Stefan Durkin

Welcome to GoodGym York 🙌

🏃‍♀️🏃We're a friendly and social group who combine exercise with helping out in the local community. Every Monday we meet to get active and do a physical task to help the charities or community organisations in our city.

WHERE WE MEET 🎒 We meet at the Priory Street Centre and our usual room is the Denham Room. As you approach the front of the Centre, turn right and go to the car park area. The room we use is locked whilst we're out so you can leave your bits and bobs in there.

😷We will have a person at the door managing one in, one out system while dropping the bags etc. There is no requirement to wear a face mask when entering the building, as you will be there by yourself and only for a short period of time, but you can wear one if you feel more comfortable that way.

🚲There is cycle parking as you approach the Centre and a 10 bay pay and display car park is available behind the nursery block, to the left as you approach front of the Centre. In addition, on street parking is available on Priory Street.

TONIGHT 🌱We’re heading to Rowntree Park tonight to help the Council Environment team. They've asked for our help to tidy up the area, to make it a more pleasant environment for everyone who uses it.

THE TASK 🧤 As we'll be doing various tidy up tasks in the gardens, please bring gardening gloves and a headtorch if possible.

RUNNING AND WALKING WITH US 👏GoodGym is for everyone. We welcome runners of all abilities and if the task is close enough we have a walking group too. It's possible to walk to Rowntree Park (1.5km each way). Walkers may need to leave at 6:25pm promptly so please arrive in plenty of time.

👍We always have a back-marker too so nobody will get left behind - no matter what your pace is.

POST-RUN SOCIAL 🍻We normally head to The Ackhorne Pub on St Martin's Lane after our run for a spot of liquid refreshment and a good chat (COVID rules-pending, obviously). Please join us!

❄️26 excellent GoodGymmers met on a rather chilly Monday evening for our group run.

🙌We were thrilled to welcome Katie for her first group run, after meeting her a few times at recent community missions.

💪We spent some time congratulating people on some incredible getting fit and doing good over the weekend and last week. There were slabs laid, nature areas developed and half marathons run (including some very impressive PBs) 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️

🎂We discussed the plenty more opportunities to get involved this week, including GoodGym York's 5th birthday celebrations this weekend. With the choice of 5 tasks over the weekend (and any number of 5k runs you fancy doing), the world is your oyster 🌍

😁Tonight, our naming and numbering was accompanied by the perfect antidote to Blue Monday - a discussion of what makes us happy. From kittens to cake to the pub to Paul Kelly, the variety was impressive 🐈

🌳After waving goodbye to our walking friends and doing a quick warm up, we headed to our task.

🌱There to meet us at Clarence Gardens was Iain who gave us our instructions. There were two parts to tonight's task: digging and composting.

🌺Team Dig used a variety of tools (including hoes) to dig over two large flowerbeds. Weeds were pulled out and bulbs rescued in this important task. The council hope to get some funding to transform these at some point but in the meantime, they're grateful for a hand with maintaining them ready for the spring flowers 🌷

⛏️Team Compost were mining for gold (aka decent compost, carefully crafted by GoodGym York over the last few years. There was much digging through the layers of variously composted leaves/mulch to find said gold. The first wheelbarrow was (very politely) declined by Iain who has appropriately high standards when it comes to compost. Once through that layer to the real thing though, there was plenty to be found, dug out, wheelbarrowed and spread on the newly turned over beds. So much compost in fact that there was then a slight panic about what to do with the remaining compost and leaves with the time available. Cue frantic borrowing of tools and people from Team Dig and the compost area was left nice and tidy with a potential future task to finish off the job 🍂

🐍After that, we did some fitness fun involving running snakes (need to come up with a better name) and British Bulldog. With that, we jogged back to base where we stretched off and looked forward to warming up at home/the pub 🍻

👍Thank you everyone, it was really great to see you and hopefully see you sometime soon!