It was great to welcome Phil and Helen to the GG pack.

Big thanks to Annie for welcoming everyone before dashing to Theatre practice and then the family meal! Busy lady!

We headed down to the start of Gerry's section of the Transpenine Trail to meet her and William and get tooled up ready for litter picking.

We got to it heading out of the city the opposite way to last time. On the whole things were looking fairly clear with some hot spots along the way.

Once done, Gerry talked us through the Fix My Street app and how to report various concerns to the council via the app. Very modern.

Until next time. Happy running! :)

I took advantage of a lovely sunny day when I was going to be passing by the area anyway to fit in a mission for Mrs M. She has dementia and has struggled to take care of her garden since her husband died last year.

She kept apologising for the state, but I assured her I've seen much worse. The main job was mowing the lawn. I also cut a few overhanging branches, weeded between paving, put away tools that had been left out rusting and cleared some rubbish.

A good honest hour's work and Mrs M and her daughter in law were both very grateful ☺️

Four fantastic GoodGymers ran a short distance to help at Common Thread this evening. We met lovely Fran and Jess inside their building where they were ready and waiting for us. There were already many other volunteers scurrying around inside. We received a quick briefing of our tasks for the night, which included sorting bags of donations into categories, bagging them up, labeling them and taking them to be stored in the cellar. Amelia was given the very special task of designing and making a placard saying Jeans World (a reference to the Wayne's World films). What a fantastic job she did too!

After a solid hour of sifting and sorting we said our goodbyes and headed out into the night.

There was one last thing for us to do before stretching at The Showroom, a set of exercises at the amphitheatre near SHU. Using the concrete seats we did push-ups and tricep dips.

A fun evening was had by all!

Tonight we welcomed in a new GoodGymer on our run to help out the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust clear up some of the Grey to Green area. Give her a cheer here Amelia.

We met Simon and Gerry who had a plethora of litterpicking apparatus ready for us to hit the streets around the Castlegate area. We all hooped, bagged, and pickered up and set out to clean up the sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) which seem to collect litter as effectively as well as rainwater. There wasn't a great amount in the beds this time because the council had obviously recently been doing some green-fingered shenanigans there. We did manage to find a lot of smaller items that had been passed over by others... bottle tops, cigarette butts etc.

After a solid hour of clearing up, we deposited the 'full' bags near a bin to be reported and collected. We then gathered to pose with our trashy accomplishments for a couple of pictures, before saying our goodbye's to the Walk Wheel Cycle people.

It was now time for a bit of exercise fun, in the form of competitive wall sits and box jumps. Everyone leapt at the chance to participate! After this we headed back to the Showroom to stretch off and debrief.