🌆We met for our group run at dusk on a lovely Monday, still in a bit of light, which was greatly appreciated.

👋We were thrilled to welcome Martha and Dan for their first GoodGym session.

☘️We had an Irish-themed (for St Patrick's Day) naming and numbering tonight where we found that lots of us enjoy Irish food and beverages, and Irish people too. We then did a quick warm up and walked/ran to Rowntree Park 👍

⚡On arriving at the park, we spotted a GoodGym t shirt running past at lightning speed. On (eventually) catching up with them, I discovered it was Rob, the Area Activator for GoodGym Solihull who's visiting York at the moment. Although he wasn't able to join us tonight, we hope to see him again soon 🥳

🌊We were met at Rowntree by Kristina from the Council (and Michal and Rachel) who explained what we needed to do. Friends of Rowntree Park are hoping to be able to reopen the park on Wednesday but needed some help to be able to do that. We were therefore tasked with clearing the paths that the street sweepers weren't able to get to. Armed with brooms, leaf blowers, shovels and rakes, we quickly set to work, dividing and conquering to tackle all corners of the park 💪

🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️After half an hour, we'd cleared lots of paths and made lots of areas more accessible. Oh, and Antonia found some nice frogs too 🐸

📸 We had a group photo before doing our fitness session on the area of grass by Millennium Bridge. This involved various relays (and some very impressive speed-skipping and hopping).

👌 With everyone just a little bit more tired, we headed back to base to stretch and go to the pub. Some of us were also lucky enough to be collecting some incredibly yummy biscuits baked by Ellie and Ben for their charity fundraising effort 🍪

🙌We've got a task on Friday morning needing a few more pairs of hands and various missions available so do please sign up if you're able to. There are also currently a couple more spaces for tree-planting in Haxby, which not only sounds really fun and worthwhile but also offers the possibility to win a bottle of wine 🍷

👏Thank you for your hard work tonight everyone, and hopefully see you again soon 😁

🥫Nine noteworthy GoodGymmers assembled at West Bank Park on a sunny morning for some litter-picking. (Some of us may have been a tad late, and a tad out of breath, having run just over 7k from Heslington parkrun) 🏃‍♀️🏃

🙌We were delighted to welcome James for his first task with us, and Rachel back for her second 😁

🌳 Laura had kindly brought the GG York litter-pickers (and Leanne had brought her own personal one, which was handy!) so we quickly split into three groups. Four folk headed off for an adventure out of the park. Meanwhile, the rest of us divided into two teams and conquered the park. A mostly-biodegraded book was found by Team Woods - Debs guessed it was once Tracy Beaker but it was pretty tricky to tell 📖

🛍️ After an hour's litter-picking that resulted in six pretty full (and very heavy) bags of rubbish, our work here was done 💪

📸 We posed for a photo before most of us headed down the road to the Bluebird Bakery for a much-needed coffee/brunch ☕🥐

Thanks team, excellent work 👏

☔ 12 fantastic folk arrived at Rowntree Park for a rainy session this morning. Some of us had run from an equally rainy York parkrun at the Knavesmire and some people met us at the park. After negotiating a rather icy patch just inside the entrance of the park and collecting the tools we needed from under the Reading Cafe, we set off for the wildlife area to meet Christine from the Friends of Rowntree Park.

👋We were thrilled to give a huge welcome to Iain, Harriet and Rachel for their very first GoodGym session. It was really great to meet you, thank you so much for coming along.

🐸We had two main tasks today - creating a bog and a new pond, which together should create a lovely new habitat for frogs and other amphibians.

💪We split into teams and got to work quickly:

🧊 Team Bog were shovelling and wheelbarrowing topsoil from two (very) large bags over to the "old" pond, which is becoming a bog garden (whilst negotiating various worms that we came across). Some great teamwork meant that the soil was shovelled and wheelbarrowed to the bog at impressive speed. There to meet the wheelbarrows were Leanne and David who had impressively pulled up some stubborn pond liner and broken the ice (literally, whilst we also did so metaphorically with our new friends). Leanne and David (aka the captains of the bog) then spread the topsoil over the area, demonstrating some great "shovel and flick action".

🦎 Meanwhile, Team Pond were filling sandbags and wheelbarrowing them to go around the outside of the "new" pond. After experimenting with the optimal fill-level of the bags, the sweet spot was hit and the sand container was emptied and the new pond lined with sandbags.

👏 After just over an hour, both the soil and sand bags had been fully transported and distributed, including some great team-dragging and lifting of the nearly empty (but still very heavy). Christine was thrilled and it was really satisfying to see the outcome of our work, and to think of all the lovely frogs who will hopefully benefit from it.

☕ After a team shot (which will appear just as soon as I've got it from Christine), a quick fitness session (everyone loves the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors game) in the ongoing rain meant that some of us definitely felt the need for a coffee/bite to eat, which we duly had at a nearby cafe.

🙌 Thank you so much everyone, the Friends of Rowntree Park are thrilled with our work today. We'll definitely be back there for our group run session on the evening of Monday 24th January and will be doing lots of other fun tasks in the meantime, which you can see here.