It was the annual Choir With No Name summer concert at the Everyman theatre on Hope Street. Two Goodgymmers Steph and Steph were performing with the choir and our Area Activator Ema, who is also manager of the choir was in attendance which was a real treat for the choir and us Goodgymmers because we have really missed her while she has been ill. Aatefa, Dina, Suren, Liam, Heetu, Sallyann and myself met with Kate from Choir With No Name who explained our role in selling merch, signing people up as fans and collecting donations.

To be honest we were well and truly on it, we love being a part of this event so we knew the drill. The puns on the merch were so fantastic we knicked one for the title of this report. All song lyric puns, you had tea towels ‘Never gonna wash you up’ (Rick Astley) ‘Hate to say I toweled you so’ (The Hives) and tote bags with ‘Bag to life, bag to reality’ (Soul II soul). Sallyann was please that a bag with ‘Bag a do do do’ (Black Lace) sold as it was the last one and she hated for it to be lonely.

The concert was typically phenomenal, our Steph put in a fantastic solo in a Chapel Roan medley and Heetu commented that her favourite song was their rendition of Kate Bush’s ‘Running up that hill’ it was amazing.

A really special part of the concert was special guest, Scouse poet, Joseph Roberts who puts his poems to music. The CWNN provided a haunting backing vocal to his poem about mental health called ‘luggage’. It was stunning. There was a moving testimony from one of the choir members called Skye who spoke about grief and surviving suicidal thoughts and how she had found a home in the choir. It was so moving and definitely moved the audience.

The audience showed incredible generosity in the bucket donations and merch sales. We think that merch sales might be the most successful we’ve ever known with the new tea towels proving particularly popular.

Well done to the Stephs and so wonderful to see Ema, we all left on a high. Special shout out to Aatefa and Sallyann who did the TRIO on this day… parkrun in the morning, Everton Park Games in the afternoon and CWNN concert in the evening, it was an epic day for them.

Goodgym Saturdays are the best!

Everton park is on a site that used to be high rise social housing and jn the 1970s and 80s that was demolished and a beautiful park was created, a stunning green space with activity areas for locals to enjoy. It is widely known in Liverpool for having one of the best views of the city. Friends of Everton Park maintain the large park and attend to the community gardens. John is our main point of contact and he was the brains behind their new initiative, an Everton Park games. He told us that his inspiration for the games was going to Scotland and seeing the Highland Games that are enjoyed by local communities there. They have assault courses where competitors toss hay bails and build fences. A relay race filled with challenging activities. So this is what John set about creating. A space on the hill was allocated and John got a track painted onto the grass.

The course included passing through hoops, running backwards with heavy bags, rolling a large tube up the hill, constructing a jigsaw puzzle, looping rope onto cones, manoeuvring a wheelbarrow through a line of poles and finally throwing the heavy bag into a hoop.

Unfortunately no one had signed up to this first event but that was ok, in fact it was a perfect opportunity to test run the event and iron out any problems before holding the event again at a later date. After the intense heat some rainfall was welcome, Sallyann, Heetu, myself, Vikky, Aatefa and Nasser all pitched in to help set up and dismantle the course. We then ran the course with varying levels of success! It was incredibly fun with just a few teething issues that we discussed with John and the other volunteers at the end so that the next event could be a success.

The course created some fun inter-generational discussion with the older volunteers comparing the course to the hit 80s phenomenon ‘It’s a Knockout’ and slightly younger volunteers referencing 90s show ‘The Krypton Factor’ still both vintage references, clearly this format needs a reboot for the 21st century! Thanks John and everyone for a really fun day.

It was a very warm evening in Liverpool. Sefton park was very busy with people enjoying the evening sun, picnics, ball games and singing.

In a corner of the park runners were gathering to run the annual Tony Barnes Memorial 5-Mile run. Tony Barnes was a member of the Mossley Hill athletics club and when he passed away his community started this run in his honour.

Waiting at the start line were Sophie, Bekah and Steph. Lots of other runners were in their packs of running club mates, it was both reassuring and intimidating to our goodgym runners… this would be a great run but also a challenging one with lots of strong runners picking up the pace.

Me and Aatefa pitched up at the intersection where runners would pass multiple times as they made their way in a figure of eight around the lake and around the top of the park. Sallyann cheered on the runners from the pavillion area of the park.

It was a gruelling run in the heat. Lots of runners were visibly struggling but all three of our goodgym runners managed to smash the 5-miler (8km) race in under an hour. Steph came in at 58.38, a whole 12 mins under her predicted 1hr 10mins. Bekah came in at 52.54, a whopping 3.20 mins faster than her time last year. And Sophie came in at just 45.34, an amazing achievement.

