👻 18 excellent GoodGymmers gathered for another two-task Monday evening, the evening before Halloween. The rain had (basically) stopped so we were raring to go. Neither task was particularly close so Ed’s Heworth group and Vicky’s party pace Foxwood group both set off promptly. The rest of us named, numbered and warmed up while hearing about our favoured trick and/or treat. Treats varied from whisky to bonfire toffee while tricks involved clothes pegs and (fake) dog poo!

🖐️Here’s what Ed had to say about the Heworth five:

🍁 The slightly longer run team set off promptly from Priory Street to meet task owner Roger at Heworth Community Centre. We armed ourselves with rakes and made our way round the corner to a field that will be familiar to many GoodGymmers after several previous raking trips over the years. We soon got to work raking up the leaves and cuttings, gathering them on to sheets of tarpaulin and then disposing of them in a nearby copse of trees. After several full loads of tarp, we made our way back to the Priory Centre with a quicker pace because I don't think Tristan could have lasted too much longer without eating his tea!

🌺 Meanwhile, in Foxwood, we were provided with bulbs and dibbers if you were lucky or a fork/spade if you were less lucky. Mitch was probably the least lucky, being given a smaller-than-average fork with a rotten handle that broke halfway through the task.

🌼 The group swiftly divided and set to work, digging holes and planting bulbs. There was some discussion about how best to split to cover the area required and distribute the bulbs fairly. This seemed to be resolved as all the bulbs were planted pretty speedily, good work team.

🕸️ There was a lot of love for the dibbers, which made the process very simple and efficient. Maybe we should all get a dibber?! We then enjoyed a team photo in and around the suitably-spooky-spider web climbing frame (until Mitch got stuck fairly near the top of it!)

🎃 Our team was so efficient that there was plenty of time for everyone to participate in some Halloween-based fitness. The party pace crew did one circuit of monster/zombie etc based exercises before heading off while the rest of us did a second set. It was soon time to head back to base, meet up with the other group and head home/to the pub.

👏 Thank you everyone, see you again soon!

🙌 23 epic GoodGymmers met for our double-task group run this evening 🌃

🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️ We had some brilliant achievements to celebrate, with Tay reaching 100 good deeds this evening and Lucy and Max both doing their 200th good deed this evening. Amazing 👏

💪 And if that wasn't enough, we also said a huge well done to everyone who ran the Yorkshire marathon/10 mile yesterday, and a massive thank you to everyone who cheered us on and helped on the water station. Incredible stuff 💦

👍 Nick quickly took a crack team of 5 to Heworth Without to do some hay-raking. Here's what he had to say:

👩‍🌾👨‍🌾 It was a nice little task raking up the grass cuttings and dragging them on tarps to dress the base of the trees in the field to give them nutrients and a mulch for the winter.

Good work everyone 👌

🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️Meanwhile, the rest of us ran (some of us cycled) to Mayfields Open Space to help with some footpath maintenance there 🚲

🌱 Malcolm had helpfully marked out where the path was meant to go so our job was to tidy up any grass that has strayed beyond the string ✂️

🌳 At the same time, we had a group cutting up branches that Malcolm had chopped down earlier. Malcolm was worried he might have been over-ambitious in his expectations - he needn't have worried as the team completed this job with time to spare ⌚

🥾 The footpath trimmers also did a superb job and some of them had trouble stopping when the time was up 🤔

🧁 Luckily, the allure of refreshments that Malcolm had kindly brought were enough to tempt most people into finishing their labour. Bakewell tarts and chocolate marshmallows were enjoyed with almost as much enthusiasm as we'd had for our task 😁

🥳 And for the few people for whom even that wasn't enough to drag them away from their labours, the arrival of Michal and his promise of him sprints did the trick 🗻

👀 Some of us sore-legged crew watched in awe from the bottom as everyone sped up and down the hill. We were particularly agog with David showing us how to do hill sprints the day after running a marathon (which he also made look remarkably easy) 😳

😎 We headed back to base where we were joined by Team Rake and heard how I had vastly over-estimated the distance to Heworth Without (only 3.6k each way, not 5k, sorry everyone). We heard about what's coming up this week, stretched out our tired muscles and parted ways 🎉

🤓 Well done everyone, great work and thank you for your equally epic efforts at getting fit AND doing good (and eating cake, obviously) 🎂

We kicked off the evening welcoming brand new runner Libby to the team, and giving Mitch some big cheers as he did his 300th good deed at the weekend. Amazing.

