Due to the Easter holidays our sessions have been a bit all over the place for a few weeks so it didn’t feel too weird doing a Tuesday session to help our friends at Ouseburn Trust. This fab charity maintains loads of green spaces around our Stepney Bank Stables space and it’s always a great workout. We’ve done so many sessions with these guys and they are always varied, everything from path clearing to litter picking and tree planting. It was lovely to join them for an evening task in daylight, and an added bonus of missing the rain by minutes!

This session had been billed as a Beginners session but alas no beginners were anywhere to be found. Instead, three regulars rocked up for this one, Damu starting early ahead of the pack to allow him to leave early without feeling guilty. What a superstar.

Tonight we were path edging on the steps to the Cumberland Arms, a popular thoroughfare through the network of paths connecting Ouseburn and the wider city. Path edging makes paths safer, clearer and has the added bonus of needing a lot of physical action to make a difference. We also learned the difference between Dutch hoes and British ones (one has a curved edge and one is flat) tonight which might come in handy one day. We unearthed and rendered temporarily homeless a number of worms tonight, but I’m sure the later rain helped them to find somewhere new pretty quickly! Hopefully you can see the difference we made in the before and after pictures.

We received an urgent referral today for some help at the Tiny Forest site in Bensham that needs some muscle and a few pairs of hands on it. Keep an eye out for that, it will be listed tomorrow for this weekend.

Welcome to Ross for his first ever Goodgym mission.

Today we helped out at Nuns moor park helping local volunteers to plant some tress and some shrubs.

It is so lovely to see Nuns moor park coming to life. The space is blooming now and I can't wait to see what it looks like in the next coming years.

A definite must is suncream for any future Goodgym missions.

It was one of those deceptively sunny days where as soon as you step out of the sun you step into a fridge for our visit to help at North Marine Junior parkrun in South Shields.

Let's get a huge round of applause for Aimee who completed her 50th parkrun volunteer today and earned herself the red V50 tshirt. The bulk of Aimee's volunteer points are at junior events so it was fitting that she earned this today.

We covered three roles at North Marine Juniors today: Paul and I timekeeping and Aimee marshalling. 52 brilliant kids ran, walked, skipped and hopped to the finish today and the finish line was the happiest place to be as always. A lovely blue sky start to Sunday all round.

It was a massive turnout today morning, as we all headed down to Leazes Park to help out Urban Green. Today's task was to clear the top of the bushes at the edges of the park boundary. Some of the bushes and ivy was encroaching on the adjacent pavement and we needed to clear it out. Mike was there with his hedge trimmer. With so many of us there, we got so much done! It was definitely an eventful morning!

It may be my age but it doesn’t feel like five months since we last did a donation drive for our friends at East End Women at Building Futures East. Time flies I suppose! We met tonight at the Cycle Hub at the Quayside for a social walk combined with a donation collection for the foodbank. As we aren’t back at our Stepney Bank Stables base until next week it felt like great timing.

We have been helping the Foodbank for over four years now, with early tasks being during Covid, sessions which ran through all of the lockdowns and provided structure for us and support for the project. In fact, for some of us during that time it was the only place we ever went and had any human contact outside of our homes. We’ve also helped to pack Christmas food parcels, deliver leaflets, paint their project spaces and even helped to decorate a bus.

There was no such hands-on-ness for us tonight as instead we just met for a social walk and catch up. There had originally been four signed up for the session but it ended up being just me and Anna with some Mondayish circumstances getting in the way! We had a lovely walk up to the swing bridge, under the Tyne bridge and back over the millennium bridge (thats a lot of bridges) and chatted about all things work, marriage and life related- it sounds heavy when it’s written like that but it wasn’t! We made it back to the hub just in time for the rain to start again.

Post-Easter can be a challenging time for families and donations can be lower so I’ll keep the donation bag in my car for the next week or so, so you can bring donations along to the next few sessions and I’ll take them along when we have a few more.

There are three chances to do good stuff with us this weekend, including this big Urban Green Community mission on Saturday which looks like it’s going to be massive. Our Monday session moves to Tuesday next week as we join forces with the brilliant Ouseburn Trust. We’d love to see you at that as we take advantage of the light spring nights.

Have a great week!

At GoodGym Newcastle we have a strong tradition of helping out at junior parkrun so when Saltwell Juniors put out a late call for volunteers last night I was happy to help.

Although we’re not in the middle of Storm Kathleen, we’re definitely catching the edge of it, but some wind and rain was no deterrent to the hardy kids of Gateshead. 66 of them ran (very fast in some cases!), skipped, walked and slalomed round the cones in this beautiful Victorian park. Their enthusiasm never fails to amaze me and it’s the perfect inspiration for me to get out for my own run!