Despite the heat Goodgymers came to help out at the Stirchley Community Market! Chairs were set up, tables were arranged and general odd jobs were done!

This morning Steph, Padmeya and Jonny helped out at St Anthony's Residential Home.

This was an exciting new session helping the home to get ready for their garden festival in August. Even the Birmingham Mayor came along to see the great work GoodGym do :)

Allister who organised the task, warmly greeted us and it was on with the task which was sanding and then painting the benches, you can see the before and after pictures and also weeding the flower bed.

The sanding smoothed the benches so that they were ready to paint. It was then on with the painting. After a stop for lunch provided by the home it was onto painting the last bench.

As you can see GG painted 3 benches.

The home were so appreciative of our efforts that before I even got home I got a lovely WhatsApp message from Allister thanking us so much for our help and how much of a difference we had made :)

Ok that's an awful pun. Prizes for a better one 😅

We had a lovely group of 5 tonight taking on the Rea Valley path on a 4km plog. It was great being joined by Sophie & Narendra as it had been a while since we caught up! After the litter pick, where we filled a big bag of rubbish, the fab five headed to the British Oak where Laura asked them to put the (Cricket) World Cup on! It turned out Narendra had been to see India v Pakistan and I'm hopefully going tomorrow to see Pakistan take on South Africa. Great chats and a good time spent with one another 🏏👏❤️

Tonight we welcomed Nan to GoodGym for the first time.

We were at Nelson Mandela School for some gardening. Emily ran the 4k to the school with Jonny on the bike, Miriam ran around 10k from Northfield to the task, Martin and Nan came on foot to the session.

The task was a big tidy up of the school garden. After just a few minutes of gardening we saw one of those 'rats the size of cats' (infamous last year in Brum!!) It certainly was a porker, as it scuttled off under the undergrowth!

You'll see from the pictures the big pile of gardening waste we moved whilst also getting rid of some weeds.

Once done Jonny rode back with Emily, who did a nice 8k in total, Miriam deservedly got the train and Martin and Nan put in a great effort with the task before heading back.

This morning Louise volunteered at Edgbaston Reservoir Parkrun and Jonny helped out at the Sutton Park event.

Both Jonny and Louise were situated at the finish, with Louise scanning barcodes and Jonny who had his sister visiting from Yorkshire and was running the event gave out the finish tokens.

Louise took some lovely pictures of the Edgbaston Reservoir and Jonny got a picture with the token string, thankfully none were dropped!

Tonight Eve, Rich and I ran 4km up the Rea in the sun after what was quite a damp and rainy afternoon!

We then met Amy who had already done a one hour mammoth task leafletting for the community market. We helped her finish off her leaflet stack having the EXACT right number to do an entire road. So satisfying.

Then it was off to the British Oak for refreshments and a catch up ❤️