide an opportunity to come together and remember friends like Susan and Joel, GoodGym-ers who sadly lost their lives.

Massive thank you to everyone who supported the fundraiser for Mind.

We’re fundraising for Mind because their work supports people like Susan and Joel, providing mental health information, advocacy, and peer support. Since the pandemic, the demand for mental health services has been increasingly overwhelming, and charities like Mind are doing essential work to help keep up.

If you’d like to donate, you can still do so here: https://www.justgiving.com/page/brightongoodgym-halfmarathon2024?utm_term=MqPB5rDjy

This week it is the third in the run for the GoodGym January Challenge! From the 1st to the 31st of January, across the country, we are going to walk, run and cycle to complete as many good deeds as we can.

Yesterday however it was an hard core call for Brighton GoodGym-ers to convince ourselves to get out for a run, but we did it! New GoodGym-er Amaryllis returned to run with us, so we did something right :-) We helped OffTheFence and joined effort with the B&H TidyUP Team to collect Christmas Tree that have been fly tipped and left on the pavements of our city streets.

We think community only works if everyone is included. So Off The Fence do! Somehow we believe that we contributed to OffTheFence fundraising mission to recycle Christmas trees into cash for the homeless. Certainly, we helped to clear our city streets by those xmas trees and fly tipped green waste that can be now responsibly delivered to the B&H recycling waste centres.

We found a few of those trees on our route and moved them to the designed collections points for xmas trees that are still open to the public until 22nd of January! And, we kept up with moving and GoodGym fitness action to avoid freezing!

This week, there are a few more training sessions to keep ourselves active during this cold but dry winter week of January. Plenty of opportunities to have some social runs together!

What next? Tuesday next week we are returning to the Brighton Workshop & Tool Library. Sigh up HERE to come along!

A grand welcome was given to new members Sarah and Stefan at yesterday GoodGym’s session at the Fitzherbert hub helping the Real Junk Food Project.

A running stroll on the seafront and high knees step ups the stairs enriched our fitness session on route to the venue. And once there, … surprise! We found some construction work-in-progress but, regardless, the unstoppable Brighton GoodGymers managed to clean safely all the exposed surfaces, swept and mopped all the floors in a blink of an eye, by equipping themselves with helmets – not these ones not 😊, but yes indeed with all the available brooms, brushes, dust pans, backets and mops!

We also extended the job to the neighbouring Brighton Table Tennis Club to make our cleaning session more fulfilling. It was a grand group, so with no surprise we finished off everything very quickly to get ready for the follow up entertainment: The Quiz night at the Kempt pub.

Yesterday afternoon the sky cleared just on time to provide us with good conditions for our autumnal gardening session at Manor Paddock, one of the senior residential housings that we served in Brighton & Hove. As usual, resident Luc welcomed us well prepared and massively thankful for the GoodGym superpower offered – without which the job would take him ages to do!

Several were the tasks needed, all done within less than an hour at the light of our powerful (more or less) headtorches! Planting bulbs, reshaping lavender bushes, weeding scrubs, collecting foliage, pruning buddleias and taking care of tomatoes plants’ beds.

Whom's running, whom's easy pacing because a doggy knee or cycling because of a stiff back pain (me, sigh!) … all we came and went off in full action!

Something to add to my gardening culture: Buddleia, also known as butterfly bush, is a perennial, semi-evergreen plant. Once it has flowered, it only loses its foliage for a short period of the year. The flowers of a buddleia generally appear from July to October. It's a robust shrub but can quickly become untidy if not pruned, with the flowers appearing so high that only the butterflies can enjoy them. Annual pruning keeps it in shape and helps produce more flowers, lower down.

Let’s see the results of our “pitch-perfect” buddleia pruning and lavender shaping next spring, shall we? 😊