Mitch was the first privileged GG Yorkie to don the newly adjusted cape.

My wife has sorted the cape so it won't strangle anyone. - Carl

Egg's Team We took the short route to check out the awesome new project that is Holgate Community Orchard. It is an ambitious project and it was great to see it at the very start (well, almost. They'd kindly cleared a lot of bramble for us before we got there!)

There were tools a-plenty and everyone was quite excited about having a personal spade AND fork for the entire task.

It was tough going, digging out huge roots with some bonus rubble under the surface for good measure.

After a solid hour of digging, there was just enough time to give our very muddy trainers a good scrape off before the run back.

I'm cleaning mine with tap dancing! - Lucy

Mitch's Team

8 intrepid runners took the long running route to Heworth Without Community Centre. We kneeded to rake recently cut grass, and then move them to the nearby woods to help the trees grow.

The run went smoothly except a certain run leader forgetting his phone! Luckily Terrific Tristan was on hand to help with time keeping and photos.

After a quick intro we got stuck in, putting larger and larger piles of recently cut grass on the tarpaulin to move to the nearby trees. We were a well oiled machine, and after half an hour hard graft, we cleared the grassland without a hitch. 

We managed to get back to base just in time for the stretch (and find the phone I left on the bench).

Having signed up for some path building delights, some of us were slightly surprised to see we had sneakily been reassigned to more soil sifting 😉. However the weather had other ideas and turned the already clay and clod heavy soil into a mud bath, so our task was hastily reassigned to ditch digging to release some of the new and unwanted ponds.

While Louise and Jackie busied themselves raking any remaining good soil into the grass as originally planned, most of the rest of us started attempting to widen the ditch Roger had started, to hopefully get it flowing into the next door allotments. Unfortunately this involved digging under and around a barbed wire fence, brushwood, trees and the aforementioned giant pile of mud/soil.

We set to it as best we could, rapidly damming the current channel so we could dig more easily and hacking away from various angles while we slowly sank into the clay and fixed ourselves (or at least our trainers) in place. After clearing the brush, Lucy and new boy Jon went round to the other side and started digging there, at increasingly awkward angles (Lucy: "this feels like when they send the smallest child up the chimney to sweep"). Debs, Pete and myself got stuck in (literally) on the wet side, to the point of hands and knees for Debs, while Max "don't want to dirty my best trainers" supervised from a safe distance.

Eventually, after a brief baby rat incident, Michal came over to tell us our time was up, but then got dragged in and continued the digging! The final core team couldn't be dragged away by any enticements of dinnertime or dry feet and eventually victory was theirs, and they all plodded off home on their new clay platform shoes 🙂

6 GG Yorkies Sieved Some Soil

There's a lot of very clay-ey soil at Heworth Without. They've extracted tonnes of the stuff from installing a new outdoor gym and wanted us to sift the soft stuff from the clay to top up the level of the boggy field.

Nikki 'hit-it-with-a-hammer' Gover stuck with what she knew, attempting to mallet the clay through the sieve. She did see some success but Rich and Stuart quickly discovered that the double-person shake was the most efficient sieving method.

Meanwhile, Max was enjoying sieving out interesting items such as acorns and seeing who he could throw them at.

All the unsievable rejects were loaded into wheelbarrows and used to fill the tiny trench left by the installation digger. The clay was an excellent filler once it was stomped in, and excellent at filling our shoes too.

We finished up with a thorough testing of the new gym equipment!

8 of us GoodGymers were tasked with sifting a large pile of soil from newly constructed outdoor gym equipment and transporting it to use as a top layer dusting in the park.

After locating Roger and his garrison of tools and receiving his instructions from Zinnie, we set to enacting the plan of dividing up into a streamlined team. With the plan out of the window, Michal, Jenna, Mitch, Laura and Steve (when he turned up) got to hammering the clumps (apparently no one's favourite word) of soil into fine grains - roughly translated to slightly smaller clumps ready for sifting. Zinnie and Kieran alternated shovelling more soil, distributing clumps amongst the hammer-wielders and sifting the soil with their tools - hands.

With shovels, hammers, stones, a sifter and a wheelbarrow the group soon became a well-oiled machine producing 6 wheelbarrows of fine soil and getting rid of as much clay as possible.

Running over time because we were having so much fun, all of the tools were transported to the shed after tackling the park gate leading to the final task of locking the padlock which Steve made short work of.

The mountain of soil is not yet conquered but as Michal said, 'at GoodGym we finish what we start,' so I'm sure we'll be back for more!