Once our runners were finished it was time to head to the picnic tables for our annual picnic, Dike and Ellie joined us and there was so much delicious food we had enough for all of us to take lunch for the next two days! Special mention for Steph’s homemade brownies, Bekah’s famous salt and pepper sausage rolls, and Dike’s incredible effort into cooking fried chicken wraps and fried plantain. He may have decided not to run the race but more than made up for it in his cooking efforts. We all decided that Dike had set a level of expectation in us all that would mean he would have to prepare this for every future gathering.

It was so nice to stay out until late in the park and enjoy this summer tradition. Well done runners and thank you to everyone for making a great picnic.

A special run, this one - a magical mystery tour of the locations that made up the first ever group run and the first ever coach run - from over 16 years ago (💾 📼 📟)!

Why? Well, to bid farewell to a special guy. He's tall, he's pale, he's handsome, he has an OBE. It's goodgym's founder Ivo Gormley. Many words were said about this man at the leaving party after the run, at the beautiful Calthorpe Community Garden, so we are not going to attempt to do him justice here. But the fact that a group of otherwise strangers, all wearing their red and black uniforms with pride, were gathered on the steps of York Hall (can you use their toilet? NO) a full sixteen years after the first group of otherwise strangers gathered on the steps of York Hall, to run around and help some people, has to mean something about how powerful and enduring Ivo's idea has been.

Warm up? LEG SWINGS UP THE WAZOO 🦵🏿💨 💨💨 - led masterfully and mindfully by Ade - along with some other limbs and muscles essential for running.

Bags loaded up in the Mechanical Cycling Machine™️ (it's Fast Boi Shaun Dixon on a cargo bike 🚚), we are led off by Euclides Montes who, by his own admission, doesn't actually know the area at all. But who cares?! It's the running that counts! More being lost equals more running! For the relatively small Venn diagram of people who were both a) on a goodgym run and b) knowledgeable about football, Darren performed the role of Roving Reporter (bluetooth speaker) with the GOALS! GOALS! GOALS! from England's match against DR Congo. There were indeed three goals but it wasn't a pretty picture for the 68 minutes between goal 1 and goal 2. We ran past some awfully concerned looking pub goers! But it had a happy ending WAHEEEYYYYY ⚽️.

First stop (probably, can't remember the order because the goals were so compelling) was St Hilda's East Community Centre - the site of the VERY FIRST GOODGYM GROUP TASK. In 2009, Ivo and 13 others emptied a cupboard. And how! St Hilda's is awesome - long-term friend of gg Tower Hamlets, the Centre (led by Lucy) provides bilingual advisory services around employment 🧑🏾‍⚖️, offers activity clubs to combat loneliness 🎯, exercise classes for the elderly 🪑 - it's the kind of place that communities across the country utterly depend upon.

Question, is it possible to belong to goodgym for 12 years and still not know the name of common little yellow flowers 🌼 that come in pots? Answer: Yes! But we planted them on the roof. Those who were particularly confident at differentiating between plants (alive) and plants (dead) also performed a valuable weeding service (let's hear it for weeds 🌱!), leaving things very spruce and cheery up on the terrace for users of the Centre to enjoy.

Next stop, just round the corner off Arnold Circus, where one Ian Drysdale (runs a long way, never looks sad 👨🏻‍🦱) gave us the next bit of the history tour. DID YOU KNOW that Ivo and Ian worked together in a social-enterprise-cum-think-tank in Shoreditch, before goodgym even existed? If you didn't, you could guess. Ian showed us the EXACT SPOT where Ivo first turned to him and said, "Ian I have an idea about a club where people run around and do helpful things instead of just be in the gym" and Ian was like, "WHAT? No Way!" and Ivo was like, "Yes absolutely WAY and I'm doing it, and you're DOING IT WITH ME because you know about computers 🤓 and I only know about films and being kindly." I am fairly confident this is what was said. And so goodgym became a thing with a name and a team.

One! More! Stop! It was only TERRY'S HOUSE wasn't it! "Who's Terry?" - have you been living under a rock? Terry was the clay-pipe-collecting (no, still no idea), amateur-boxing, newspaper-reading, Ivo-appreciating elderly man who became the defacto first-ever goodgym coach. Ivo used to run to his house and there they did have a chat, and that really was it and that was kind of the point. Another goodgym man John Hunter (👋🏻) has also been a long-time coach visit-doer and so said some words about this. Those words were like: "Having been running to my coach Florence 👵🏿 for 6 years, and then Richard 👴🏻 for nearly 2 years now, I have learned a couple of things about what it means to make these visits. It is a friendship, not a service, and it has the potential to be profound for both of you." They were very serious words and I'm not crying, you're crying.

With that, the history had been retold, and it was time to jog on 🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️- to Calthorpe, and a garden full of over..ooh, a hundred? people with love and admiration in their hearts for the phenomenon that is goodgym. Ivo is a very humble man, but let's be honest, it wouldn't exist without him, would it?