I couldn't make the Goodgym litterpick session today so decided to go out locally for a walk and do my own litterpick. Three miles ish walk and collected 2 bags of rubbish.

Wow what an evening!

We had a gap in the diary this evening with no community organisation based tasks so decided to do our first litter pick.

Living directly behind an alley which is regularly frequented with litter that solo attempts make little difference to i was keen to get it sorted for a task.

We were joined this evening by two lovely newbies Simon and Paul who forgo both climbing and the pub to join us!

Its fair to say we were kept busy for the full hour. We had separate bags for recycling cans (which ellie is going to take to the air ambulance collection) general waste and glass.

We filled several very big bags and had a great time chatting along the way. A real noticeable difference has been made to the local community, well done team!

Litter picked at Itchen Ferry

Whilst doing finish tokens at Southampton Parkrun I met a GoodGymer from York, she didn't think there was a Southampton GoodGym - she is going to look us up and hopefully join us another time!

We returned for our second visit to George Williams YMCA this evening. After successfully ensuring we could enter the garden at last weeks visit we decided to start tackling different sections of the garden this evening.

It was lovely to be joined by Lucy and Duncan this evening who had travelled from Portsmouth to brave the hideous rain and lend a hand! Thankyou both.

Duncan and Hannah split into a team litter picking the vast amount of litter in the garden. Top finds from them were a knife and fork!

Lucy, Helen and Grace decided to tackle the bramble bush of doom which was just inside the door. Grace earned top marks from Lucy for her bramble technique and the team soon uncovered a shopping trolley(which was repurposed into a rubbish holder) two washing up bowls and a whole other mountain of litter.

I decided to use one of the bowls to collect glass in, there was so much it seemed to never end! In the end i called defeat on squatting down for glass after yesterday's marathon squatting escapades and once litter mountain was uncovered started to make an attempt in disposing of that.

Overall it was a very wet but enjoyable evening. Much rubbish and brambles were cleared and we look forward to returning soon!

Bright and early on Sunday morning at 7am(!!!) four eager goodgymers set out to help the runners of the ABP marathon, half marathon, 5k and 10k look after their bags by helping run the baggage hall.

With 7000+ runners there were a lot of bags to safely distribute to their place within the guildhall and then redistribute back out again.

Luckily the abp team had a wonderful system in place making this quite an easy task. We had to take each runners bag to the corresponding area in the hall for their race number. We then had to sanity check in the downtime to ensure no errors were made and try make the space a bit more organised. We then had to find the bags again (and in some cases suitcases!!) and return them efficiently to their rightful owners. It was a very physical effort, Hannah clocked up over 20,000 steps and with lots of bending and lifting its fair to say we had a good goodgym workout and a good time keeping the runners happy.

We were kindly rewarded with cakes and sandwiches from the abp team which went down very nicely and hope to be back again next year!